Storm Cursed (A Mercy Thompson Novel) Read online

  “The Salases are legal,” the Marine told me firmly.

  “I don’t care,” I told him. “As these gentlemen aren’t with immigration, they shouldn’t, either.” I didn’t actually know if that was true or not, but it should have been.

  A young, very blond deputy, who had remained quiet, said a few words in liquid Spanish.

  I caught “how” and “killed.”

  Salas looked at the Spanish-speaking deputy and frowned.

  The deputy said something else and Mrs. Salas laughed, then covered her mouth and carefully looked away from Fedders.

  Salas looked at his wife, at his friend, then began speaking, and the young deputy took notes.

  “He says,” the deputy told me when Salas had finished, “that they all had their throats cut. There was no sign of a struggle. Someone collected their blood.” He glanced around at the other deputies. “I think, given the circumstances, that we should believe him?” At the last he looked at me.

  I shrugged. “I’m not an expert in zombies,” I told them. “I’ve never had much to do with them.” But I knew that they were witchcraft, and witchcraft was powered by body parts with a leaning toward blood and bone. “But if something weird happened, any weirdness that preceded that is probably connected. We”—I indicated Mary Jo—“can find the goats. I don’t know exactly what to do with them, but I have resources. Let me make another call.”

  Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our witch on retainer. It sometimes amazes me how much of the supernatural world has adopted lawyerlike techniques. I don’t know whether that says something about lawyers—or something about the supernatural.

  Elizaveta was in Europe. She’d gone to help me, and stayed when Bonarata had made her an interesting temporary job offer. But her family was still here and obliged to our pack.

  I called Elizaveta’s number and a woman’s voice answered it, soft and Southern. “This is the home of Elizaveta Arkadyevna,” she said. “I’m afraid that she’s not here and her family is all tied up right now. What can I do to help you?”

  No one in Elizaveta’s family had an accent like that. Elizaveta clung to her Russian accent, but everyone else sounded newscaster American, the born-in-the-Pacific-Northwest kind of voice.

  I had a very bad feeling. Especially since I was pretty sure that her “all tied up” wasn’t a figure of speech. It wasn’t that I could tell if she was lying or not—over the phone, sometimes I can tell and sometimes I can’t. It was that I heard the sound of people in pain.

  I cut the line. There was nothing I could say that would be useful under the circumstances. Zombies and something off at our local witch’s home. Coincidences are always possible, even if unlikely.

  I thought a moment and called Adam. His voice mail picked up again and I said, “We have miniature zombie goats in Benton City and when I called Elizaveta’s house, a strange woman with a thick Southern accent picked up the phone. Background noises suggest that Elizaveta’s family is in trouble.” Then I called Darryl.

  Darryl Zao was our pack’s second. Unless you included me, who, as Adam’s mate, was technically above Darryl. Our pack’s ranks were currently a little convoluted as tradition belatedly met women’s liberation and sputtered. The road to enlightenment was a little bumpy, but we were on the right path.

  Anyway, I called Darryl. He’d be up. He ran every morning at six A.M.

  He answered, his voice distorted by his car’s phone system. “Yes.”

  I explained the situation to him. “I have the goats covered, more or less. We’ll figure out what to do with them until better-educated minds can be put to the problem.”

  “I’ll grab a few wolves and head over to Elizaveta’s,” he said.

  “Just recon,” I told him. “Unless Adam picks up his phone or listens to the message I just gave him. See what is going on over there. Then we contact the wicked witch herself and let her make the calls. There are witches who can control wolves,” I reminded him.

  He paused. “Should I bring Post, or leave him out of it?”

  I frowned. “He doesn’t remember anything. Why bring him in?”

  Sherwood Post (not his real name—but it would do until he figured out what that was) had been discovered when the Seattle pack cleaned out a nasty coven of witches. It had taken a while for him to regain human form—and he was never able to regenerate one of his legs, which was weird. Werewolves either regenerate or they die. He didn’t remember anything and no one knew who he was except (we all thought) Bran, the Marrok. Bran had gifted Sherwood with his unusual name and sent him off to our pack.

