Soul Taken

3

I KNEW . . . I knew. But I waited for Sherwood’s response in case I was wrong.

Beside me, Adam quit breathing for a moment, his body tightening like a bowstring. Once I’d pointed it out, he saw it, too.

Bran Cornick, the Marrok, looked like a grad student most of the time, though he was the most powerful werewolf in North America and possibly the world. His firstborn son, Samuel, shared his hair color, but was about eight inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. Bran’s younger son, Charles, took after his Native American mother more than his father’s side of the family.

It was only when the Cornicks were together that it was apparent they were closely related. Their alikeness was subtle, the way they moved, the expressions on their faces—but it was unmistakable. Sherwood looked more like them than they looked like each other.

There were no other Cornicks that I knew of. Bran’s parents were dead. Charles and Samuel were his only surviving children. Samuel had no surviving children. I didn’t know about Charles, but he was half-Salish, and Sherwood showed no signs of having Native heritage. Besides, though Charles was a couple of centuries old, Adam had told me that he thought Sherwood was one of the really old wolves.

“You beat Samuel at chess?” asked Sherwood. I noticed that he didn’t comment about being a Cornick.

“Sometimes,” I answered. Twice was sometimes.

“A Cornick,” said Adam. Only someone who knew him very well would have heard the relief in his voice.

“Does this help?” I asked him. I thought it did, but I wasn’t sure why.

“If he is a Cornick, it might,” Adam answered.

Sherwood half lidded his eyes. That was a Charles-like expression if I’d ever seen one. “If I am?”

“Well, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in the betting pool,” I said, to buy Adam a little time to think. “But Ben will be happy.”

I didn’t understand why I felt relieved that Sherwood was a Cornick rather than any of the scary monsters in the betting book—assuming that being related to Bran meant that Sherwood wasn’t Merlin, King Lycaon, or the Beast of Gévaudan (someone had written “He’s dead, idiots” beside the Beast of Gévaudan in block letters). The problem of Sherwood’s dominance did not just go away because we knew he was related to the Marrok. I knew that it didn’t. But reality apparently didn’t affect how I felt about it.

Adam looked at me. “Ben said that Sherwood is a Cornick?”

“Ben said ‘Bran’s flunky,’ ” I said.

“I am no one’s flunky,” Sherwood growled, sounding so much like Bran that I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t seen it before now.

I paused. How had I missed that resemblance until now?

We’d fought side by side, Sherwood and I. We had bonded sitting way too high up in the air on a freaking huge crane designed to build nuclear power plants in Japan, overlooking the Columbia River in a way I hoped never to see again. And I hadn’t noticed he had a tattoo on his neck? Hadn’t noticed that his eyes were the same hazel as Bran’s? Put like that, the answer was obvious.

Magic.

If I were going to send an amnesiac wolf out into the world, and that wolf was old and powerful enough to have amassed the kinds of enemies that such a one would accumulate, it would be better if everyone didn’t immediately know who he was.

Pack magic is hunter’s magic, very good at stealthy things like camouflage and muting sounds. I wouldn’t have thought that pack magic could have hidden Sherwood’s actual appearance from other werewolves, but Bran was Bran. I was happy to believe that he could figure out a way to use pack magic to hide Sherwood in plain sight. Something that made people not really see him. Something that made him look less real.

Bran had given Sherwood a disguise to protect him from his enemies when he could not protect himself. Magic that had melted away today in Uncle Mike’s, in the halls of a Green Man. I remembered that odd look I’d gotten from Uncle Mike as he gave us privacy, and wondered if it had been on purpose or by accident.

Moreover, thinking about how no one had hinted anything about Sherwood, I was pretty sure that his disguise was not something Bran had done just for Sherwood’s move to our pack. I could see a few old wolves holding their tongue about Sherwood’s real name. But no one who looked at him and also knew Bran could fail to understand what they were looking at. Bran must have disguised Sherwood almost as soon as Sherwood regained his human shape. I couldn’t think of any other way for Bran to keep all the wolves quiet.

