Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson Book 13)
Soul Taken: Chapter 7

After Larry left on his shaggy pony with dawn a whisper over the river, we headed up to bed. Daytime slumber in pack central was not going to be easy to accomplish.

While Adam fiddled with the drapes in an attempt to keep as much light out as possible, I scrubbed my tired face and brushed my teeth. By the time Adam had finished doing the same, I was buried under blankets and most of the way to sleep.

He climbed in, bringing a wave of cold air with him, and I growled a faint protest. But when he pulled me into his arms, his warmth more than made up for any disruption to my comfort that his entry into my nest of blankets had made. Of the many benefits of marriage to Adam, sleeping together was pretty high up on my list. He liked to cuddle and he radiated heat.

“Stefan is alive, right?” murmured Adam.

I nodded.

“I didn’t want to ask with Larry around,” he said. “But I was pretty sure that you wouldn’t be sitting around chatting if he was gone.”

“I don’t know anything else,” I told him. Unlike the mating bond I shared with Adam, the vampire’s hold on me wasn’t a bond between equals—if Stefan didn’t want to contact me, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

“Is that on purpose?” Adam asked softly.

“One of my least favorite things about marriage is this penchant you have for keeping me up when I want to sleep,” I grumbled.

He gave me a comforting squeeze. “I know you don’t like to think about your connection, let alone talk about it. But it might be important. Is Stefan keeping you in the dark on purpose?”

“Do you mean, why isn’t Stefan jerking my lead and dragging my butt to wherever he is?” I wiggled to put some distance between us. Thinking about being tied to Stefan left me claustrophobic. “I have to assume it’s for the same reason he hasn’t shown up here.”

Stefan had appeared in my living room before. He’d made me do things, too. Mostly things that had saved my life or his, but the idea that Stefan could force his will on me made my skin crawl. I finished with, “I have no idea.”

Adam followed my wiggle but didn’t touch me other than to kiss my temple. Even with the pumpkin-bruise, the brush of his lips was so tender it didn’t hurt. I knew if I pulled away again, he’d let me be.

I sighed and snuggled back into his warmth. “Assuming we don’t replace him, I’d planned on trying to contact him through the blood bond after I’d gotten some sleep. I thought I’d wait until dusk.”

Adam grunted his approval. Eventually I felt him relax, but now I couldn’t follow him into sleep because thinking about Stefan’s bond left me edgy. My thoughts kept chasing each other around until, finally, I saw a new angle on Marsilia and decided Adam needed to take a look at it, too. A kind person would have left it until morning, but since he’d made sure I wasn’t going to fall asleep, I felt justified in waking him up.

“I am pretty sure she likes you,” I said thoughtfully, and felt him wake up.

He waited, but he’s not the only patient hunter in our family. Finally, he said, sounding a little wary, “Who likes me?”

“Marsilia,” I told him. “She likes you, and so sending you after Wulfe probably means that he’s not behind the weirdness at the seethe.”

He huffed a laugh at my logic.

“She’d send me no matter what, of course,” I continued. “You remember that she sent me after a vampire possessed by a demon.”

“I do,” agreed Adam with more heat in his voice than that deserved. It had been several years ago.

She was not happy that I’d survived and the demon-possessed vampire had not. She’d had plans for him.

“But she doesn’t like me,” I said. “She does like you.”

“She likes you better now,” Adam said. “She tells me that she enjoys watching you spread chaos over other people’s plans.”

I gave him an amused snort. “Not enough to care whether I live or die.” I thought about that for a moment, because Marsilia had unarguably risked a lot to help Adam replace me after Bonarata had kidnapped me. I added, “As long as it didn’t affect her alliance with you.”

There was a little silence.

“If she thought Wulfe was someone who needed to be stopped,” Adam said carefully, “she would ask us to stop him. Instead, she’s sent us to replace him.”

I lifted my head and glanced at his face to judge the seriousness of his expression. I put my head back down and said, in a voice that was smaller than I wanted it to be, “You think Larry is right.”

I could not for the world have articulated why I didn’t want Wulfe to be making trouble. Part of it was that I was more scared of him than of Bonarata. I’d escaped Bonarata. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have escaped Wulfe. Part of it, perversely, was that at some point I’d put Wulfe, terrifying as he was, on “our side.” He was one of our people.

Larry had been right: I didn’t think like a werewolf.

“I believe Marsilia sent us after him, and I doubt it’s for the reasons she gave us,” Adam said. Not quite arguing with me, just making sure I saw his point of view, too. “Other than that, I don’t know why she thinks we need to replace him, and neither does Larry.”

“Larry is scared of Wulfe,” I said after a minute. “That might be affecting his judgment.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Adam said. “That doesn’t make him wrong.”

“Does he scare you?” I asked. “Wulfe?”

