It saw me and lunged. Adam grabbed the dead wolf by its shoulder and ripped it (literally, because its claws were dug into the carpet) away from me. The creature fell all the way to the foot of the stairs and . . .

Magic hit me, as it had earlier this morning when the goblin had flung his magic around. This power surged from the bottom of my feet and traveled up my body in a shock so hard that for an instant, every muscle in my body locked up with painful intensity in a giant, hellish charley horse–like cramp and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, couldn’t think. When that subsided and I drew in a first, panicked breath, I smelled ozone, as if I’d been too close to a lightning strike.

I collapsed in a heap on the ground and my body vibrated to even more magic, gentler magic this time that my senses wanted to interpret as music, a wild wailing sound of grief and rage echoing through my flesh and not my ears.

And then it was over. I scrambled instinctively to my feet—the floor is a terrible place to be in a fight. Adam stuck his side against me so that I didn’t go right back down to the floor.

The last I’d seen Adam, his body had been poised to follow the zombie down the stairs. Evidently my weird reaction had kept him upstairs.

“I don’t know,” I told his worried eyes breathlessly. “Some big magic.” I rubbed my arms.

There was a scraping noise from the basement.

We both looked down the stairs, but the zombie was nowhere to be seen—though I could certainly still smell him. There was a puddle of the same foul, squishy liquid muck that Peter’s sword had extracted in the carpet at the foot of the stairs. Something big had been dragged through it.

“Sherwood?” I called.

The sound of his growl should have reassured me.

Adam’s ears flattened. He glanced at me.

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

So I waited while my mate went down the stairs to see what had happened.

      5

   Sherwood growled again. This time it was a pained sound that had elements of human vocal cords in it. He had been all the way wolf when I’d seen him, not five minutes ago.

Adam, out of view, didn’t make any noise at all. And a wave of magic rolled over me again. I always had trouble with heavy magic use, but it seemed to me that my reaction to it was getting worse over time. That, or I was just being exposed to more powerful magic users.

As soon as I could stand up, I took a deep breath and decided I was done waiting. I traveled cautiously down the stairs. The bottom two were wet with repulsive goo from the original barrier that we, Adam and I between us, had brought down. But beyond a certain squick factor because I was barefoot, I didn’t pay much attention to that. What I saw in the room stopped me cold, right in the middle of the gooey spot.

Adam had paused about halfway across the room, presumably for the same reason I had.

At the far end of the room, where the shadows were deepest even in the middle of the day, was a giant beanbag chair. Beanbag chairs were one of the few pieces of furniture that were equally comfortable for wolf and human, so we had a few scattered around the room.

The remains of the zombie wolf were laid on the chair as if his comfort mattered. The dead werewolf looked lifeless, really dead and going to stay that way. Sherwood knelt on the floor next to the beanbag. He was a mess. I’d heard his human voice amid the wolf, and his body was like that, caught halfway back to human in a way I’d never seen before. He was stuck in a bizarre mismatch of human and wolf limbs and features that looked incredibly painful and completely unsustainable. If his outside was so wrong, I couldn’t imagine what his internal organs looked like.

But he had two human-shaped hands resting on top of the pile of hide-covered bones. Sherwood’s eyes—golden, feral eyes—tracked from Adam to me and back.

Adam sat on the ground where he was, all the way down, belly to the floor. I’d have sat down, too, but there was a deep puddle of goo under my bare feet. I hoped that the combination of how much less of a threat I was than Adam and the fact that I was farther away would be enough to make my presence not an issue for Sherwood.

Sherwood apparently agreed with me. He watched Adam for a moment more, then, satisfied that we would leave him to his work, he turned his attention to the dead-again werewolf.

And he sang.

The words were mangled by the caught-between-change shape of his mouth, but he was pitch-perfect and the song ruffled the hair on the back of my neck and broke my heart with its magic-carried grief.

We waited where we were, Adam and I, while the scent of black magic dissipated. The scent, the feeling of black magic, lingers for a long time, years or even decades. But the dead wolf and the basement—and me and even my unholy rank-smelling hair—were all being cleansed as Sherwood sang.

I don’t know what Adam could feel, but it seemed to me as if magic swept out from Sherwood and washed over us all. I couldn’t tell what kind of magic it was—a rarity for me. It just felt like Sherwood, masculine and reserved, werewolf and gruffly kind. Not werewolf magic—that’s another thing altogether. This was something . . . more primal. More wild. And I didn’t think there was a thing more wild than pack magic.

As I observed Sherwood grieving over this werewolf who had been a zombie, I thought about the power of what he was doing. Of what I’d felt course through me.

I thought about how Sherwood had ended up in our pack, sent by the Marrok who had ruled us all and now ruled all of the werewolves except for our pack. And how short a period of time lay between when Sherwood got here and when those ties had been cut.

I thought of what I knew of Sherwood, whose voice was so beautiful that tears coursed down my cheeks from his sorrow when I could not even understand the words of the song he sang. But I knew the music’s content because its intent was made magically clear.

Bran, the Marrok, had rescued Sherwood from a witch’s coven that the Seattle wolves had uncovered. Sherwood had been missing a leg that nothing could help him regenerate and no trace of memory that predated his stay with the witches. He hadn’t really answered me about how much of his captivity he remembered when I asked him when we’d headed into the witch’s house earlier today.

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.