“Not a flunky,” agreed Zack, interrupting my racing thoughts. He still had a rapt look on his face, like an acolyte meeting a saint—or maybe a teenager meeting a rock star. “His right hand. His problem solver.” His voice sank to a whisper as his lips curled into a smile. “I have heard stories.”

“You think you know who I am,” Sherwood said.

Zack started to nod but paused and shook his head slowly. “No. Maybe. Maybe not. But I know who you have been. And I heard a story from a wolf who was there, in Northumberland. The strangest thing in the whole business, she said, was that you didn’t have any trouble following the lead of an Alpha a lot less dominant than Adam for a couple of years.”

I glanced at Adam, who shook his head. He didn’t know what Zack was talking about, either. But unlike Adam and me, Zack had reason for his belief that Sherwood’s identity meant we had a path forward without blood being spilled. If Sherwood had managed to be part of a pack without killing the less dominant Alpha, then he could do it again.

Sherwood said with a growl in his voice, “Northumberland was six hundred years ago. At your age, you should know better than to believe stories.”

Zack, who still cringed when the other wolves growled too close to him, gave Sherwood a serene smile. “Stories have power. My friend is—” Here his voice hesitated, and the smile faded. “She was not one to exaggerate.”

“A Cornick,” said Adam. “I think we can manage things differently if you are a Cornick.”

Sherwood glanced at the three of us and shook his head in what looked to me something very like dismay.

“Bran Cornick abandoned you,” he said. “And even if he had not, I am not he. And you have such—” He searched for a word.

“Faith,” I supplied.

“Hope,” Zack offered.

“I’m not going to say ‘charity,’ ” said Adam with amusement. “But yes.”

Sherwood shook his head and raised his arms up in a hopeless gesture. “Being a Cornick is not magical. Trust me, it does not solve any problems.”

“No,” I agreed. “But it solves this kind of problem. There never was a Cornick who couldn’t turn a bad situation to his advantage.” And that was true. They were all, even Samuel, ruthless and focused. “And killing Adam is not to your advantage.”

Silence fell for a moment.

“Point to you,” Sherwood said. He looked at Adam. “Though I don’t know why you are so convinced I’d be able to kill you if I tried. Bran did not think so, or he wouldn’t have sent me here.”

“I know what you are,” Adam said.

“And I know wha—” Sherwood stopped speaking midword. His pupils suddenly enlarged to engulf his irises to the point where his eyes were black with only a thin ring of wolf yellow.

“Magic,” he rasped, surging to his feet so fast that his chair fell on its side.

Adam was a half second behind him. I don’t know when Zack got to his feet, only that all four of us stood for a long minute, alerted by Sherwood’s reaction. But no one made any further move. I couldn’t smell any magic besides Uncle Mike’s, but I trusted Sherwood’s abilities over mine.

Nothing happened.

With my senses expanded for battle, the steady tick of the old-fashioned clock on the wall was annoyingly loud. Zack let out his breath, but no one else relaxed.

Adam, staring intently across the room, said, “By the fireplace.”

I looked, but it didn’t appear any different to me than it always had.

The old stone fireplace took up most of the far wall of the room, maybe twenty feet from where we sat. The gray stone was blackened around the hearth, with soot streaks reaching all the way to the ceiling. It had the appearance of something ancient, something that had been heating this room for centuries, though I knew that the building that housed Uncle Mike’s had been built in the early 1950s.

I inhaled to ask Adam what he’d seen and caught a familiar scent.

“Sulfur,” said Zack.

“Brimstone,” I said. The difference between sulfur and brimstone was not chemical but magical.

Brimstone meant witches. I was, as usual, armed with the cutlass the pack had given me. But I had no intention of getting that close to a witch if I could help it. I pulled my carry gun. I held the 1911 in a two-handed grip, keeping it pointed at the floor until I had a better target. It took an effort to keep my hands steady, and I found it uncomfortably hard to breathe.

I wasn’t ready to face witches again.

