I have a quirky immunity to magic. It works best for vampire magic for sure, and for everything else it is hit-and-miss. Tad and I had spent an afternoon experimenting with it after we’d faced down some witches. He thought I’d been remiss not figuring out what kinds of magic worked on me. After he’d pointed it out, I’d had to agree.
It hadn’t been a productive afternoon. In the first place, Tad only worked fae magic. I didn’t want to involve the vampires, and the only witches I knew were now dead. It turned out that my immunity to magic, when dealing with fae magic, really did appear to be random. The same spell thrown at me the same way affected me sometimes but not always. We asked Zee to help, but he refused, saying, “Chaos is not predictable. To imagine anything else would be dangerous.”
But some immunity was better than none.
I glanced into the dimly lit windows and saw no one moving about inside. Those vulnerable windows, added to Stefan’s unanswered phone, fairly shouted that neither Stefan nor his people were in charge of the house. Someone inside that house used fae magic.
I wondered if this situation was tied up in Marsilia’s mysterious message and Wulfe’s apparent disappearance, or if it was some entirely new problem. A coincidence.
I don’t believe in coincidences much. I knew the thought was Adam’s, but I agreed.
I tried to send back a question: Do you think Marsilia sent us into a trap?
She would know that the first person I’d contact if I were looking for Wulfe would be Stefan.
“I’m beginning to think that all of our vampires are in trouble,” murmured Adam into my ear, so softly that a werewolf standing five feet away would not have heard him.
He stepped in front of me, pushing me behind him as he started to knock on the door again. Obviously, he intended to go in first.
In a physical fight, Adam was the tank and I . . . well, I was a predator, too. In our four-footed forms, Adam’s wolf was more than eight times my coyote in weight. I was a hair quicker, but his werewolf was considerably better armed.
In human form, which for me was the better shape for fighting, I had years of martial arts training backed by a recently hard-earned black belt. I carried a gun and a cutlass. But even there, Adam was a better fighter. He’d spent most of his life in battles—first as an army ranger and an LRRP （long-range reconnaissance patrol, essentially a scout） in Vietnam. After the war, he’d been Alpha of a werewolf pack and served in that role for almost half a century.
But in a fight where magic was a strong possibility, even an unpredictable immunity to magic made me less vulnerable. It made sense that I should go first.
I caught his arm. Continuing our probably useless attempt to be stealthy, I wiggled my fingers to indicate magic, tapped my chest twice, and then held up one finger by itself.
Adam’s lips tightened and a streak of white appeared on his cheek when he clenched his jaw. Given that reaction, it surprised me when he nodded. He made a downward gesture with the flat of his hand, indicating a space about knee height.
That made sense, too. I was a more difficult target in my coyote form, more unexpected and quicker than when I walked on two feet. I hadn’t managed to prove it to myself one way or the other, but I thought that my immunity might work better when I was wearing my coyote self, too.
I glanced over my shoulder at the road that ran by Stefan’s house. It was a fairly busy one, but at this time of the very early morning, when the darkness ruled, there was no one around. I stripped quickly out of my clothes and changed as I dropped my underwear on the ground. Unlike the werewolves, my shifting was both painless and virtually instantaneous.
I felt one claw catch in fabric that tore and hoped it was my underwear. I’d been wearing a new shirt my youngest sister had sent me for her birthday. I usually gave her something on my birthday, too. I don’t remember when it started or why, but it was a tradition now. This shirt was a T-shirt that said When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, Remember That I Am Faster Than You in glow-in-the-dark lettering.
I shook myself to get rid of the last of the changing tingles and pressed my shoulder against Adam’s leg to tell him I was ready.
He fished my carry gun out of the pile of clothing, checked it, and tucked it into his waistband. He hesitated a moment, then simply drew my cutlass from its sheath, holding the blade against his body where it would not be seen by any passing motorist—though the road was still quiet.
I made a noise. The cross guard was silver.
“It’s not a cross guard,” murmured Adam almost inaudibly. “It’s a guard with a knuckle bow. Only the knuckle bow is silver. I’ll be careful.”