Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(13)

I hadn’t realized he had a tattoo at all.

Sherwood had been in our pack about five months and I had never seen the tattoo on his neck that was the size of my hand? It wasn’t even something a high-necked collar could have covered completely—the edge of the tattoo touched his jaw. The button-down shirt he was wearing obviously didn’t hide anything. I tried to remember how Sherwood usually dressed—but I just didn’t pay much attention to what people whose names weren’t Adam wore.

I thought of Uncle Mike’s meaningful look. Had he done something to Sherwood? Or had he seen something about Sherwood that had changed?

I looked at Zack. Did he look real?

Yes. But it didn’t feel any different than usual. Did that mean that Sherwood usually didn’t look real?

While I puzzled over Sherwood, the conversation had lingered a bit on swearing, with Zack leading the conversation. No one laughed, but the tension had died down a bit when Adam returned to the original topic.

“Curiosity aside, I don’t care who you are or were,” he said.

Adam hadn’t been slouching—too many years in the army. But now he straightened further and leaned forward, careful not to cross the edge of the table, which was still serving as a small and only partial barrier between the two dominant wolves. “What I do need to know is what you now mean to the survival of my pack.”

“Because I am more dominant than you are,” Sherwood said, his voice a low rumble. He held up a hand, and when he spoke again, most of the aggression was out of his voice. “Sorry. That has not been established. Let us say that I am too dominant to fit in the space I have occupied in the pack.”

Zack drew in a shivery breath as he finally figured out that this meeting was about something a lot more serious than Sherwood regaining his memory.

Zack hadn’t been briefed by Adam like I had, and Sherwood only felt different in the pack bonds to the Alpha. Having a werewolf in the pack who was, even possibly, more dominant than our Alpha was both unexpected and possibly disastrous. Sherwood, without taking his attention from Adam, put a reassuring hand on Zack’s shoulder.

Adam took a moment before he spoke.

“The pack’s situation is precarious,” Adam said. He glanced at Sherwood and then away. It was a look that human males don’t do much—good werewolf manners, one Alpha to another—equal to equal.

Sherwood nodded slowly, giving Adam the same look-and-away deliberately, completing the acknowledgment of equality that Adam had begun. A step back from the assertion of superiority that both wolves could accept better than mere words. A lot of communication between werewolves was nonverbal. That was why this conversation was happening in person instead of over the phone.

“Everything hangs by a thread the fae have managed to spin here,” Adam told Sherwood. “Not just our pack’s fate or the fate of the peoples—wolves, fae, human, and other—who live here in our territory. It may be the thread that leads the entire world away from the probability of annihilation of whole categories of sentient peoples. We, all of us, stand upon a precipice. If our pack can continue the illusion that this, our home, is a safe place for all, the Gray Lords might manage to negotiate a peace that holds.”

Sherwood’s lips twisted, but it wasn’t a smile, not really. “I hadn’t thought you were that much of an optimist. How many witches have you met that you think peace is possible with them? Vampires? The fae barely look up from assassinating each other.”

He didn’t sound like Sherwood, I thought, but what he said still sounded familiar, like listening to a few lines from an old movie I couldn’t quite place.

“I know you understand what I mean,” Adam said impatiently, his voice a little hoarse with the wolf, though his eyes were still dark. “Isolated violence is different from genocide. A battle is different from a war.”

Sherwood tipped his head in admission. “Yes. But you know and I know that even if the Gray Lords manage to work out some kind of peace—it will not last. The humans are just beginning to remember what their ancestors understood. And they are afraid. In this case, knowledge will not make them less afraid.”

I’d grown up listening to variants on the theme. Sherwood sounded, I thought, like someone who had been watching world events for a very long time, like Bran.

“You think like an immortal,” Adam said, echoing my thoughts. “Of course, peace doesn’t last any more than war does. We”—he waved a hand around in a swirling gesture as if indicating every thinking being on the planet—“tire of peace, eventually. But I know war. And every day I can hold it off is valuable to me, and to its victims.”

“Fighting becomes a habit,” I offered, more to break up the intensity that had developed between Adam and Sherwood again than because I really had something to add. “But so can peace, if you give it time.”

But Adam nodded at me as if my point had been important.

“Peace kills fewer people,” he said. “And if we get a peace that lasts for a century or a decade, it is worth fighting for.”

Sherwood raised an eyebrow at Adam. I frowned at him. There was something about that expression.

Adam nodded. “Fighting for peace—I know how stupid it sounds. I fought in that war, and it didn’t seem to help anyone at all.”

He sighed, took another drink. When Adam spoke again, his words had weight, though he spoke quietly. “I am responsible for my pack. For the lives of those living in my territory. For those I love. That responsibility gives me a duty to strive for peace.”