I didn’t have nightmares every day anymore, but there were still nights when I had to drive to the burnt-out remains of Elizaveta’s home to see where the witches had died before I could go back to sleep. Last Friday there had been a For Sale sign next to the driveway. I wondered if I had a moral obligation to tell someone just how many dead bodies—some of them human—were buried there. I was sure that no one would ever find the ones Zee had buried, but I had the feeling that the witches wouldn’t have done quite so thorough a job of it.

Adam had his gun drawn, too. I hadn’t been paying attention to see when he’d drawn it. Zack had a knife as long as his forearm. The only one who wasn’t obviously holding a weapon was Sherwood, but a werewolf is never really unarmed. At that point I finally noticed what Adam had seen, a slight stirring over the blackened remains of the last fire someone had lit.

“I see smoke,” Zack said, “but nothing is burning.”

We could have rushed over, but Adam was staying put. We all waited beside him, almost like we were a team and Adam was our Alpha. I could feel the pack bonds rise and settle around us in preparation for battle. Sherwood felt to me as he always felt. The bonds thought Adam was the Alpha, too.

Black smoke began to trickle out of the firebox mouth, then flowed out and down, as if it were a little heavier than the air around it. The cloud of smoke ebbed and writhed in reaction to something—at first I thought it was just the invisible air currents in the room. But gradually it gathered in a rough circle on the battered floor in front of the hearth, a purposeful shape. As more smoke entered the room, the circling darkness grew higher and more dense, forming a rough cylindrical shape that stretched up until it was as tall as the big mantelpiece that topped the fireplace.

Then she stepped out of the smoke.

She was clothed from head to foot in black, like the charcoal color of the smoke. There was some magic about that, too, because my first impression was that she was wearing a Victorian era widow’s dress complete with lace veil and feathered hat. But when I blinked, the clothes were made of smoke that wrapped around her like black velvet. The big ostrich feather drifted off into nothingness around the edges.

The brimstone blunted the effectiveness of my nose, and the smoke blurred the edges of her body. I could not tell who or what she was until she reached up with hands covered in black tatted lace—or lacelike smoke—and pulled the veil up to reveal Marsilia, Mistress of our local vampire seethe.

There was something different about her. Her eyes were closed, and the golden glory of her hair was veiled. Against the blackness, her flawless features could have been made of porcelain rather than flesh. Arched brows so pale that they were almost invisible teamed with the high cheekbones to frame her closed eyes.

She usually darkened her brows and her lashes, I thought, though makeup was generally the last thing I noticed about anyone. But the effect of all that paleness was startling, and not at all the impression she usually made. I caught a glimpse of something just below her jaw—a dark mark. A wound, maybe. But before I could be certain, the smoke drifted up her neck again. Something about the too-white face and the encircling darkness reminded me of a porcelain death mask.

She looked vulnerable.

Marsilia didn’t do vulnerable. And this dramatic entrance was unlike her, too. She could do drama, but this was drama without a point. We all knew her, knew that she was scary—so why the smoke and brimstone?

I tried to tamp down my adrenaline as I coughed to clear my throat. There was no need to overreact.

Marsilia was our ally. She was not a witch. Though she was scary, and she disliked me, she did not feature in my current nightmares. And still, staring at that pale, perfect face, I did not put my gun away. This was not like her, and that worried me.

Marsilia was an old vampire, and old vampires, like most old supernatural creatures, picked up talents and bits of magic throughout their lives. Marsilia could teleport. I hadn’t known that she could do this smoke-thingy, and I didn’t know why she’d bothered. Surely if she were trying to be scary, teleporting directly in was as scary as anything else she could have done.

Maybe she’d figured out who Sherwood was, too, and this show was for him. She was old; maybe she’d known all along who he was and had been waiting for us to figure it out.

She stood with her eyes closed for as much as three seconds. No one spoke because Adam did not. I’d have thought that seeing Marsilia would have lessened his tension—Marsilia and he liked each other—but it didn’t seem to.

