Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(34)

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 house, 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.