Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

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.

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.