Without opening her eyes, she pulled the veil back down to hide her face again. Only with her face behind the black smokey lace did she turn her head fully toward us. I saw the glint of something that might have been her eyes, though it was more red than brown.

“Where is my Wulfe?” she asked.

For a second I thought she was speaking about one of our pack—none of whom belonged to her. Then I realized she was talking about her second. W-U-L-F-E, not W-O-L-F.

Wulfe was a very old vampire, older than Marsilia. He was witchborn and a wizard, which meant that he wielded two entirely unrelated forms of magic in addition to whatever magical power just being an old vampire brought him. He was also bug-nuts. The combination of power and unpredictability made him the single scariest vampire I’d ever met—and I’d met Iacopo Bonarata, who ruled Europe.

Lately Wulfe had been stalking me.

“How should we know? He belongs to you,” I said, my voice sounding weirdly normal amid all the theater. “I haven’t seen him since last Thursday.”

He’d been standing just on the other side of the glass when I looked up while I was doing dishes, startling me into dropping a Pyrex baking dish on the edge of the sink. He’d been gone when I looked back up from the disaster of sharp glass in dirty dishwater. That was the last time I’d seen him.

Two days later he left a gift for me on Adam’s and my bed, a very long, green silk belt embroidered with phoenixes from one end to the other. Between every seven birds was the word “Ardeo.”

It was old. Very old.

Google translated the Latin as “I burn.” It was, apparently, meant to be taken in an erotic way and not as an offer to turn oneself into a pile of ashes. I didn’t think it was magical—it didn’t have the feel that the fae artifacts had. But Wulfe had left it on my bed, so I figured all bets were off.

Presently it was stored in our weapons safe until I figured out what to do about it.

More worrying than having custody of such a thing was how it got onto our bed. Adam had been unable to determine how Wulfe had entered the house unnoticed.

While it was true that vampires (among a few other supernatural creatures, according to their nature) could not enter a home without invitation, Wulfe had been brought inside when unconscious while everyone involved had been too exhausted and battered to make better choices.

Even so, our house was filled with werewolves. A vampire shouldn’t have been able to traipse around unnoticed. Especially since Adam’s pillow had been pulled out from under the covers and noticeably—probably deliberately noticeably—dented, as if Wulfe had lain beside the belt for a while.

It had been the second time Wulfe had made it up to our bedroom without anyone seeing him. The first time he’d just left a note covered with heart stickers, the kind kindergartners put on Valentine’s Day cards.

That’s when I’d asked Joel and his wife to move out and take Aiden—our fire-touched rescue boy—with them in case Joel wasn’t able to control his tibicena.

“Because of Wulfe?” Joel had asked.

“Because I don’t like the way Wulfe treats Aiden like a threat,” I told him bluntly. I hadn’t told him I was just as afraid for Joel, because that wouldn’t have been useful.

Joel had packed up his wife and Aiden and moved out. That reduced the people living in our home to Adam, me, and Adam’s daughter, Jesse. I was pretty sure Wulfe viewed Jesse as a noncombatant in our current weird stalker dance, leaving only Adam and me as targets.

But I wasn’t going to tell Marsilia all of that. Primarily because if Wulfe could waltz in and out of our home, I wasn’t going to advertise it to the enemy. Ally. Frenemy.

“You have seen him,” she said to me. “All know that Wulfe hunts the Columbia Basin Pack Alpha’s mate.”

Her words were formal, almost stylized. This was the Mistress of the seethe speaking, and it sounded like a threat to me. I just wasn’t sure what kind of threat.

Marsilia’s attention lingered on me a moment, but I wasn’t going to say anything until we knew more about what was going on. This time I was sure that it was a red glint I saw behind the black smokey lace. I’d seen vampires with eyes that glowed like that—they’d been very hungry. It made me glad she was all the way on the other side of the room.

I wondered if she was wearing the veil to hide her eyes or to protect us from her gaze. I was (mostly) immune to vampire magics, but Adam and Zack were not. I didn’t know about Sherwood. Marsilia had captured Samuel with her gaze once, so I didn’t assume Sherwood was safe.