Adam thought about that for a moment, and I was drifting off to sleep when he said, “In some ways. Bonarata scares me more. Bonarata wants your hide to nail to his wall as a trophy. I don’t think Wulfe would hurt you.”

That woke me up. “Why don’t you think he would hurt me?” I sat up and scooted around until I could see his face. I didn’t think Wulfe would hurt me, either. My certainty was based on Wulfe’s actions and manner. I hoped Adam had better reasons.

“Vampires are selfish creatures,” Adam told me. “They have to be, in order to become what they are. Whatever it was that you did to him in Elizaveta’s backyard when you were laying those zombies caught Wulfe’s attention. Made him think you are important to him or his survival.”

I’d been laying the spirits of the collected zombie dead that belonged to generations of a black witch family. Not being educated in the matter, I had been working with pure instinct. I’d managed to lay the zombies, but the spell effects had knocked Wulfe flat. I wasn’t sure if he’d been in some kind of waking coma or if I’d done something worse. What I’d done had been a product of a long and terrifying night, with magic of all kinds thick in the air, and I wasn’t sure I could ever do such a thing again.

Given that it was probably not repeatable, I didn’t want Wulfe to think it was important to his survival. That sounded like an unhealthy thing for me in the long run.

“How is it important?” I asked.

Adam pulled me back down into the bed and pulled the covers around me. If I hadn’t been there, he’d probably have slept on top of the covers. But I liked covers, and he liked to cuddle me, so he dealt with sleeping too warm.

“I don’t know. Neither does he,” Adam told me. “If he weren’t as confused about it as you are, he’d do something more pointed than following you around and giving you inappropriate gifts. Until he figures it out, he won’t hurt you. And that”—he hugged me tightly—“puts him far down the list of things I’m afraid of.”

From the roughness of his voice, I understood that there were things he was afraid of, things that he didn’t want to talk about. Like the fact that we were both worried about Elizaveta’s lingering curse. That Sherwood could still be a problem, even if he was a Cornick. That our pack might not be up to the task of protecting our territory, and our failure to do so could end in a war, with the humans wiping out any supernatural they could replace.

We both had nightmares, both from our pasts and from what might happen in the future.

“Larry thinks that Wulfe has taken over the seethe with plans of taking over the world,” I said. “Do you think that’s likely?”

Adam’s husky laugh ruffled my hair. “Asking me the same question again won’t get you a different answer. I know why Larry is worried. I don’t know if that worry is justified. Something happened to the seethe. I think that there should be at least six hours of sleep between us and any further answers.”

I growled at him, just to make him laugh again. All the worries in my stomach relaxed a bit when Adam did.

“I expect we’ll replace out eventually no matter what we do or don’t do,” he said. “We should sleep so we can deal with it when all hell breaks loose. Again.”

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” I said direly.

He pulled me close and kissed me. “That’s my optimist,” he said, settling back in the bed to sleep.

“Love you,” I told him, then yawned.

“Love you, too,” he said.

—

I dreamed.

I sat on the edge of the abyss from my earlier encounter with the spell web. It loomed below me, both a bottomless, empty hole and a presence of blackness that was the embodiment of solid darkness.

Instead of the snow I’d walked in previously, the ground beneath me was something like the forest floor in the Douglas fir–dominated wilderness I’d grown up in. It was deeply packed with dried fir and pine needles until it made a cushiony layer over the hard ground. That was not the sort of ground one usually found on the edge of a cliff, since needles were easily scattered by a good hard wind. I dug my fingers into it.

Can’t argue with what is, I thought, tossing my handful of dirt and needles off into the abyss, feeling the tickle of the falling earth against the bare skin of my dangling foot. My other foot was tucked up and hooked under the knee of the leg that hung over the edge.

It didn’t feel like I was doing anything very dangerous. It felt like I was dangling my foot off the branch of a very tall tree I’d climbed. Just enough frightening to make my stomach tingle a bit. I twisted around until the abyss was to one side of me instead of in front of me, though I left one leg hanging off the edge.

Spread out on the ground in front of me was a white linen tablecloth set with an elegant tea service, the kind with porcelain so fine you can see your fingers through the sides. There was a plate with those little creamy sandwich cookies I associated with France but could now buy at Costco. There was also a plate of brownies, but those looked a little unreal, as if whoever had made up the plate couldn’t quite remember what they looked like.

A warm breeze rose from the abyss and caressed my bare foot, leaving sharp prickles behind. It wasn’t really painful, more like I’d gotten too close to a Fourth of July sparkler, the ones they give little kids. I was connected to the abyss in some way that made me uneasy. I started to pull my foot up, but Stefan spoke.

“Mercy.”

I hadn’t realized he was there, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the tablecloth. He wasn’t looking at me; he was frowning at the brownies.

