Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(12)

Sherwood looked at Adam a moment, not quite long enough to initiate active conflict. Then he looked away, sighed audibly, and relaxed his shoulders a degree or two.

With a quirk of his lips and a touch of showmanship, he filled his own glass. As if it were fine wine in a crystal goblet instead of battered barware, he brought the drink to his nose and inhaled. He sipped it, working his mouth as if rolling it on his tongue.

The room’s dim lights caught his hazel eyes. I couldn’t recall if I had noticed what color his eyes were before. Which was a little odd, now that I thought about it.

“Nothing magical,” Sherwood said, a not-so-subtle reminder that he was adept with some sort of magic.

He took a second drink. “Not magical anymore, I should have said. They’ve purified it somehow.”

He put the glass down deliberately, as if putting an end to the theater. Adam glanced at Zack and me, then nodded his head toward the pitcher.

Zack and I each filled our glasses and drank. The water could have been out of a sewer and I wouldn’t have noticed, not just then. I swallowed quickly and set the glass down. Zack took his time. No one spoke until he put his glass down, too.

“Just about two weeks ago, something happened to you,” Adam said in the same conversational tone that he’d used to talk about the water. “I felt it in the pack bonds as you came back into your power. As if a firework sparkler turned into a fusion bomb. Quite extraordinary.”

Even now when I sought Sherwood through the pack bonds, he felt the same as he always had. Adam thought Sherwood was doing something that kept me and all the pack unaware of his true power. Either Sherwood had not bothered to hide what he’d become from Adam—or he couldn’t hide himself from the Alpha of his pack. I thought it was the latter.

“Something died,” Sherwood said. He gave a brief, unhappy smile. “You could ask Charles about that if you’d like to. I heard that he was in the right place when it died, but I haven’t talked to him about it.”

“Something?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Something. Someone. An old foe. By its death, it released me.”

It wasn’t the time for stories now. I’d call Anna and see if she knew anything.

“You remember yourself,” Adam murmured.

“Yes,” agreed Sherwood, in an equally quiet voice.

“I gave you time to come to me,” Adam said. “But you didn’t. For the sake of the pack, I could not let it lie any longer.”

Danger scented the air, a sharp, almost storm-front quality that was as much possibility as odor. I couldn’t tell if it was my nose warning me or the pack bonds.

“I understand,” Sherwood said. “My identity is a problem.”

“I don’t care who you are,” Adam said heavily, “or were.”

“He’s not Shakespeare,” I said cheerfully into the heavy threat gathering. “He told me so.”

Briefly a smile lightened my mate’s face. “There will be several of the pack disappointed.”

“Six,” I said. “Including Sherwood. They might have won two hundred and four dollars and eighty-three cents, split between them.”

“Life is about disappointment,” murmured Zack. “Who keeps putting pennies in? What do you do if they win?”

I had a plan for that, but Sherwood interrupted me before I got the first word out.

“You don’t care who I am?” asked Sherwood, sounding . . . not distrustful exactly. If Adam had lied, we’d all have heard it.

“I don’t have any money in the betting pool,” Adam said mildly. “And I’m curious. But who you were doesn’t matter for the pack’s welfare.”

“Darned curious,” I said confidentially, bumping Adam’s shoulder very lightly with mine.

I had been raised by werewolves. I knew how to manage them. The key to keeping two dominant wolves from killing each other was to keep things from getting confrontational. Zack and I were both working to lighten the atmosphere, our voices reminding Adam and Sherwood that this was not a duel and not a fight. Not yet.

To that end I continued, “Maybe even expletive-deleted curious. Starts with an ‘f’ and isn’t ‘firetruck.’ But he won’t say so in front of me.”

That Adam wouldn’t swear in front of me had become, fairly recently, a matter of some hilarity in the pack. A few of them were trying to get him to swear on purpose. That’s how I learned that Adam apparently swore a great deal—rivaling our pack execration champion, Ben—when there weren’t any females in the room. When I’d confronted him, he’d blamed his time in the military.

Adam didn’t look at me, but I caught the edge of his dimple peeking out, as if he’d thought I’d been funny. Proof that he wasn’t as annoyed with the pack antics as he pretended—and also that his nerves were titanium.

This could go so wrong, and there were very few ways it could go right. Which disaster came to pass depended on Sherwood, and I didn’t know who this Sherwood was.

He wasn’t paying attention to me, so it was safe to examine him. I stared at him as if my eyes could take his surface and read the depths. Sherwood’s eyes really were hazel—almost green. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed them before.

There was a black tattoo on the side of his neck, a tattoo that was so old it was hard to discern anything about it other than that it had probably not been done with a modern technique. That made sense because werewolves are hard to tattoo, but if they have ink work done before they are Changed, it stays with them.