Marsilia took a step closer to us, the smoke following her like a black wedding train. “There has been peace between us,” she said.

“Yes,” Adam agreed, his stance changing a little, Alpha werewolf speaking to the Mistress of the seethe.

“We have come together to keep this territory safe from other predators,” she said.

“Yes,” Adam agreed.

Supernatural beings in confrontational, or semi-confrontational, interactions tended to restate the obvious. I thought it was to make everything absolutely clear so that if death resulted, it would not be by misunderstanding.

“All know my Wulfe has been oft at your door of late,” she said. The archaic wording was unusual. Marsilia, like my friend Stefan (who was also an old Italian vampire), had mostly kept her Italian accent, but otherwise she spoke colloquial American English.

“He’s been stalking me, yes,” I agreed dryly.

“And now he is gone,” she said. “Others say that he is dead and your pack at fault. Adam Hauptman, if you would keep our alliance, you will find my Wulfe, prove he is not dead.” She might have invoked Adam’s name, but the hairs on the back of my neck were certain that she was still looking at me, no matter how much that veil hid.

“Wulfe’s a vampire,” said Sherwood, speaking for the first time. “He’s already dead.”

Sherwood distracted her from me. She looked at him, tipping her head sideways in a motion more wolf than vampire. I wasn’t sure how to read that. Maybe without the subtle disguise Bran had given Sherwood, she, too, recognized him.

But it was a brief pause. She looked squarely at Adam, and he tensed under her regard, even though her veil was now almost opaque.

I gripped Adam’s wrist, leaving my gun in my left hand. I could shoot left-handed, though not as well as with my right or in a proper two-handed grip. Sometimes I could extend my limited immunity to vampire magic to someone by touching them. And keeping Adam free of Marsilia’s influence was more important than whether or not I could hit the side of a barn.

Adam growled, a low rumbling in his chest. He twisted his hand until it closed over mine, so we stood hand in hand.

Marsilia didn’t seem to notice.

“If you do not find Wulfe, all will know what happened to him,” she said, sounding suddenly tired. Her next words were rushed, a little more like her usual self, though the word choice was still off. “All will know that you prey upon your allies. Upon those who count upon your support. There will be war between your pack and the vampires.”

She disappeared, smoke and all, with the suddenness that I was more used to from her. Almost in the same breath, Uncle Mike opened the door, taking three quick steps into the room with the attitude of a sheepdog scenting wolves. I thought I caught a glimpse of a blade in his right hand, but his body blocked my line of sight. When he turned to us, there was no sword in sight except for the cutlass hanging from my belt.

“My apologies, Adam,” Uncle Mike said. “I’d not have thought any enemy could have trespassed my wards here in the heart of my home.”

“Marsilia isn’t our enemy,” said Adam in a thoughtful voice, holstering his gun. “Not yet, anyway.”

When we exited the building, I heard Uncle Mike turn the lock. The big new sign had been turned off, along with the rest of the building’s exterior lights. There was a staff lot on the other side of the building, so our vehicles were the only ones left in the main parking lot. I checked my phone—and yes, it was that late.

We didn’t discuss Marsilia’s visit. We were on Uncle Mike’s ground; whatever we said would probably be overheard. Adam hadn’t told Uncle Mike much about Marsilia’s visit—just that she had brought us a message. If that message turned out to have larger implications, Adam would share it with Uncle Mike.

Uncle Mike hadn’t pushed the issue.

Sherwood was parked near the entrance. The parking lot had been mostly full when Adam and I had arrived, so we were parked near the back of the lot, the black SUV blending in with the shadows where the parking lot lights didn’t extend. A maroon Subaru Outback was parked near us, presumably Warren’s new car.

We were almost to the SUV when Sherwood, who’d stopped by his car, said, “Adam.”

We—Adam, Zack, and I—turned to look at him.

Sherwood stood with one big hand on the top of his car and the other on the open door. He was not looking at us, his gaze turned back toward Uncle Mike’s.