I looked up at the sky, which was that bright cerulean blue that artists are so fond of. But I couldn’t locate the sun.

“Is this a dream?” I asked slowly. “Or are you doing this so you can talk to me?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Stefan said absently. “That would be too dangerous. Someone would notice. But everyone dreams.”

His words seemed important. I tried to make sure I’d remember them exactly. Marsilia’s words had been important, too, but I had only remembered the gist of what she had said. Hopefully I would do better with these.

“Dangerous for you?” I asked.

He laughed. And it was wrong. Stefan had a warm laugh, and this was full of broken things like dreams and hope.

“No,” he said, wiping his face as if there might have been tears on his cheeks. “Not for me. Marsilia and I, we are survivors. We are powerful enough to be useful, but not so powerful that we are threats. It’s our friends and allies that we have to sell out so we can survive.”

He looked up at me then and I sucked in a breath. Someone had gouged out his eyes.

I made as if to get up, to go to him, but he put up a hand. “No.”

There was such command in his voice that my body stopped moving without my volition. Suddenly my heart pounded, my hands and face felt numb, and I couldn’t breathe as one of those stupid panic attacks gripped me. I hadn’t had a panic attack in . . . maybe a whole week. The last one had been spurred by a dream, too. I’d dreamed of Tim and the drink from a fairy goblet that had stolen my will.

Just as Stefan had stolen my will.

If Stefan told me I was happy, I’d feel that way. It was the nature of the vampiric bond. If he told me to kill Adam . . .

“I don’t think that would work,” Stefan told me in a detached voice. “I don’t think anyone could make you kill Adam.” He paused. “Except maybe Adam himself, if he got you mad enough.”

I stared at him. There was nothing wrong with his eyes. They were the same rich brown as always, a couple of shades lighter than Adam’s. My panic attack had stopped. Just stopped. And I wondered if he’d told me not to be afraid. And not to remember that he’d told me so.

He turned his head to the abyss as if he were ashamed.

“I am sorry,” he told me. “I can’t— I’m not . . . Anyway. Marsilia and I have given you a game to play.” His fingers worried at the edge of the tablecloth that dangled over the ledge. “If you lose, you die. If you don’t play the game, you die. And even if you win . . .” He wiped his cheeks again. In a whisper he said, “I am so tired of the people I love dying while I go on and on.” He bowed his head and, still very quietly, asked, “Do you know the prayer? ‘If I should die before I wake . . .’ But the Lord doesn’t keep the souls of vampires safe, Mercy. Vampires don’t have souls.”

“Stefan,” I said.

“Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry about Marsilia,” he said forcefully.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Are you safe?”

He laughed that terrible laugh again. “No. And no. But I’ll survive. That’s what I do. Tell me what happened when you went to my house.”

I frowned at him. “How do you know I went to your house?”

“I was informed. Please?”

I told him what had happened in more detail than I would normally. I didn’t know if that was an effect of this place or not-place, or something Stefan wanted from me.

“Is this a dream?” I asked again when I was finished.

“Have a brownie,” he said, instead of answering my question. “You like brownies.”

I gazed doubtfully at them. “I’ll take a macaroon instead, please. I don’t like the look of your brownies.”

He laughed, and this time it sounded like his laugh—if a little tired. “Macaron,” he told me. “Macaroons are the stodgy ones with all the coconut.”

“I’m sorry about the piano,” I offered without taking a cookie. “And, really, most of the living room furniture. The stairway. Some of the books got pretty wet, too, when the frost all melted.”

“I don’t care about the piano,” he said. “Things can be replaced. Even books.” He was frowning at me. He leaned sideways, getting a better look at my dangling foot. “What’s wrong with your foot? Your feet? Why are you keeping that one way out there?”

I looked at my foot, too. “It’s the one that got a bit of spider spine stuck in it.” Hadn’t both of them been hurt? “I’d forgotten. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Show me,” said Stefan.

I raised my dangling foot and lost my balance, as if it were a lot heavier than I’d expected. Stefan swept forward like a striking snake and grabbed my ankle, sending the teapot spiraling off the edge and into the darkness.

He kept his grip until I regained my seat.

“Don’t fall off the cliff, please,” he said, sounding a little shaken. He gave the abyss a wary look. “Literally or figuratively. I don’t know what it is or why it’s here.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

I knew I hadn’t been in any danger. I trusted Stefan to keep me safe.

I examined that last thought as Stefan looked at my foot. I knew that the only person I trusted to keep me safe with such bone-deep certainty was . . . no one. Not even me.

I frowned suspiciously at Stefan. What else had he said to stop my panic attack?

“Give me the other one.”

I managed that without overbalancing myself.

“You should get them looked at,” he said, releasing the foot he held. “Show them to Zee, I think. And soon.”