  “Because,” said Darryl, “he’s sitting right next to me.”

  “Well, then,” I told him, exasperated. “Ask him if he wants to go or not. Take him if he wants to go, drop him off somewhere if he doesn’t. This isn’t a war mission, it’s a recon. We’ve got enough on our plate. We’ll leave any warfare to Elizaveta unless she asks otherwise.”

  “Problems?” asked the Spanish-speaking deputy.

  “I hope not,” I said. “But I think we’re on our own.”

  3

  Mary Jo and I spent the next couple of hours catching adorable zombie goats. She could just pick them up in her massive jaws and deliver them. I had to let my coyote find them, then shift back to my human self to catch and carry them back. They might be small for goats, but the adults weighed nearly what my coyote did.

  Luckily I usually carried a backpack in my car that I could shove my clothes into. Otherwise, I’d have spent the morning walking around naked, carrying dead goats with red eyes and a taste for blood.

  Not that the zombies could actually eat anything. In the first place, their throats were cut. One of the adults I’d caught was so deeply wounded that its head just lolled around; there was no muscle to move its neck. In the second place, they were dead. No systems go. But it didn’t stop them from causing lots of mayhem. Small animals—squirrels, quail, chickens, and the like—didn’t fare well. I would have thought that zombies would be slow, like in the movies. But these, at least, were not.

  Because we were using our animal forms, we had to leave our phones in the car. I had to trust that Adam got my messages and that Darryl was staying safe.

  I finally figured out that Darryl would rather have left Sherwood behind, and he’d been hoping that I would give the order. It was interesting that Adam’s second didn’t feel comfortable giving orders to Sherwood, who was, supposedly, below him in the pack structure. I tried to figure out whether that was a new thing or not, but then I detected another zombie miniature goat.

  Detected, not scented. I put that aside, too.

  Darryl and Sherwood had their jobs; Mary Jo and I had ours. Mine was to find as many of the miniature zombie goats as I could, not to explore too hard how I was finding them. Concentrate on the job at hand and sort everything else out later.

  I found my last escapee about two miles from the Salases’ house. It was a baby goat, black with a big white spot in the middle of its chest, nearly as short as the dachshund it was attacking. And I didn’t find this one because of my coyote nose, either.

  The goat must have backtracked, because the scent I was following continued down the road. But I felt the zombie and it was directly on my left. I stopped running but stayed where I was.

  I had an odd grab bag of talents. I could sense magic better than the werewolves. Magic didn’t always work on me, and when it did, sometimes it didn’t work as intended. I could turn into a coyote. And I saw ghosts, which I’d always dismissed as mostly useless.

  But over the last few years, I’ve been learning that I could do a little more.

  Just then, standing on the verge of a dirt road in the maze of rural roads above the Yakima River, I could feel something both animate and dead, and it was on the other side of a hedge where a small dog was yapping its head off.

  I burrowed under the hedge
and found the goat-dachshund standoff. I changed to human, pulled on my jeans and T-shirt, and hoped that my faith in the little dog wasn’t misplaced. I’d hate to live with the guilt of the death of someone’s pet just because I didn’t want to run around in late-morning traffic naked as a jaybird.

  I did not think, as hard as I could manage to not-think, about the fact that I had felt where it was. Ghosts were one thing. I’d been seeing them as long as I could remember. I was kind of used to my interaction with them. I didn’t want to have the same connection to zombies.

  Dachshunds are tough; she held her own just fine until I zipped my jeans. Hard to tell who would have won, zombie or dog. When I snagged the zombie kid and hauled it away, kicking and snapping, the dog pranced off with her tail in the air. Whatever my doubts, that dog was sure she had beaten the nasty intruder.

  I jogged back at a pretty good clip despite my bare feet—my carry bag wasn’t big enough for shoes. I met Mary Jo, who was following the same trail I’d picked up—she must have found her last goat faster than I did and come back to help me. The sight of her had a few cars pulling over so that people could take pictures with their cell phones.