“I know who and what I was,” he said heavily. “But there are a lot of holes in my memory. Zack is correct that for the better part of two years, six hundred years ago in Northumberland, I ran as second in a pack with an Alpha who was not as strong as Warren is. But I do not remember why it was necessary or how I did it.”

A train rolled by on tracks that were less than a half mile away.

“It can be done,” Adam said. “Are you willing to try?”

“It can be done,” Sherwood agreed. He gave Adam a half smile. “I don’t want to fight you for the pack. I am not convinced I would win—but I think that we would damage each other and our fight would damage the pack. I will see what I can do. But in the meantime, you should help me keep clear of Darryl and Warren—because the pack sense is that I am the fourth male in the pack.”

He had been steadily rising in the ranks, without violence, since he’d joined us. As an old wolf, he should be tradition-bound, but he still chose to add “male” into his statement—a recognition that our females held rank, too. And furthermore, that their ranking was complicated, caught as it was between tradition and reality.

“Yes,” Adam acknowledged.

“That will only last until Darryl, Warren, and I are in the same room for an extended period of time. Changing the organization of the pack without purpose is not a good idea.”

Adam and Sherwood exchanged a brief, rueful glance.

The stability of the pack was the key to werewolf survival. A stable pack helped the individual pack members stay in control of their wolves. Unstable packs resulted in wolf and human casualties. Human casualties scared people. Frightened people came hunting with pitchforks, guns—and in our modern era, more lethal weapons. Weapons that could kill even werewolves.

Our pack needed to be more stable than most to survive the pressures we were putting on it. Which is why Sherwood had to stay away from Darryl and Warren—to avert running into a situation when the confusion about where he belonged in the pack might force a fight.

“You don’t need to avoid me?” Adam asked.

Sherwood considered it. Then he shook his head. “You know,” he said. “Our talk tonight seems to have made a difference.” He glanced at me with a frown. “Or something did, anyway.” He made a fist and touched his own chest. “The beast is willing to bide its time. I think that we can work together safely. For now.”

He got into his car and the rest of us watched him drive away. Only when his taillights were a block down the road did Zack take out the Subaru fob and unlock Warren’s new car with a beep.

Adam caught the driver side door before Zack could close it. “Is there anything I should know about Sherwood that you know?”

Zack said, “Most people think that wolf in Northumberland was Samuel, you know? But Samuel’s a white wolf and the wolf in my friend’s stories was gray.”

Adam nodded as though Zack had answered his question.

“What happened?” I asked. “I don’t know the story.”

“Sorcerer,” Zack said. “Man made a deal with a demon, but this one stayed in control longer than most—and he paid attention to what victims he took. People who didn’t draw notice—whores, the sick, the very poor. Was active for a long time, a little over a century, as my friend figured it.”

“A century?” I asked. “Was the sorcerer a werewolf?”

He shook his head. “Hid himself in a monastery. Made him difficult to find. Especially as he fed the demon sparingly.” Zack raised an eyebrow in irony. “Power of the spirit over flesh was something those monks practiced, apparently. He wasn’t anyone important. He wasn’t after power or wealth. He just didn’t want to die. And the demon kept him from doing so.”

Zack smiled wryly. “He’d have been better off a werewolf. Any human who could control a demon for a century would have made a good werewolf.”

“No one hunted him,” Adam said, “because he wasn’t causing trouble.”

Zack nodded. “Not for a while. Eventually his kills started getting more public. And they looked like animal kills.”

“Framing the pack,” I suggested.

“Or possibly losing control,” Adam said.

Zack tipped his head toward Adam. “That’s what they thought.”

Zack looked at me. “We don’t get sorcerers much anymore. There aren’t a lot of people who believe in demons.”

“We had a run-in with one a couple years before you got here,” Adam told him. “A vampire.”

Zack’s eyes grew wide. “Nasty.”

Adam nodded. “We handled it, as it happens. But the Marrok showed up in case we needed him.”