He released me and began folding up the tablecloth with quick, almost angry movements.

“Are you afraid?” I asked abruptly.

He stopped moving, then his hands tightened on the tablecloth before he flung the whole thing—half-formed brownies and all—into the darkness, which swallowed them up.

“I’m always afraid, Mercy,” he said, looking into the endless black. “Always.”

I don’t remember anything after that.

—

The next time I woke up, it was to the sound of my bedroom door opening and the smell of the good hot chocolate. This was accompanied by the scents of bacon, cheese, and all sorts of breakfasty foods.

“Mmm,” I said. “Marry me.”

“Okay,” agreed my husband. “This afternoon at two p.m. work for you? I might manage one thirty in a pinch.”

“Sorry,” I murmured, burrowing deeper under the pillow, “I think I have a date with this guy.”

“Do you?” There was a clink as something, presumably my breakfast, was set down.

“Yep.” I yawned. “Some hot guy. Used to be special forces. Don’t know that he can compete with a man who cooks breakfast for—uhumf.”

He inserted a muscular arm under my belly and heaved me out of the blankets and over his shoulder.

“Mine,” he said smugly, a hand patting my butt.

I let myself go limp and muttered, “The things I put up with for breakfast.”

He laughed and set me on my feet. That hurt for a second—and then it didn’t. I returned his butt pat with interest on my way to my chest of drawers, where my breakfast awaited.

Adam had evidently rolled the walking stick aside to make room for the plate. I hadn’t caught it moving—I seldom did—but I was pretty sure Adam wouldn’t have put the plate half-on, half-off the chest.

The walking stick had been first made by Lugh who knows how long ago and had destroyed itself saving me. It had reappeared a few weeks ago, looking as if it had never been reduced to splinters and bits of melted silver. I rolled it over so I could push the plate back on solid ground. I wondered if the walking stick still counted as an ancient artifact after remaking itself in my dreams.

Dreams. I paused, remembering that dream—or whatever it had been. I decided I’d eat breakfast and digest the dream a bit before I shared it.

“Any news?” I asked, wolfing . . . coyote-ing down crispy hash browns and bacon. Adam was a wonderful cook. I could bake good brownies.

Adam shook his head. “I thought we could both use fuel before we tackled mysteries.”

He sounded a little preoccupied. I smiled to myself. I hadn’t worn anything to bed, and I wasn’t wearing anything now.

“Sex fiend,” I told him. “The tabloids are right about you.”

“Unusually so,” he agreed. “Almost as if they had an inside source. Are you through eating yet?”

—

“So what do you think it was?” Adam asked, nearly an hour later, as he put away the pans he’d used to make breakfast.

“Did I have a dream, or was it a message from Stefan?” I wiped down the sink and shook my head. “I don’t know. It had the same feel as the one in Stefan’s house—and neither of them felt quite like my normal dreams. But Stefan didn’t say anything materially that I didn’t know, and what was new was something I could have made up.” I paused. “But I am going to have Zee look at my foot. It looks and feels okay—but it should be more painful, I think. It hurt when I stepped on those spiky things, and then I forgot about it.” Feet, I thought. I needed to have Zee look at both of my feet.

“I’ll go with you. Afterward we should gather some of the wolves and go pay—” He stopped talking as the sound of a car outside caught his attention. He glanced at me.

“George,” I said with certainty. George drove a ten-year-old Mazda sedan. There was another Mazda in the pack, but it had a smaller engine. I knew cars.

A second car followed the Mazda. Brand-new cars could be trickier—less individual than older cars.

“And,” I said, “someone driving a newer Chevy Malibu.”

—

Geena Reed’s hand shook as she brought the cocoa up to her mouth. Sleeplessness ringed her eyes and tightened a mouth that looked as though it usually wore a smile. She was short, plump, and maybe fifty.

We made her very uncomfortable. Interestingly, it was just Adam and me who bothered her. She appeared to be quite at ease with George.

We had gathered in the living room because the kitchen seemed a little close quarters for someone who was as scared as she was. The living room had more choices of seating where she could get some distance without looking like she was trying to hide from us.

“Geena has been in the Tri-Cities for about two weeks,” George said. “We met at my club.”

George’s club was where he joined other people who practiced BDSM. Geena didn’t look like my idea of someone who belonged to a BDSM group. But I didn’t look like most people’s idea of a mechanic, either.

“I’m a witch,” she told us—unnecessarily because witches carry a distinctive scent. Or rather there are three kinds of scents that belong to three kinds of witches.

White witches use only their own power to create magic. Being a white witch usually meant being a good person. Anyone witchborn who wasn’t a good person—and who had a lick of self-preservation—became a gray witch. Gray witches pulled their power from the strong emotions of other people. I understood that negative feelings—pain, anger, grief—worked better. To stay a gray witch, the sources that they harvested from had to be willing—or at least unwitting. That gave them a lot more power than a white witch had.