  Yes, it was a good thing I’d taken time to put my clothes on.

  One of the deputies raised the lid on the zombie goat corral, an empty dumpster that had been hauled over next to the damaged goat pen—Salas’s Marine friend’s idea. So far, the big, green, smelly metal box had proven to be escape-proof.

  I could feel them in the dumpster without looking. As if I’d become sensitized to the way the zombies felt. I could tell how many of the little zombies were bumping around just as I could tell when there was a ghost around, even if I might not be able to see it.

  It wasn’t so bad if I could tell there were zombies around, I thought. I’d made it thirty-odd years before running into my first zombies; it might be another thirty years before I met another.

  By now, all of the sheriff’s cars except for two were gone. Three of the original deputies remained, but we’d been getting drop-ins from law enforcement from as far away as Prosser and Pasco, including the highway patrol. Everyone wanted to see the miniature zombie goats.

  “It could have been worse,” I told the deputy who opened one side of the dumpster lid for me so I could drop my little zombie in with the rest of the adorable, blood-hungry fiends.

  She said, “Right? They could have been full-sized goats and we wouldn’t have any idea what to do with them. Hard enough to keep goats in without them being impervious to pain. This dumpster is picking up a lot of dents that it didn’t have when we started. What do you plan on doing with these things?” She glanced at the dumpster. “You are planning on doing something with them?” And not leave them to us, please; half of that thought was unsaid but not unheard.

  “I don’t know,” I told her, not quite honestly.

  I wasn’t sure exactly how to kill . . . how to eliminate zombies. But I was pretty sure we could burn them. I didn’t know if real fire would do the trick, but we had Joel, inhabited by the spirit of a volcano dog.

  If he couldn’t manage it by himself, we could bring in the big guns—Aiden, my fire-wielding ward. He wasn’t officially our ward yet, actually. We were finding it very difficult to become the legal guardians of a boy who had no paperwork trail. I was sure either Joel or Aiden could reduce the goats to ash—even zombie goats couldn’t come back from ash.

  I just didn’t know if I wanted to advertise that we could call upon that kind of power. And I wasn’t sure either Joel or Aiden had enough control to just burn the goats and stop.

  “Are any of the Salases still around? I’d like to ask a few questions.”

  She nodded. “Jimmy, Mr. Salas, and Mr. Salas’s very large friend are all sitting on the porch talking about their days in the Marines. The mom is fending off the hoi polloi from the front yard.”

  “Mr. Salas was a Marine, too?” I asked.

  She nodded. “And English is his native tongue; he was born and raised on a quarter-horse ranch outside San Diego. I don’t think Mrs. Salas speaks English, but he is certainly bilingual. Not the first time I’ve seen the ‘speak no English’ used when people are facing hostile law enforcement.”

  She glanced over at the Salas house and then back at me.

  “Fedders is a problem,” she admitted with a sigh. “Apparently he’s better known in the Spanish-speaking community around here than we thought. He was first on scene.”

  She gave me a quick smile. “He’s like a black sheep—part of the family but also awkward and occasionally dangerous. You wouldn’t think it from today’s performance, but he’s really good with trauma victims—even those from our Spanish-speaking communities. When he’s helping someone who is hurt, he drops all that crap. I’m sure Captain Gonzales will explain, again, why antagonizing people isn’t useful. Someday it will stick, or he’ll cause such a big problem they’ll promote him right off the streets.”

  She glanced at Mary Jo, who was keeping back far enough to give the officer a false sense of safety. “Maybe some big werewolf will get tired of him, chew him up, and spit him out with an attitude adjustment.”

  Mary Jo grinned at her.

  “My, what big teeth,” said the deputy with a smile, though her hand slipped toward her gun. Funny how Little Red Riding Hood came up whenever the werewolves were about.

  Mary Jo closed her mouth and wagged her tail.

