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Except they weren’t peopled with thieves.

Both of them had a single person in them, wearing the sort of eclectic, cobbled-together outfits Rita wore.

Her missing compatriots, squished into short uncomfortable wicker coops.

Nor were they the only two: the wicker man’s sturdy legs each contained another person, as did his torso.

His head looked large enough to hold a sixth person, but it was empty, and I wondered if Lynn Schumacher had been intended for that spot.

Worse, I wondered if Morrison would take his place.

There was no immediate sign of my wayward boss, but we were too low to see beyond piles of shredded wood that lay around the wicker man’s feet.

I didn’t like that pile. It suggested bonfires, and I had the vague, uncomfortable idea that wicker men often came to fiery endings.

I was not about to watch one wicker man and five real men burn to death, regardless of what else happened.

My overenthusiastic magic would have to come to heel, or I would?—

Distressingly, the only way I could think to finish that idea was or I would risk knocking a hole through to the world above , which would have been just fine if I wasn’t really quite sure we were beneath Lake Washington.

I mean, yes, that would be better than exploding a hole in downtown Seattle, but in terms of a dramatic rescue it would be an utter failure.

I didn’t want to save these guys from burning to death only to drown them.

Images of shielding them all in bubbles and letting them bob to the surface came to mind, complete with pop-pop-popping sound effects. Great. I had a backup plan, in case everything went stupidly, spectacularly wrong. Too bad I didn’t have a decent primary plan.

Billy elbowed me and nodded toward the firewood ring just as movement caught my eye, too.

Tia paced out of the ring like Lady Godiva sans the horse.

A moment later Morrison, still very much a wolf, trotted after her, his head nearly level with her ribs.

There were worse places for it to be level with, all things considered.

Billy widened his eyes at me and I shrugged, as wide-eyed as he was.

I didn’t know what had been going on behind the wooden ring.

I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

I had a horrible feeling that at some point, I’d find out.

The idea made me exhale just a little too loudly.

Morrison’s ears cocked and he looked my way, but Tia didn’t.

Apparently werewolves didn’t retain canine senses in human form.

I filed that away under “Thank God for small favors” and stayed where I was, stomach clenched as Morrison gave me a long, steady look to make it clear he knew I was there.

A flicker of hope danced through me. Maybe he had chased Tia in order to keep an eye on her.

Maybe it hadn’t just been wolfy instinct out to get him—and eventually me—into trouble.

Nah. Nothing was ever that easy. I almost smiled, and Morrison caught up to Tia with a couple of loping steps, evidently uninterested in Billy and me.

Billy performed a soundless collapse of relief which would have done Charlie Chaplin proud.

I wanted to follow suit, but I remained as I was, tense and wide-eyed, for just a few seconds longer while I tried like hell to make out what was supposed to happen in this underground cavern.

A sacrifice, obviously: people didn’t go around randomly constructing wicker men in magic-born, power-filled chambers and then stuffing the wicker men full of expendables just for the fun of it.

But if there were werewolf gods, I knew nothing about them, including why they might want sacrifices, or whether this might be an annual thing or just a special occasion.

A penny dropped, quick twist of certainty at the back of my mind: it was a special occasion.

The same special occasion which prompted the ghost dance killing.

The moon was full, or would be tonight, and the equinox was only another day away.

It still wasn’t a perfect alignment like it had been the year before for the banshee murders, but it was close enough.

The only question was, close enough for what .

Not that it mattered, particularly: it wasn’t very likely Tia would sit down, explain it all and make such sense that I’d say, “Oh, well, okay, go ahead then, light ’em up.

” A burble of relief slipped through me.

I was a full day ahead of schedule, with the full moon not being until tonight.

Between being here early and having stopped another ghost dance murder, for once I had the upper hand.

Particularly since Morrison hadn’t informed his new lady love that we were there.

All I had to do was tiptoe up and bash her unconscious without being noticed, and we could get all our answers later.

It sounded like a respectable Plan A. I very cautiously triggered the tamped-down Sight again, hoping it wouldn’t blast my eyeballs out.

It merely filtered on, the way it was supposed to.

Pleased, I tapped Billy’s shoulder and went into a complicated mime routine trying to explain what I intended to do.

After about thirty seconds of playing peekaboo, which completely failed to get across the idea of “I’m going to wrap myself in an invisibility cloak,” he rolled his eyes, mouthed, “Just do it,” and hunched back down to await my antics.

If the Sight could knock me senseless for a couple minutes, I could hardly imagine how badly something that inherently screwed with the laws of physics might end up if I wasn’t careful.

I delved into my magic more delicately than I’d ever done, trying not to do more than scrape enough off its surface to bend light around myself.

Even those tiny scrapes left bright silver-white marks, like I was coming dangerously close to unleashing power I was totally unprepared to deal with.

If I had to do anything fast while we were down here, that Plan B with the bubble shields might well come in necessary.

Gradually I felt like I’d succeeded, but one of the problems with this trick was I could still see myself.

In fact, I was pretty sure it violated laws of physics all over the place, since I could also see out of my invisibility cloak, which technically I shouldn’t be able to do.

Magic, however, wasn’t physics. I tapped Billy’s shoulder again and he flinched, suggesting he couldn’t see me.

Satisfied, I crept forward, flashlight knotted in my hand like the bludgeoning tool it was shortly to be used as.

Morrison and Tia had gone halfway around the wicker man, Tia stopping every few feet to examine something.

I paused where she had, trying to see what she’d seen, but gave it up after a couple of attempts and edged around the circle as quickly and quietly as I could, until I was opposite Billy and only a few yards from my furry boss and his golden-haired girlfriend.

Tia scruffed the top of Morrison’s head and said something inaudible to him.

He lay down immediately, chin on his paws, but his whole body quivered like a dog who wasn’t at all sure he wanted to do as he was told.

I wondered abruptly who was the boss in a wolf pack, the alpha male or the alpha female.

In an awful lot of pack structures, the males were there for protection and breeding, and the females ruled the roost. Morrison looked very much like his roost was being ruled.

Tia crouched to scruff him again and he lay flatter, ears and tail full of displeased body language, but Tia ignored him as she laid a hand on the wooden ring she’d built.

Fire exploded everywhere.