Black witches didn’t bother with replaceing volunteers. White witches, weaker and full of potential, were black witches’ favorite victims, but they weren’t fussy.

“I’m a white witch,” Geena said, as if she were used to explaining herself. “Word has gone out that you don’t tolerate black witches, and that’s why I came here. I belong to a group of about thirty white witches. Most of us haven’t been here long. A year ago, I am told, there were only six of us.”

She looked at the cocoa in her hand and said, “We all thought . . . hoped, really, that this would be a safe place.”

George helped her set her cocoa down on the side table. He looked a bit rough around the edges, like a man who could handle himself in a dark alley. He also appeared young enough to have been her son, though he’d been born sometime in the late nineteenth century.

There was an air of protectiveness in George’s body language that was interesting—and none of my business. That last didn’t lessen my interest. He took Geena’s hand and kissed it. He didn’t say out loud that he wouldn’t let her be hurt—because Adam might take offense at that. But his kiss made it very clear that he considered her to be under his protection.

“I was asked by my coven to talk to George because we’re friends,” she said. George had not released her hand, and now her fingers closed tightly around his.

“And I brought her here because I thought you needed to hear what she knows,” George said, when she didn’t say anything more. “Witches have been disappearing and worse.”

“Three witches have disappeared, we think,” Geena said, sounding a little tentative. “No one from our coven. But Sandy is one of us.”

Good for Sandy, whoever that was, I thought, when she quit talking. And did that mean that Sandy had disappeared, and we had four missing witches? Or had something else happened to her? Or was she the one who knew about the missing witches?

Geena’s group wasn’t really a coven, not a proper one. I’d been told that specific criteria were required to have a coven. For one thing, they had to have an exact number of members—I couldn’t remember if it was nine or thirteen. But I knew it wasn’t thirty. A coven had to have representatives from multiple families of witches—most of whom have died out. I was also pretty sure, because the implication was that all the witches had to be people of power, that a real coven wasn’t formed by white witches. Still, Geena was welcome to call her group a coven if she wanted to. I didn’t care.

“Sandy knows someone who disappeared?” inquired Adam before the silence grew any more desperate on her part. His voice was gentle. George wasn’t the only one feeling protective.

Alphas and dominant wolves tended to be protective. It was both endearing and annoying, depending upon whether it was turned toward helpless, kindly women who looked like they baked bread for the homeless on a regular basis or directed at me.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice tightening until it was nearly a whisper.

It wasn’t that she was a naturally anxious person, I didn’t think. BDSM wouldn’t attract the faint of heart. But a person could be taught fear—and white witches had plenty of reason to be afraid.

I ran through reasons she might be worried about us—and not George—and tried one.

“Geena,” I said, “our job is to protect the people in the Tri-Cities. We can’t do that unless we know what’s going on. We appreciate very much that you’ve brought this to our attention. Whatever you tell us will help us keep your coven”—if she used the word, so could I—“safer.”

She lifted her chin then and stared at me. She raised one hand toward me, palm first, and I felt a fine tickle of magic slide over me. Then she closed her eyes and nodded.

“Truth,” she said. “Truly meant. Sorry, sorry.” She sounded, this time, as if it were an apology rather than a fear response.

She straightened her back, let George’s hand go, and said, in a much firmer voice, “Sandy is one of my coven. She shares a house with a woman called Katie, who is also a witch. Last Friday night, Katie went into her meditation room and locked herself in, as was her habit. Sandy went to bed, got up in the morning, and went to work. She’s a nurse and has a regular Saturday shift. When Sandy got home, she noticed that the room was still locked. No one responded to her knocks or calls.”

She frowned at us. “Meditation is a way to increase power, but you can get caught up in it, and that is dangerous.” She waited until Adam nodded, and I wondered if she was a teacher of some kind. She seemed made for the role of elementary teacher—I really wouldn’t have picked her for one of George’s club members in a thousand years. Some people were hard to pigeonhole. Maybe Geena was a banker or an insurance salesperson.

“Sandy had to take the hinges off the door to get it open,” she said. “When she did, Katie was gone. The room was empty.”

George nudged her.

“It is a converted closet,” she explained hastily. “There are no windows or other doors. The lock is a bar dropped into brackets on the inside of the door. That’s why Sandy had to take off the hinges.”

“Is that something a witch could do?” Adam asked. “Vanish from a locked room?”

“A black witch maybe?” Geena hazarded. It was obvious that she didn’t really know. “Sandy says Katie was a gray witch, but not a powerful one, not even measured by white witch standards. And Sandy said that the room felt wrong. She’s sensitive to things like that.”

