I hooked the scythe between the top two rails of the fence and around the vampire’s neck, just under her jaw.

I never, ever thought that mowing that field with a scythe would be useful to me. Who uses a scythe in the era of lawn mowers and tractors? To make that exact point, Bran had parked a new, wide-swath, riding lawn mower just outside the field. He wanted to rub in the fact that all the sweaty, backbreaking work I was doing could have been done in an hour on the riding lawn mower. By the time I’d finished, I’d had blisters, muscles in my arms and back in places I didn’t know I had muscles—and I’d learned a lot about how a scythe worked.

The first rule of cutting grass with a medieval farm implement is that the blade has to be sharp, or when it hits the grass, it will bend it over instead of cutting it. The sharp side of the blade is on the side nearest the scytheman, so he hooks the grass and pulls it with a smooth motion that uses his whole body, like a golfer. I think. I don’t golf, but the motion a golfer makes when hitting the ball looks a lot like the one I developed by trial and error to cut waist-high grass.

The same motion I used on the vampire. I caught her totally by surprise because her attention was on the werewolves.

Evidently, Jitka knew about keeping her scythe sharp, because it slid through flesh like a hot knife through butter. It was easy, only a little hesitation as the blade hit the bone, and it was done. Expecting a more difficult task, I used too much force and overbalanced myself, put a foot on the edge where the sod had been cut, and rolled and fell on my butt in the dirt.

I was too worried about cutting myself with the scythe to try to roll, but I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could. Or almost as quickly as I could, because I found a little more speed when I realized that the head had landed right next to me.

Pretty much anything that is decapitated dies and stays that way, even the kinds of things that are otherwise immortal. Vampires’ bodies turn to ash when they are dead, mostly—though I’ve learned over the past few years that isn’t always true. There are apparently some strains of vampirism that don’t do that at all. Younger vampires tend to have bodies just like real people. But vampirism is magic-fueled, and magic doesn’t follow the rules all the time like science does.

What that means is this: if I decapitate Wulfe someday, he will probably turn to ash because he is very old. If he doesn’t turn to ash, I’ll burn his body and his head. Either way, I will take his ashes and scatter them in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—salt being a pretty effective deterrent to magic. I don’t know of anything that decapitation followed by burning doesn’t kill, but with Wulfe, I wouldn’t take any chances.