“They didn’t have something like the Marrok in those days,” said Zack, then he smiled. “Well, I suppose they must have done, given that Sherwood came to help. They just didn’t know it, eh? My friend told me she thought Sherwood was just some wolf, joined their pack and lay low for a while. Called himself Jack Hedley, which was a common surname around those parts. But when the pack started actively hunting the sorcerer, he took point. He’s the one who figured out that the sorcerer was living in the monastery. He organized night patrols that ran the area around the monastery. After a few months, the patrol came upon a kill.”

In a faraway voice, which held enough horror that I was fairly sure that, though he hadn’t been present for this one, he’d seen something similar enough to picture the scene quite clearly, he said, “Some little boy, maybe two years old. They later found he’d been abandoned at the monastery for care.”

There was a short pause as Zack collected his thoughts.

“Their Alpha had been leading the night’s patrol when they heard the cries. He was fast and he had a little boy about that age. He outstripped the pack and got there before the others. If the monk had been purely human, he’d have died with a werewolf’s fangs lodged in his neck.”

“But he rode a demon,” Adam said.

Zack nodded, but said, “The demon was doing the riding by the time the rest of the pack got there, she said. Just finished boiling the skin off their Alpha and in the process of burning him from the inside out. He was still screaming while most of his body was already ashes. My friend, she was an old wolf when I knew her, and she told me it was the most horrible thing she’d ever seen.”

By now it was obvious that Zack was avoiding giving a name to the friend who’d told him the story. There were a lot of reasons for things like that, and good werewolf manners meant not asking.

“There they were.” Zack’s voice was a bit dreamy. “This pack of werewolves surrounding a little old man in the robes of a monk, and they were too scared to move. And then Jack Hedley stepped out of the shadows. He hadn’t even been on patrol that night. She never did find out how he knew where to be. He wasn’t even in wolf form, but he called a challenge to the sorcerer.

“She thought he was a dead wolf, no joke. But she was near enough the edge of the pack to try working her way around through the shadows, hoping to get behind that old monk, see? She had a burning need to kill him for what he’d done, though she figured to lose her own life in the process. But she had to get close to him to do it.

“The sorcerer sent green lightning out of his hands to strike old Jack down. It hit him right enough—and caused no damage. Jack took everything the demon-ridden monk had to throw and just stood there. When the demon stopped, Jack smiled at him and turned into a beast.”

Zack looked at Adam and nodded, as if in answer to a question. “I haven’t seen the beast you carry, but if the description you gave is accurate, it’s not the same thing at all. This was a wolf—twice the size of a normal werewolf. Only this Jack, he changed like Mercy changes, between one eyeblink and the next.”

He took a breath and closed his eyes, and when he spoke, it was obvious that he was reciting someone else’s words. “A storm rose from the ground, tearing up rocks and hunks of earth, flinging them into the air. We wolves, we flattened ourselves in fear and wonder as the Great Beast fought the demon, not with teeth and claw but with magic meeting magic. The air crackled with it, and lightning rained down as though the end were nigh. Four of us died—three were lightning struck and the other was just dead with no sign of what killed him. And when it was over, the demon having been driven from his host, Jack stepped from the Great Beast as if he were throwing off a winter coat and snapped the monk’s neck.”

Zack shrugged. When he continued, the words were in his own voice. “That’s the end of it. Jack left. Another Alpha took over. The monk was dead. Another monk found his body with the poor child, and the monastery decided God and his angels had struck the man down for his wickedness while wearing the cross. One of the wolves in her pack swore he’d seen Jack before, called him Cornick. My friend knew Bran—and Samuel, too, for that matter. She thought that other wolf was right, but she never managed to find out just who he was.”

“The Great Beast of Northumberland is in the betting book,” I said. I hadn’t been able to get anyone to tell me the story of the Great Beast, even though three people had bet on it. None of those had been Zack.

“Maybe Sherwood should go through the betting book,” Zack suggested.

I grinned at him. “That should be interesting.”

Zack made to shut his door again.

