Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(24)

So instead of explaining, I told them, “Adam said that it wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait for the morning. It had to be early morning so that we could get the whole pack here. You can blame Auriele, who has to be at the high school by seven at the latest. Adam is upstairs if you want to head to the meeting room. He’ll start as soon as everyone gets here.”

“Do you know what this is about?” asked Ben. He took a sip of his coffee and then exploded into expletives that had a couple of the wolves taking out their phones to look up a few of the words he used. He was British, our Ben, and had the foulest mouth I’d ever heard. One didn’t, I was pretty sure, have a lot to do with the other, but both of them occasionally required translations.

“We are holding a meeting,” I pointed out to him when he’d calmed down enough to listen, “so we don’t have to repeat the same stuff over and over as new people come in.”

Sherwood Post opened the door on the end of my sentence with a steaming Starbucks venti cup in one hand.

“Starbucks is open?” asked Luke. “I could have gotten Starbucks?”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t diss my coffee.”

“How’s Pirate?” asked Honey.

Pirate was the one-eyed kitten that Sherwood had rescued. There had been a point at which we had all been certain the kitten wouldn’t make it. But as of last week, he’d been freed from the vet’s tender care.

Sherwood nodded at Honey, which meant that Pirate was fine. Then he looked at me and asked, “What’s up?”

“A meeting,” I told him. “So I don’t have to repeat myself over and over.”

Ben snorted a laugh.

Sherwood looked like a lumberjack in his red flannel shirt and khaki pants. He wore the peg leg today, so he was probably headed to work after this. The foot prosthetic was more expensive and he didn’t like to risk it. He’d just gotten a new prosthetic that looked like a modern artist decided to blend the idea of a foot with a spring. It was more useful and stronger than either of the other two, but he wasn’t comfortable in it yet, so he only wore it at home or at the gym.

No, he hadn’t told me all of that. He still didn’t talk much—but the whole damn pack gossiped about him like a bunch of fond mamas. His facility with magic—when his wolf took over—had resulted in a betting pool about the real identity of our amnesiac pack mate. I had instituted a one-dollar limit per bet, winners split the pot. It currently stood at $187.29.

There was, I had learned from the entries, an entire folklore about old wolves and their deeds that I had been unaware of. Being a history major, I was more than a little grumpy that no one had told me all those stories—but I was learning. I kept the betting book, and before I would write down the name, I made the wolf doing the betting tell me about their candidate for the position. Maybe sometime I’d record all the stories I learned. I couldn’t publish them since a lot of them demonstrated just how dangerous werewolves were—and we were currently trying to soft-pedal that for the humans we lived among so they didn’t decide that the only good werewolf was a dead werewolf. But still . . . someone should write them down.

The choices for Sherwood’s real identity weren’t limited to werewolf legends, though. Five people had put their money on Robin Hood.

If they had been older wolves, I would have been excited, but four of them were from the current generation and the other was, I think, joking. Still, Sherwood Post to Sherwood Forest made a certain amount of symbolic sense. And everyone knew that Robin Hood had lived in Sherwood Forest. So had Little John and Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet. Little John had gotten two dollars. Alan-a-Dale and Will Scarlet one dollar each. No one had put money on Friar Tuck—our Sherwood just didn’t look like the friar type.

As Kelly had pointed out when he handed me his dollar for Robin Hood, Bran seldom did things without reason. When I told him the story I’d had from both Sherwood and Bran, that he’d picked the name because Bran had had a book by Sherwood Anderson and the treatise on manners by Emily Post on his desk, Kelly had snorted.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows that Bran keeps his books in his bookshelves and not on his desk unless he is actively reading. We had that from several different sources. Also, no one has ever seen Bran read Sherwood Anderson, before or since that day.”

I blinked at him. Apparently there had been a lot more serious investigation into Sherwood than I’d been aware of.

Misreading my expression, Kelly backtracked a little. “Elliot knows a couple of wolves from the Marrok’s pack. Luke knows a few more.”

“Might be right,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

Most of what I remembered about Bran’s study had to do with keeping my eyes down and pretending I was sorry (or mystified, if the evidence against me wasn’t strong) for whatever it was Bran was mad at me about. I hadn’t been paying attention to whether he had books on his desk.

Before I took his dollar, though, I told Kelly, “You should know that historians are not sure that Robin Hood was a real person. Or if he was, if he was as significant a figure as the stories about him make it appear.”

Kelly shoved the dollar into my hand and pointed to where three other names were behind “Robin Hood” on my notebook page. “And maybe he was a werewolf,” he said.