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.”
By now it was obvious that Zack was avoiding giving a name to the friend who’d told him the story. There were a lot of reasons for things like that, and good werewolf manners meant not asking.
“There they were.” Zack’s voice was a bit dreamy. “This pack of werewolves surrounding a little old man in the robes of a monk, and they were too scared to move. And then Jack Hedley stepped out of the shadows. He hadn’t even been on patrol that night. She never did find out how he knew where to be. He wasn’t even in wolf form, but he called a challenge to the sorcerer.
“She thought he was a dead wolf, no joke. But she was near enough the edge of the pack to try working her way around through the shadows, hoping to get behind that old monk, see? She had a burning need to kill him for what he’d done, though she figured to lose her own life in the process. But she had to get close to him to do it.
“The sorcerer sent green lightning out of his hands to strike old Jack down. It hit him right enough—and caused no damage. Jack took everything the demon-ridden monk had to throw and just stood there. When the demon stopped, Jack smiled at him and turned into a beast.”
Zack looked at Adam and nodded, as if in answer to a question. “I haven’t seen the beast you carry, but if the description you gave is accurate, it’s not the same thing at all. This was a wolf—twice the size of a normal werewolf. Only this Jack, he changed like Mercy changes, between one eyeblink and the next.”
He took a breath and closed his eyes, and when he spoke, it was obvious that he was reciting someone else’s words. “A storm rose from the ground, tearing up rocks and hunks of earth, flinging them into the air. We wolves, we flattened ourselves in fear and wonder as the Great Beast fought the demon, not with teeth and claw but with magic meeting magic. The air crackled with it, and lightning rained down as though the end were nigh. Four of us died—three were lightning struck and the other was just dead with no sign of what killed him. And when it was over, the demon having been driven from his host, Jack stepped from the Great Beast as if he were throwing off a winter coat and snapped the monk’s neck.”
Zack shrugged. When he continued, the words were in his own voice. “That’s the end of it. Jack left. Another Alpha took over. The monk was dead. Another monk found his body with the poor child, and the monastery decided God and his angels had struck the man down for his wickedness while wearing the cross. One of the wolves in her pack swore he’d seen Jack before, called him Cornick. My friend knew Bran—and Samuel, too, for that matter. She thought that other wolf was right, but she never managed to find out just who he was.”
“The Great Beast of Northumberland is in the betting book,” I said. I hadn’t been able to get anyone to tell me the story of the Great Beast, even though three people had bet on it. None of those had been Zack.
“Maybe Sherwood should go through the betting book,” Zack suggested.