Stefan could have taken a witch from a locked room. Or Marsilia. I didn’t like that thought one little bit. “When was this again?”

“Saturday,” she said. “Or at least sometime between Friday night and Saturday late afternoon.”

Friday night something odd had gone on at the seethe. On Saturday, Wulfe had brought me the girdle.

“You said that there were other witches missing?” Adam asked.

She nodded. “We think that the first was Ruben Gresham. He disappeared a few weeks ago. He was a white witch with a little more power than most men, from an old family that has a reputation for producing a few male witches every generation. I didn’t know him—he vanished before I moved here. He wasn’t a member of the coven, exactly, more of a loner. But he had a few contacts there. Maybe he got scared and just left.” Her voice grew darker. “We white witches know how to run.”

“Yes,” I said.

That seemed to be what she needed. When she continued, her voice was steadier. “But if Ruben ran, he left everything behind, told no one, and knocked over his dining room table in the process. That was about four weeks ago. We called his family—one of my group is a cousin of sorts. They came and cleaned out his apartment, but none of them had heard from him. Not that they admitted to, anyway. Probably if it weren’t for the other two, no one would have thought much about his disappearance.”

“White witches don’t file missing persons reports,” George said. “If one of their people has reason to run, they don’t want to have the police—or anyone else—searching for them.”

“He’s right,” Geena said. “There might be more. These are the ones that no one thought would run. The third witch was Millie Sawyer.”

Adam stiffened. “I know her. About eighty years old? Lives in West Richland near the pizza place? Elizaveta brought her in for some work once.” He glanced at me. “Back when I was still married to Christy.”

“Nearer to ninety according to what I was told,” Geena said. “She didn’t get out much, but some of my coven would go play bridge with her on Sundays. Two weeks ago, they found her door broken and no sign of Millie. Like Ruben, she didn’t seem to have packed up and gone anywhere. Her car was still in the garage.”

Adam looked at George. “Those are the three witches who disappeared. You sounded like something else is happening, too.”

“Yes.” It was Geena who answered. “I don’t have a real name for this one. Sarina, she called herself. S-A-R-I-N-A but pronounced like the title. She pretended to be the reincarnation of a Russian Czarina—”

I couldn’t help my snort.

Geena smiled briefly. “I’d have been more inclined to believe it if she’d said she was the reincarnation of a chambermaid or cook myself. Anyway, Sarina does—did—readings, virtual and in person, in a room she rented in the upstairs of an antiques store in downtown Kennewick owned by another witch.”

She wrinkled her nose as if she didn’t approve of the store owner.

“On Monday, one of Sarina’s regular customers told the store owner, Helena, that the door to the reading room was locked. The owner sent the customer off and went upstairs to check for herself.”

Geena pulled out her phone, opened the photo gallery, and handed it to Adam. “Helena—who is a gray witch—texted the leader of our coven, sent her the photos, told her to be careful, and said she was leaving for a while.”

I leaned over his shoulder so I could see, too.

There were a series of photos. It took four of them to understand what we were looking at because the photos had been taken too close: a human body sliced up by something sharp. There was a pattern to the cuts, which were evenly spaced, but I couldn’t quite see it.

“Why hasn’t this been in the news?” asked Adam with a frown.

“No time,” George said. “Geena took me by the store. There’s a ‘Closed until further notice’ sign in the window, and the door is bolted. I thought about breaking in, but I called the police instead—about an hour ago.”

I raised my eyebrows. George was “the police.”

He gave me a faint smile. “I called the Kennewick police.”

That was an interesting thing for him to do. The more usual thing was for us to cover up crimes we were sure only involved the preternatural community. Those were too dangerous for human law enforcement.

“Was the body still there?” asked Adam.

George nodded. “I was surprised about that.”

“Helena must have been seriously spooked to leave the corpse,” Geena said. “For a gray witch, a murder victim . . .” She hesitated.

“Christmas and birthday present all in one?” I suggested.

She nodded. “As long as Helena wasn’t the killer—and I don’t think she was—such a body would be the source of spell components, even if it wasn’t fresh enough to supply magical energy.”

“Do you mind if I send the photos to myself?” Adam asked, still thumbing the images back and forth.

“No,” she said. “Of course. You should have them.” She grimaced. “Ugly things.”

“I’m putting my number in your contacts, too,” Adam said as he tapped on her phone. “Feel free to call me if you need us.”

“Us?” she asked.

“The pack,” Adam said, handing her back her phone.

“Thank you,” George said, putting a hand under Geena’s elbow, urging her to her feet. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Just the three missing witches?” I asked.

George shrugged. “If you don’t count Helena, who ran.”

“Do you think they are all related?” Adam asked. “White witches . . .” He looked at Geena and stopped.