“One more thing,” Adam asked.

Zack waited.

“Is there something I should know about Warren?”

Zack hesitated, then shook his head. “Nothing that’s my place to speak of. Not right now.”

“There is something?” I said anxiously.

Zack smiled at me. “He’s smart. If he needs help, he’ll ask for it.”

Adam was quiet on the way home. I didn’t say much, either. It was late, I had a pumpkin-induced headache, and Zack had just given us a lot to think about. But the biggest take-home of the night was the message Marsilia had given us. I wished I was sure what that message really was.

Adam was probably doing the same thing without the headache. I treated myself to a pause in my deliberations so that I could enjoy the play of the dashboard lights on my mate’s face. Werewolves don’t age, but I still thought he looked older than he had a few months ago.

The witches had inflicted some deep internal wounds. The poison had been drawn, but there were still scabs and scars that remained, exacerbating his already infamous temper. He worried about the monster Elizaveta had cursed him with. His cheekbones were sharper, and there were hollows under his eyes.

He caught my look and grinned suddenly. “Like what you see?” he asked.

Adam had anti-vanity. He knew he was gorgeous, and though he was happy to use it as a weapon, it didn’t much affect him otherwise. I suspected it embarrassed him.

Not wanting to tell him that I’d been assessing rather than admiring (primarily assessing, anyway), I pressed my face against his shoulder. I closed my eyes and inhaled, feeling my headache abate just a little.

“I love you,” I told him. “I know we have a lot on our plate again, but I’d like to take this moment to tell you that I’m glad you and Sherwood don’t have to fight.”

“Maybe,” he cautioned.

“You’ll figure it out,” I said confidently. I was a little surprised that I was able to be so confident. I suspected it was because we had another disaster on our hands for me to worry about.

What had Marsilia meant with that performance? It wasn’t out of character for her, just out of character for her with us. She knew that it wouldn’t impress us the way it would impress someone who didn’t know her. So what had it accomplished that a normal meeting would not have?

She had left us no openings to question her, and I had a lot of questions. How did she know Wulfe was gone? Where was the last place she’d seen him? What was she hiding with her veil and the brimstone? Why had she needed to hide her eyes?

The brimstone was particularly interesting because it meant we couldn’t smell anything but the brimstone: not emotions, not whether she was telling the truth, and not any incriminating scents like blood, either. It was possible that the brimstone could have been part of the magic she’d used to create the smoke effects and not an attempt to mask scents. Possibly she’d used it for both reasons.

I didn’t think she had used the brimstone to lie. I couldn’t use my sense of smell to tell me that, but my instincts were that she was telling the absolute truth. So far as it went.

“Did she not want us to believe her?” I asked when Adam turned onto our road. “I mean, I think she was telling the truth—it had that feel. But the brimstone, the smoke, the veil are all the kinds of things the vampires use to confuse the issue.”

“I think,” Adam said slowly, “that Wulfe is missing, and she needs us to find him. I am sure that the theatrics were partially to clue us in that there are other things at play, possibly things she can’t tell us.”

“Like maybe someone is going to question her?” I asked.

“Or has forbidden her to tell us,” he agreed.

“Bonarata?” I asked, and didn’t like the quiver in my voice at all. Bonarata, Marsilia’s maker, was the only one I could think of who could possibly make Marsilia do his bidding.

Adam reached out and gripped my hand.

“Last I heard he was still in Italy,” he said. “But my information is a couple of weeks old. I’ll check again. I think that you are looking at the right scale. Someone powerful enough to get Marsilia’s tail in a twist, and possibly to capture or manipulate Wulfe.”

I shivered.

“It’s not time to panic yet,” he told me. “Marsilia thinks we can make a difference. She’s not stupid, and she understands power games. We’ll start with Wulfe and work our way to Marsilia’s real problem. It is possible that there are just things she didn’t want to tell us. Marsilia is not beyond being manipulative for her own ends.”

“Keep an open mind?” I said.

He smiled at me. “Usually works better at this stage of the game.”