“Sherwood?” I called.
The sound of his growl should have reassured me.
Adam’s ears flattened. He glanced at me.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly.
So I waited while my mate went down the stairs to see what had happened.
5
Sherwood growled again. This time it was a pained sound that had elements of human vocal cords in it. He had been all the way wolf when I’d seen him, not five minutes ago.
Adam, out of view, didn’t make any noise at all. And a wave of magic rolled over me again. I always had trouble with heavy magic use, but it seemed to me that my reaction to it was getting worse over time. That, or I was just being exposed to more powerful magic users.
As soon as I could stand up, I took a deep breath and decided I was done waiting. I traveled cautiously down the stairs. The bottom two were wet with repulsive goo from the original barrier that we, Adam and I between us, had brought down. But beyond a certain squick factor because I was barefoot, I didn’t pay much attention to that. What I saw in the room stopped me cold, right in the middle of the gooey spot.
Adam had paused about halfway across the room, presumably for the same reason I had.
At the far end of the room, where the shadows were deepest even in the middle of the day, was a giant beanbag chair. Beanbag chairs were one of the few pieces of furniture that were equally comfortable for wolf and human, so we had a few scattered around the room.
The remains of the zombie wolf were laid on the chair as if his comfort mattered. The dead werewolf looked lifeless, really dead and going to stay that way. Sherwood knelt on the floor next to the beanbag. He was a mess. I’d heard his human voice amid the wolf, and his body was like that, caught halfway back to human in a way I’d never seen before. He was stuck in a bizarre mismatch of human and wolf limbs and features that looked incredibly painful and completely unsustainable. If his outside was so wrong, I couldn’t imagine what his internal organs looked like.
But he had two human-shaped hands resting on top of the pile of hide-covered bones. Sherwood’s eyes—golden, feral eyes—tracked from Adam to me and back.
Adam sat on the ground where he was, all the way down, belly to the floor. I’d have sat down, too, but there was a deep puddle of goo under my bare feet. I hoped that the combination of how much less of a threat I was than Adam and the fact that I was farther away would be enough to make my presence not an issue for Sherwood.
Sherwood apparently agreed with me. He watched Adam for a moment more, then, satisfied that we would leave him to his work, he turned his attention to the dead-again werewolf.
And he sang.
The words were mangled by the caught-between-change shape of his mouth, but he was pitch-perfect and the song ruffled the hair on the back of my neck and broke my heart with its magic-carried grief.
We waited where we were, Adam and I, while the scent of black magic dissipated. The scent, the feeling of black magic, lingers for a long time, years or even decades. But the dead wolf and the basement—and me and even my unholy rank-smelling hair—were all being cleansed as Sherwood sang.
I don’t know what Adam could feel, but it seemed to me as if magic swept out from Sherwood and washed over us all. I couldn’t tell what kind of magic it was—a rarity for me. It just felt like Sherwood, masculine and reserved, werewolf and gruffly kind. Not werewolf magic—that’s another thing altogether. This was something . . . more primal. More wild. And I didn’t think there was a thing more wild than pack magic.
As I observed Sherwood grieving over this werewolf who had been a zombie, I thought about the power of what he was doing. Of what I’d felt course through me.
I thought about how Sherwood had ended up in our pack, sent by the Marrok who had ruled us all and now ruled all of the werewolves except for our pack. And how short a period of time lay between when Sherwood got here and when those ties had been cut.
I thought of what I knew of Sherwood, whose voice was so beautiful that tears coursed down my cheeks from his sorrow when I could not even understand the words of the song he sang. But I knew the music’s content because its intent was made magically clear.
Bran, the Marrok, had rescued Sherwood from a witch’s coven that the Seattle wolves had uncovered. Sherwood had been missing a leg that nothing could help him regenerate and no trace of memory that predated his stay with the witches. He hadn’t really answered me about how much of his captivity he remembered when I asked him when we’d headed into the witch’s house earlier today.
Eventually Bran had given him a name—in a fit of exasperation, from how Sherwood himself had recounted it to me: Sherwood Post. It wasn’t a . . . usual name, gleaned as it was from the authors of two books on Bran’s desk, a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson and Emily Post’s treatise on etiquette. Bran read all the time, but I had never known Bran to read either of those authors.
I’d had a class in American lit in college and the professor had made us memorize quotes, I’m not sure why. I’d thought Anderson a little too self-aware in his writing, and had much preferred F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was more readable, and Faulkner, who was a better wordsmith. But as Sherwood sang his mourning song, I remembered that Anderson had said something about people who were deliberately stupid, burying deeper thoughts beneath a steel barricade so they wouldn’t have to look at them. It made me wonder if Bran’s choice of name had been less impulse of the moment and more a reasoned epithet.
I had been mostly convinced that Bran knew who Sherwood had been before the witches had taken him. Standing at the foot of the stairs in a puddle of rotting slime with Sherwood’s magic washing over me, I was certain of it. There just weren’t that many werewolves who could generate this kind of magic; I could not fathom a world in which Bran would not know of him. Bran kept track of werewolfkind as closely as any dragon kept watch on its treasure.