“Are prey,” she finished for him. “I’ve heard whispers of others disappearing, not just witches. People with just a bit of magic or fae blood. Some of the weaker fae, even goblins. There are whispers that say that you and the Gray Lords don’t really care what happens to us weaker beings. You just want to appease the humans. That the idea of the Tri-Cities as a refuge of safety is just a political sham—or worse, a trap.”

Geena raised her chin. “I told George I didn’t want to come here. That if you are killing your allies, or letting others kill them, what do you care about some missing witches?”

“Killing our allies?” I asked.

“Geena says Wulfe is missing.” George sat back a little.

Encouraged, Geena nodded. “That’s what people are saying. They say that when Marsilia confronted you about it, you threatened to kill all the vampires the way you killed the black witches. They say that you already killed Wulfe.”

She looked suddenly terrified. I’d be terrified of someone who could kill Wulfe, too. She looked up at George, who sighed.

“They say,” George said, with a little emphasis on the vague pronoun, “that maybe we killed the Hardesty witches not because they were evil but because they threatened our power. And now we’re doing it to the vampires, too. Or at least that’s the story Geena’s coven has. Is Wulfe missing?”

I exchanged looks with Adam.

“We don’t know,” Adam said. “But Marsilia told us we needed to replace him.”

“When did you hear about a confrontation between Marsilia and us?” I asked.

“This morning,” Geena said. “I heard she met you at Uncle Mike’s.”

“I was the first one to leave,” said George, half-apologetically and half-irritated.

“The only people who were there when Marsilia showed up were Uncle Mike, Sherwood, Zack, Adam, and me,” I said. “Do you think any of them were on the phone this morning talking about it?”

“The pack knows,” Adam said blandly. “I called them myself.”

I threw up my hands. “I’m wrong again,” I said. “I forgot you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

Adam laughed. “I get your point, though. I didn’t talk to anyone this morning. I got in touch with Darryl about two hours ago and gave him the story and told him to make sure it traveled through the pack.”

“Whoever is talking,” I said, “it’s not coming from us.”

“Did you threaten to kill all the vampires?” asked George, sounding a little too eager.

“No,” Adam said. “We’re allies. Marsilia asked us to look for Wulfe, and Mercy and I spent the rest of the night doing just that.”

“Huh,” I said. “Marsilia said we’d be blamed . . . but I didn’t quite believe it. It sounds like we really do need to replace Wulfe.” I glanced at Geena. “And the missing witches. And the missing anyone else.”

George’s eyes narrowed. “Huh.”

“Interesting,” Adam said. “I wish this wasn’t so interesting.”

“I don’t believe you are killing witches, having met you,” Geena said earnestly to Adam. Women tend to look at my husband with just that expression. George gave me a faint smile.

I was glad I hadn’t responded by rolling my eyes, because Geena turned to me next. “You aren’t a ruthless killer—you care about people.” She made an odd brushing motion, one hand over the other. “My hands do not lie to me about the nature of a person.”

“Good to know,” I said. I had, in fact, killed people ruthlessly. Or at least without regrets.

“Come,” George said. “Let me see you to your car.”

“Thank you for your insights,” Adam said. “I am sorry that we failed to keep your people safe. We will replace out what’s going on and stop it. Please, if you replace out anything more, let us know. You can call me or George anytime.”

She looked at all of us and then nodded her head. “Thank you.”

George escorted her to the door. “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as the door shut, Adam picked up the phone and called Larry and briefly explained what we’d just learned from Geena.

“White witches always go missing,” said Larry.

“Yes,” Adam agreed. “But that is not usually accompanied by a wave of gossip accusing my pack of making them go missing. There’s a dead witch, too.” He told Larry about the fortune-teller.

“Our informative witch also said there are rumors about other people going missing, Larry,” I said, knowing Larry could hear me. “Goblins, lesser fae. People who don’t have anyone to watch their backs.”

“Those also tend to use travel as a means to keep themselves safe,” Larry grumbled. “Except for the goblins.”

He didn’t say anything more for a moment.

“She said goblins are going missing?” he asked. “Did she name names?”

“No,” Adam replied. “She only had rumors. Are goblins going missing?”

“I hadn’t thought so,” Larry said. “But there are a couple of my people I haven’t heard from in a while. Recluses. If there are missing people, that means we have an enemy who knows our home and our peoples very well.”

“It could just be rumor,” Adam said. “But I would appreciate it if you could replace out.”

“Information is my game,” agreed Larry, and disconnected.

“I’ll have Zack and Ben check into it, too,” Adam told me.

Zack knew a lot of the more vulnerable supernatural folk around town. They used him to communicate with us because he wasn’t as scary as the rest of the werewolves. Ben was a computer genius, and in his own words minus expletives, if there was a database he couldn’t hack, it was because he didn’t want to.

George returned in the middle of the call to Zack and waited with me while Adam made the call to Ben.