  A nice path opened up for us through the gathering crowd—werewolves are useful like that—and we slipped past the hordes unmolested. It wasn’t really a big group of people, maybe fifteen or twenty.

  “Mr. Salas,” I said. “Mary Jo and I were able to round up all the goats. I’ll make sure they are taken care of. If anyone gives you trouble or asks you to pay for damages, you call us.” I gave him a card. “This is not your fault in any way. You are not responsible for any damages, and if someone needs to be reminded of that, my husband will take care of it.”

  He took the card and looked thoughtful.

  Mary Jo nudged me to get my attention, then she trotted off. I assumed that she was going to regain her human shape. I didn’t let my gaze linger on her; instead, I considered the Salases’ situation.

  “Did you, your wife, or your children have any trouble with anyone lately?” I asked. “With a stranger, probably.” Certainly.

  There were, I understood, several kinds of practitioners who could create zombies. But this was witchcraft. As soon as I touched the first goat, I could feel the black magic humming in my bones and turning my stomach.

  Leaving aside the black magic—because there were no black-magic witches in the Tri-Cities—no local witches would have done anything like it. They were too afraid of Elizaveta and her family. And we didn’t, to my knowledge, have anyone with this kind of power except for Elizaveta herself. Zombies took serious mojo—I knew that much.

  But I couldn’t explain our local witch population to Salas or the police; I didn’t want to cause anyone to go out hunting witches. That was Elizaveta’s job.

  Salas shook his head. He called a question to his wife, who shook her head. “A moment,” he said. “I will ask my son.”

  “He served this country for eight years,” the blond deputy (presumably Jimmy) told us, a snap in his voice. “And he has to hide when the police come to call?”

  “No,” I said. “Because there are deputies like you here.”

  Salas returned to the porch, shaking his head. “No. No unusual arguments. But Santiago, my son, he says there was a lady who stopped yesterday morning while he was feeding his goats. She wanted to buy them all, all twenty, but he didn’t like her so he told her they were not for sale. He stayed inside the pen while she talked—the way he said it makes me think that maybe she wanted him to come out to her car. He told me that she sounded like one of my friends from the Corps—Porter. Porter is from Georgia.”

/>   Southern was how the witch at Elizaveta’s sounded. I wondered if they were the same witch.

  Twenty goats she couldn’t buy, twenty goats that were killed and turned into zombies. Then I had a terrible thought. If she could take the goats, why couldn’t she take the boy? And what did she need with twenty zombie goats? She didn’t even take them with her. That sounded like spite to me.

  I looked at the pen that was next to the house. It was the side farthest from the house where the fence was torn open. That section of fence wasn’t visible from the road. “Did the goats damage the pen, or did that happen earlier?”

  “Whoever killed the goats cut open the pen,” Salas said. “The goats were dead, so we didn’t bother to repair it.”

  I wondered if the witch who had killed them had returned later that night and reanimated them, or if there was a time component. That the goats had been spelled as they died, but it had taken a few hours for them to turn to zombies.

  Today that didn’t matter, but I would find out. I didn’t know as much about witches or zombies as I obviously should.

  Had she taken the goats because she hadn’t been able to persuade Santiago to come to her? Consent had magical implications for most of the magic-using folk; I didn’t know how it played for witches.

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that your son was smart to stay in the pen when the lady came by.”

  If the witch had taken the goats, surely she would have been able to walk in and take the boy if she had wanted to. But maybe, I thought, not in the middle of the day. If Salas’s son had come out of the pen and up to her car, she could have taken him then and there with no one thinking anything of it.

  Maybe the goats had been second choice.

  “Tell him—Santiago? Tell Santiago that if he sees her again, he should go inside the house, lock the doors, and call the number on that card.”

  His eyes narrowed and his bearing changed. It was like he had put on the same invisible cloak of readiness that Adam carried around all of the time. Deputy Jimmy had that, too. It was a matter of posture, mostly—head up, shoulders back—but also of intensity. Had Salas looked like that when I’d driven up, I’d have picked him for ex-military of some sort right off the bat.