nodded. “And Elizaveta and her whole clan are . . . were black-magic practitioners. Did you find anything else?”
“A few things,” I told him. “And I don’t know what to make of them. Everyone in the house died at exactly the same time.”
“How do you know that?” But before I could answer, he snapped the fingers of his free hand, the one not touching me. “Ghosts.”
I shook my head. “They are all over in that house, but I didn’t get anything coherent out of them. Trauma might make for strong ghosts, but it doesn’t always make them good communicators.”
“So how did you know they all died at the same time?” Adam asked.
I frowned, because I wasn’t happy about this. “I just knew, Adam. I could feel it in that house—that life just stopped being possible in a single moment, and everything died.”
He grunted unhappily, which is how I felt. I did not like knowing that there was a witch out there who could do something like that. Fourteen people and dozens of animals died under her magic. If she could do that to a house full of witches, could she do it to a house full of werewolves?
I also did not like knowing how strongly I’d felt the moment of their death. I was beginning to understand how closely Coyote was connected to the transition between life and death—Coyote was the spirit of change, after all. The implications for me were unsettling.
Moving right along, then. “There were a lot of ghosts in that house,” I told him. “If you dig on her land, I bet you’ll turn up human remains along with the animals. More than just the gentleman with Alzheimer’s.”
He grimaced. “That’s something we’ll figure out when Elizaveta gets back.”
“Did she have any theory about who might have done this?” I asked.
He shook his head, then shrugged. “Someone trying to take over her territory while she was away.”
Frost was sort of in my head because of our earlier discussion. And he’d come to the Tri-Cities to take over Marsilia’s territory. And then my subconscious, which had evidently been plodding along most of the morning, finally connected a few dots.
Adam frowned at me. “Mercy?”
“Huh,” I said. “Frost.”
“What?” Adam asked.
“I just figured out who the witch that made those zombies smelled like,” I told him. “You know how scents are, after a while it takes a bit of jogging to remember when you smelled someone before.”
“Yes,” Adam said.
I nodded. “I knew that she smelled like someone I’d scented before. But I kept running through the witches I’ve met—there haven’t actually been all that many—and came up blank. But the parts of her that didn’t smell like black magic and witch smelled like Frost. Enough like him to be a close relative, sibling, child—even parent. But no further removed than that.”
“Huh.” Adam made the same noise I had, sounding unusually nonplussed. Then he seemed to gather himself together.
“Frost,” he said. “Do you think that this attack had something to do with vampires?”
“Or,” I said slowly, “maybe the whole Frost thing had something to do with witches.”
He pulled his hand free and used both hands to rub his face tiredly. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in nearly a week. Me, either, actually.
“Terrific,” he said. “Just what we need right now, a witch-maybe-vampire territorial dispute.”
“I’ve given you my current conspiracy theory,” I told him. “Maybe it is a coincidence?”
“But it makes me go hmm,” he said.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he said. After a moment he said, “Did you hear Sherwood turn on the water?”
“No,” I said, sitting up. If Sherwood had taken a shower, we should have heard it. “Sherwood?” I called his name. He was a werewolf; he should hear me easily.
There was no reply.
“I can’t reach him through the pack bonds,” Adam said, getting out of his chair and heading toward the basement. “He’s there, but I can’t contact him.”
Adam didn’t run, but he didn’t waste any time, either. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and held up a hand for me to pause, too.
The basement was quiet, too quiet, and dark. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel magic at work. I would have sworn there had been nothing there when Sherwood had headed down. Come to think of it, Sherwood, unlike most werewolves, was sensitive to witchcraft—and this was witchcraft. If it had been there, he’d never have gone down.