I was getting an odd feeling, and I don’t know where it came from exactly, though it solidified as I watched Sherwood sing to the dead wolf as he drove the filthy magic out of it and away. I thought that maybe Bran had also known, somehow, that Adam and our pack would end up alone against the world, and he’d sent this broken wolf to help us survive. This wolf he would not be careless with. If Sherwood was here, it was because Bran wanted him here.
As he sang, Sherwood became human. Not as quickly as I could shift—but more quickly than I’d seen anyone else change except Bran’s son Charles or an Alpha wolf pulling power from the pack. The last few minutes, as he sang, fully human, I could pick out words, though not meaning, because he wasn’t singing in Welsh or any other language I recognized.
After the last note fell and silence reigned, Sherwood kissed the dead wolf on the muzzle, ichor- and blood-drenched though it was. Our broken wolf closed his eyes, rested his forehead on the hide-covered bones, and blasted the body to ashes in a burst of magic that sent me down on my butt in the cooling, fetid goo I’d been trying to avoid sitting in.
By the time I could see again, Sherwood was in a heap on the floor, unconscious, and Adam was licking my face.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “It’s just the magic.” Even the thought of how much power Sherwood had used made me shiver in reflex. “Go check on Sherwood.”
I lurched to my feet to do the same.
* * *
• • •
“Huh,” said Sherwood, drinking his third cup of cocoa and staring at the crumbs on his plate. He was bathed and wearing a set of black sweats a little too small for him, sitting at the kitchen table with his back to the wall.
The house reeked, and would until Adam’s contractor got his guys to come rip out the carpet where the zombie werewolf had left generous amounts of putrid fluids behind. I would finally get to replace all the white, and tomorrow I’d be happy about that. But the smell was only the organic part of the foulness that had invaded our h
ouse, and that wasn’t nearly as troubling as it might have been had Sherwood not banished the stink of black magic with his song.
My hair was wet and I had shoes on to protect me from standing in any more horrid stuff. I was on my third set of clothes today and it wasn’t even noon. I’d like to say it was a record, but it wasn’t even close. The washing machine, fortified with a cup of the orange cleaner I used to get grease off my hands, was attempting to remove the goo from the seat of my jeans. If that didn’t work, I’d throw those jeans away.
Adam, fully human again, had been in the middle of recounting the events following Sherwood’s expedition to the basement shower when I’d arrived freshly showered and clean. While he finished the tale, I made more sandwiches for all of us—and lots of hot, spicy cocoa.
As Adam finished describing what Sherwood had done to the zombie’s body, Sherwood shook his head.
“I don’t remember that,” he mumbled into his cup. He set the cup down, stared at it, then said, “I remember nothing after I headed down and set off the witch’s trap—not until I came to myself in the shower upstairs. I don’t remember a zombie werewolf. I don’t remember singing. I don’t sing. I don’t do magic.” He glanced up at Adam with shadowed eyes. “I don’t think I remember.” He clenched his hands.
The sorrow I sensed from him, through the pack bonds and through his scent, did not waver. But I was almost certain he was lying about not remembering, I just didn’t think that Adam and I were the people the lie was aimed at. Only his last sentence rang true, and I could see from his face that he realized that.
“Why did he change like that?” I asked Adam, because it had been bothering me—and Sherwood didn’t even remember doing it.
Adam had stopped his change midway once—and the result had been monstrous. I still wasn’t sure whether it had been on purpose. But what Sherwood had done had been different.
“Like what?” asked Sherwood.
“He couldn’t change his whole body quickly enough for his purposes,” said Adam. He spoke to me, but he was looking at Sherwood. “He just changed what he needed. I can’t do it—but the Moor and a few of the other older werewolves can.”
We all absorbed that for a few minutes.
“So,” I said briskly, “we need to figure out how the zombie got in.”
Adam frowned. “We can try, but without a witch, I’m not sure we’ll get anywhere.”
“I can ask Zee to help,” I suggested. “He’s not a witch, but he’s been around a long time.” I hesitated. “I could call Bran or Charles.”
Adam shook his head. “Zee, but not Bran or Charles. There are too many eyes on us right now. I think it’s more important than ever that the supernatural community knows that we are not part of Bran’s people right now.”
Sherwood frowned at Adam. “What’s so important about right now?”
Adam looked at him for a long moment. “So,” he said, “let us leave aside why you wept over a long-dead wolf, shall we? Or how you cleansed the stink of the dark magic from our home.”
Sherwood looked away. “Please?”
“We have to figure out how they got in and planted that trap,” I said. “If Sherwood hadn’t been here, Adam—what if Jesse had found that thing? What if they plant another zombie werewolf?”
“They have no more,” Sherwood said, his eyes wolf-bright and his voice nearly guttural. The change was so sudden, his voice so powerful, that I found myself scooting back in my chair.
“The one who made that poor shadow is long dead.” The wolf in human-seeming almost glowed with power. “They have neither the learning nor the power to make him again. They would not have risked him if they had known who was here. I have made him free, my poor brother that was.”
