“Some people are perpetual victims,” Liz said. “My Gramma says that. Nothing is ever their fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. They drink or hit their spouse or show lack of compassion for their fellow man and get called out for it, and it’s never their fault. So…” Liz stopped to breathe. “After all this time CC decided to act on wanting me dead. Boo fucking hoo.”
Eli barked a laugh at her language. “Alex says she’s been working with a male vampire name Mayhew and a witch named Mayhew, who seems to be a descendant of a vampire witch you killed?”
“Oh. That’s not good. Yeah. Cia and I trapped the Mayhew witch-vamp after she got free from a long-chained lair and killed some people.” She held up her arms and indicated the skin there. “That’s where we got tainted by the blood-curse magic.”
“So all the bad guys you left alive got together and ganged up on you.”
“I’m lucky?”
Eli barked a laugh.
“Last time I saw him,” Liz said, “Mayhew was in the custody of some of Lincoln Shaddock’s people.”
“Shaddock’s holding was taken over recently. Maybe he got away then. I don’t remember that from my reports, but that name wasn’t’ on my radar. Could have missed it.”
The demon snarled and pressed in with his splintered bone. Thehedgebegan to fall. “You got any more hymns in you?” she asked, reaching for the silver box. It had energy. Werewolf energy, but… It was better than nothing. She hoped.
Eli stopped her and wrapped her hand in the bedroll. “Hot,” he said.
“Oh. Right.” Her brain wasn’t working well at all. Even through the sleeping bag, she could feel the heat. The silver box was so hot it was glowing a weird grayish orange, like a live coal in an old fire, covered with ash. Eli cleared his voice and crinkled paper as he opened another mint. He started singing Amazing Grace. And this time, now that she was listening, it was heartrending. And… he knew all four verses by heart. As he sang, she removed the wrapping on her fingers and opened the cuts there once more, the pain shivering through her.
Liz looked at the box again. The werewolves were nearly on top of them.
Something roared in the night, directly ahead. Something else answered. A reddish werewolf leaped from the darkness, landing near the firepit. Another werewolf, white with a strange flash of neon green on its back, flew—flew—from their left, through the dark and landed on top of the reddish wolf.
Brute. The wolves and the neon green grindylow rolled across clearing. Fangs and claws, some of them grindylow steel, flashed in the moonlight. Liz glanced up. The waxing gibbous moon was overhead, shining through the trees. Too bad she wasn’t a moon witch.
The demon made a snorting sucking sound, as if someone wearing boots was squelching through mud. It was laughter. Liz raised her eyes to the point of contact betweenhedgeand bone. The demon’s bone-claw had pierced thehedge. In herseeingworking, the energies protecting Eli and her separated at the point of penetration. Little frayed threads of her power waved in an unfelt breeze and softly… snapped. They began to fall away.
“Hey demon,” a voice roared. “Suck on this!” A bottle blasted through the trees up the hill and smashed into the mud demon so hard part of the bottle stuck in the mud.
The demon roared in pain and pulled its bone-claw away from the brokenhedge.
“Jane,” Eli said in an understated warning.
It didn’t sound like Jane, so that meant she was in an altered form. A frisson of shock shivered through Liz.
“There’s more holy water where that came from!” the voice shouted again, closer now.
A rock rolled down the hill into the small clearing. It was lit with brightness, like a single candle in the dark, lighting the campsite. Liz recognized it but her exhausted brain didn’t process what it meant.
A half-woman, half-mountain lion shape raced into the small clearing, a massive pack on her back. Jane was six feet tall with human-shaped arms and legs, but all knobby bone and taut muscle. The light of the stone revealed her to be covered by a golden pelt. She was cat-faced, with the muzzle and nose and ears of a mountain lion. Fangs of a lion. A horrible visage. She screamed and even the demon jerked and turned to her.
Jane was a shapeshifter. She carried silvered bladed weapons in each hand. Vials of Holy Water and crosses were hanging on her belt and around her neck. And…
Jane wasn’t carrying a backpack. She had hauled Cia on her back, at speed, through the woods and into the clearing.
Fury erupted through Liz. Her sister was in the presence of werewolves, wild, dangerous werewolves. One scratch or bite, and Cia, a moon witch with a blood-curse taint, would surely go furry at the next full moon. Female werewolves were always insane. And Yellowrock had brought her here.
The demon turned to the other blood-cursed Everhart.
The fighting werewolves bowled into the demon. It didn’t even quiver. Five hundred pounds of were-creature and it was as if they had hit a brick wall.
Cia said something into Jane’s ear. Jane leaped high and behind and landed on the other side of the firepit. She set Cia on the earth, and leaped again, grabbing a branch overhead. Swinging high, into a tree, Jane shouted, “Demon. Fight this!” She threw something down from the limb.
The demon howled again. Jane had just dumped a second vial of Holy Water over the demon. Now was their chance.
“Drop thehedge!” Cia shouted.