When Adam finished with Ben, George resumed his seat.

“White witches are perfect victims, aren’t they?” He made a face. “Not a surprise to lose a few, not a surprise to have them run away. We don’t even bother to look for them when they disappear.”

“It’s more surprising that Geena’s people are talking about the missing witches,” Adam agreed, sounding both tired and sad. “They don’t usually want to call attention to themselves that way.”

George nodded. “Do you remember me getting called away from the gathering last night?”

Adam lifted an eyebrow at the change in subject but nodded.

“It was the grocery store over on Road Sixty-Eight in Pasco,” he said. “The smaller one.”

“I haven’t looked at the news this morning,” Adam said. “What happened?”

“It’s not on the news yet—though it will break soon,” George said. “Some college kid was shopping with his roommates, separated to go to the baking aisle, and disappeared. One of the stocking clerks found the body about fifteen minutes after the last time his friends saw him. The thing is, his body looked an awful lot like the body in the photos Geena had.”

“Was he a witch?” I asked.

George shook his head. “Smelled human to me. But I don’t think his killer is. Geena’s pictures don’t show it—but I saw the body. The weapon is some sort of sharp blade, and he swings it like this.” George moved his hand in a figure-eight motion. “He cut the body on the cross movements. Left it with crosshatch diagonals with a little roundness on the edges as he came around. I think at least the first four strokes were done as the body fell. Then the killer rolled the body over and finished up. The wounds are very deep, down to the spine.”

That’s why George had called the police on the dead witch. There was a human involved. He just hadn’t wanted to say so in front of Geena.

“A witch Monday,” I said. “And a human last night. Pretty quick.”

“What else do you know?” asked Adam. “Is the victim connected to Monday’s witch?” He rubbed his face. “And are they connected to the missing witches?”

“I don’t know. I gave Tony a heads-up about our Pasco murder when I told him about the dead witch.” Tony Montenegro was with the Kennewick PD and liaised with various supernatural groups—mostly because he was a friend of mine.

“This,” George said, “is going to be a political nightmare for the pack. Especially if someone tells the police about the missing witches.”

Adam nodded. “That’s for sure. What can you tell us about last night’s murder?”

“Not as much as I’d have thought in a place as public as a grocery store. We spent half the night out questioning anyone we could track down who had been at the store. We have some video of the victim, but nothing that shows the killer. The cameras that covered the area the body was found in were off.”

“Off?” Adam’s business was security. “As in someone switched them off? Who has access to do that?”

“It’s a closed system, runs only out of the security office. That office was locked up before the cameras cut out and during the murder. The cameras turned back on while the office was still locked, just before the clerk found the body. It was off for about ten minutes.”

“Any suspects?” I asked. “No one saw anything?”

“Sort of.” George had a funny look on his face.

“What?” asked Adam.

“Thing is, it is probably a red herring,” George said. “But one of the assistant managers went off shift about the same time our victim disappeared. He swears he saw the Harvester walking behind his car as he backed out of his parking place—which was not too far from where the body was found.”

“The who?” asked Adam.

“The Harvester?” I asked. “You mean like in that movie? Dressed up like a scarecrow wearing a cloak and carrying a sickle?”

“The assistant manager said it was a scythe. Said he was watching his backup camera when somebody dressed like the Harvester walked behind his car. But when he turned to look himself, there was no one there.”

“You believe him?” asked Adam.

George made a thoughtful humming sound. “The employee parking lot is big, well lit, and, at that time of night, mostly empty. We have the incident partially on camera. He definitely hits the brakes hard and stops for a bit before backing out. The security camera doesn’t have a good view of the area behind his car, though—it’s black-and-white and a bit grainy. The shadows around the back of the car were too dark. There might have been movement or maybe not.”

“The grocery store on Road Sixty-Eight,” I said. “Isn’t there a movie theater right around there?”

George nodded. “And they were having a special showing of The Harvester. It had just let out. Theater manager said a number of people came dressed as the Harvester.”

Adam exchanged a grim look with me. Jesse, Izzy, and Tad had gone to The Harvester last night. There were other theaters in town, but that one was their usual choice.

George said, “I have permission to take the two of you to the murder site and to the coroner’s office to get a look at the body. Thing is, your nose is better than mine, Mercy. You might pick up something.”

Magic, he meant.

We’d been getting ready to head to the seethe. I looked at Adam. “We should hit this before we go visiting the seethe,” I said.

“After we stop by your shop,” Adam said.

I frowned at him. “To do what?”

“You need Zee to look at your feet,” he said.

I frowned at him. “There’s nothing wrong with my feet.”

“Spider?” he asked.

For a minute I couldn’t think what he meant. Then a cold chill slid over my skin.

“Yes,” I said. “I think we’d better.”