He looked at Adam, but his eyes did not meet those of my mate. “As for other mischief—my song has claimed this place for now. No evil may enter without invitation. They cannot come in.” He glanced beyond us, behind Adam and me, toward the basement. “Not for a while.”
“Sherwood?” Adam asked.
“No,” growled Sherwood’s wolf, a hint of contempt in his voice. Then his voice gentled a bit. “Not yet. He still hides.”
“Wolf,” I asked, “who are you?”
“Witchbane,” he said. “Witch’s Spawn.” He grimaced, or maybe he smiled. “Something like that, maybe. I forget. Who are you?”
“Nothing that grand,” I said.
He bared his teeth. “Coyote’s Daughter,” he said. “We shall sing them to the great death.”
Then he shuddered, closed his eyes, and passed out cold. If Adam hadn’t been as quick as he was, he would have fallen all the way to the floor.
“Well,” Adam said, hefting Sherwood’s limp form and striding out to the living room, where he could put him down on the couch. “That was unexpected.”
“Not as unexpected as having him turn into a full-formed whatsit who obliterated a zombie werewolf,” I said.
Adam grinned at me. “That which doesn’t destroy us . . .”
“Leaves us scratching our heads and saying, ‘What’s next?’” I said. “Is he okay?”
Sherwood had already begun to stir.
“Pack bond says he’s fine,” Adam said. “Just worn-out. Maybe another couple of sandwiches?”
I made food—at this rate I was going to have to go shopping again. When I brought the food into the living room and set it on an end table, Sherwood was sitting up again.
He squinted at the food and began to eat like a . . . well, like a ravening wolf.
“I remember that,” he growled. “Whatever that was.” Then he looked a little sick and he quit eating. When he spoke again his voice was soft and uncertain. “Unsettling to have that inside me all this time. To know that it is there, all of it, waiting for me.”
I didn’t think he was talking about his wolf.
“What will come, will come,” Adam said. “That’s enough for now.”
Sherwood gave a derisive half laugh. “Right.”
“You saved the day,” Adam told him firmly. “Let it go.”
“Apparently that is something I’m good at.” Despite the self-directed bitterness of his words, when Sherwood gave another half laugh, this time it was genuine.
“Okay?” Adam asked.
“All right,” Sherwood said. To prove it, he started eating again.
Adam gave me a rueful look. “I planned on matters going a little differently, but I still have to discuss some things with you.” He turned to Sherwood. “And you, too. It feels a little anticlimactic after all of this—” He tipped his head toward the mess that started at the top of the stairway to the upstairs and continued in a trail of interesting stains and broken things down toward the basement. “But it is still important—in the long run, it might be more important.”
I swallowed, because Sherwood wasn’t the only one chowing down. Adam had not eaten—and he should because he’d changed back and forth, fought a zombie werewolf thingie, and healed himself really quickly. “You need to eat,” I told him.
“I ate while you were in the shower,” he said. “I promise.”
I glanced at Sherwood, who raised both eyebrows to Adam but then nodded.
“I’m not doubting his word,” I said with dignity. “But it’s my privilege to make sure while he’s looking out for everyone else that he looks out for himself, too.”
Adam moved the few inches between where he stood and where I sat on a little round ottoman. He leaned down and kissed me.
When he straightened up, he didn’t move away. “So,” he said, “the late-night meetings I’ve been having are the forerunner of meetings between the government and the Gray Lords. No one really expects firm results, but it is the first nonhostile negotiation.”
Sherwood pursed his lips. “So why are you telling just Mercy and me? Why not the whole
pack?”
“Neither of you appears on the list of active members of the Columbia Basin Pack that someone presented to my old friend General Gerald Piotrowski,” Adam said dryly. His voice was especially dry when he said “my old friend.”
“The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” asked Sherwood.
I was impressed that he knew who Piotrowski was. Not many people could tell you who the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was, let alone the vice chairman. And Sherwood was an amnesiac who didn’t remember his own name—unless he was attacked by zombie werewolves, apparently—so in-depth knowledge about the government wasn’t something I’d have expected of him. Heck, I had a degree in history so I was supposed to be interested in things like that, and I didn’t know who the participants on the Joint Chiefs were.
“That’s the one,” agreed Adam. “And factually, it was you, Mercy, and Zack.”
“Someone has an old list of who is in the pack,” I said. “And maybe they missed me because I’m not a werewolf; I shouldn’t be pack, except in an auxiliary sense.” Something chilled in my veins, foreboding maybe. “The group of rogue Cantrip agents that kidnapped the pack in order to make you go assassinate their target had a list, didn’t they?” Last November, at the same time that Frost had been trying to take over Marsilia’s territory.
Adam put a hand on my shoulder and let it rest there. “I think that it’s the same list. I don’t know if they got it from the rogue group, the rogue group got it from them, or someone gave it to both parties.”
“I was,” I said slowly, “under the impression that it was Frost who gave the rogue agents that list.”
Adam gave me a quick nod. “That’s what I thought, too.”
“Is it important where their information came from?” asked Sherwood.
“Not to the immediate discussion,” Adam agreed. “But maybe for later investigation. I’ll see to it that Charles gets word—maybe he can figure it out.”
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