Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(20)

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.”