me staggering. I did not fall into Ruth’s miserable huddle and the solidifying liquids surrounding her. But it was a near thing.
Judging from the past few days, witchcraft affected me more powerfully than other sorts of magic. Black magic was worse than the other kind. Or maybe I was just getting more sensitive to it.
“Was that wise?” Uncle Mike asked Sherwood with a raised eyebrow. “You might have blown us to Underhill doing it that way.”
“Only way I know of,” Sherwood said, tapping his head. “I have to work with the limits of what I’ve got.”
Speaking over his shoulder at Sherwood as he made his way briskly toward Ruth, Uncle Mike said, “If all you needed to do was break the blade, I could have done it at the beginning.”
“No,” said Sherwood. “I needed to do it. I’ve got a touch, a link with our enemy, thanks to my work with Ruth—and the witches’ work, too. Breaking it that way will have hurt the owner of the athame, almost as much as she hurt Ruth. And if it had tried to blow up in our faces, I could have contained it.” He looked at the broken blade on the handle that he still held. “I’m pretty sure, anyway.”
* * *
• • •
Ruth, scrubbed and dressed in fresh clothes, had not had a lot to add to what she’d already told us. She was frightened, for which none of us blamed her. Uncle Mike assured us—and her—that since Sherwood had broken the witch’s hold on her, he and his could keep her safe.
“You did it,” Sherwood told her.
“Did what?” The pub was warm enough, but one of Uncle Mike’s people had brought Ruth a blanket and she had it wrapped around her as if it were a shield against the dark.
“By coming here,” said Uncle Mike. “You put the fox in the henhouse for them. If you had arrived at Mercy’s house with that knife, I don’t know that anyone could have broken what they tried to do. But you came here and created a weakness in their curse. Sherwood here was able to break the rest.”
Uncle Mike looked at Sherwood. “I didn’t know you were witchborn.”
Sherwood shrugged.
“But they are all dead,” Ruth said. “And they have Jake.”
“There wasn’t anything you could do about that,” I said. “But you held out against them. You won us a chance to find the senator and get him back from them.”
I was worried that the witches had Adam and the pack, too. That the pack bonds were strong was good. That I couldn’t tell a darned thing from them, except that everyone was healthy, was worrying.
There was still the faint possibility that the president had shown up and all the werewolves had turned off their phones. But that seemed increasingly unlikely.
“Because you held out,” Sherwood said—and it was Sherwood again—“we have dealt them a blow, and we have a chance to find them.” He held up the broken knife, which he was carrying in a kelly green take-out box from Uncle Mike’s.
We left Ruth in the safety of Uncle Mike’s hands. As we stepped out into the parking lot, Sherwood held up the box again.
“The trouble being,” he said, “I don’t know how to use this to find them. May—”
He stopped abruptly and turned in a slow circle.
“It’s just me, wolf,” said the goblin king, emerging from the shadows along the side of the building.
Larry seemed more tired than he had the last time I’d seen him. He usually looked like a smile was a moment away, if it wasn’t already on his face. Not tonight.
“I’m here to give you some information,” he said. “In exchange for calling me out to your hunt the other morning.”
I had sort of thought the ball was in the other court, but I wasn’t about to argue with him.
“Don’t go to the senator’s house in Pasco until daylight,” he said. “And don’t let anyone else go, if you can help it. We goblins lost much to the witchcrafting around that place.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I sent three of my best to follow Ruth Gillman after your lunch with her,” he said. “One of them was my daughter, who I have had in my heart to be my successor when I quit this duty. She called me to tell me that the witches had set up an immense circle around the house. They set up watching places outside the circle as I directed her.”