Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson 12)

Sherwood nodded at Honey, which meant that Pirate was fine. Then he looked at me and asked, “What’s up?”

“A meeting,” I told him. “So I don’t have to repeat myself over and over.”

Ben snorted a laugh.

Sherwood looked like a lumberjack in his red flannel shirt and khaki pants. He wore the peg leg today, so he was probably headed to work after this. The foot prosthetic was more expensive and he didn’t like to risk it. He’d just gotten a new prosthetic that looked like a modern artist decided to blend the idea of a foot with a spring. It was more useful and stronger than either of the other two, but he wasn’t comfortable in it yet, so he only wore it at home or at the gym.

No, he hadn’t told me all of that. He still didn’t talk much—but the whole damn pack gossiped about him like a bunch of fond mamas. His facility with magic—when his wolf took over—had resulted in a betting pool about the real identity of our amnesiac pack mate. I had instituted a one-dollar limit per bet, winners split the pot. It currently stood at $187.29.

There was, I had learned from the entries, an entire folklore about old wolves and their deeds that I had been unaware of. Being a history major, I was more than a little grumpy that no one had told me all those stories—but I was learning. I kept the betting book, and before I would write down the name, I made the wolf doing the betting tell me about their candidate for the position. Maybe sometime I’d record all the stories I learned. I couldn’t publish them since a lot of them demonstrated just how dangerous werewolves were—and we were currently trying to soft-pedal that for the humans we lived among so they didn’t decide that the only good werewolf was a dead werewolf. But still … someone should write them down.

The choices for Sherwood’s real identity weren’t limited to werewolf legends, though. Five people had put their money on Robin Hood.

If they had been older wolves, I would have been excited, but four of them were from the current generation and the other was, I think, joking. Still, Sherwood Post to Sherwood Forest made a certain amount of symbolic sense. And everyone knew that Robin Hood had lived in Sherwood Forest. So had Little John and Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet. Little John had gotten two dollars. Alan-a-Dale and Will Scarlet one dollar each. No one had put money on Friar Tuck—our Sherwood just didn’t look like the friar type.

As Kelly had pointed out when he handed me his dollar for Robin Hood, Bran seldom did things without reason. When I told him the story I’d had from both Sherwood and Bran, that he’d picked the name because Bran had had a book by Sherwood Anderson and the treatise on manners by Emily Post on his desk, Kelly had snorted.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows that Bran keeps his books in his bookshelves and not on his desk unless he is actively reading. We had that from several different sources. Also, no one has ever seen Bran read Sherwood Anderson, before or since that day.”

I blinked at him. Apparently there had been a lot more serious investigation into Sherwood than I’d been aware of.

Misreading my expression, Kelly backtracked a little. “Elliot knows a couple of wolves from the Marrok’s pack. Luke knows a few more.”

“Might be right,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

Most of what I remembered about Bran’s study had to do with keeping my eyes down and pretending I was sorry (or mystified, if the evidence against me wasn’t strong) for whatever it was Bran was mad at me about. I hadn’t been paying attention to whether he had books on his desk.

Before I took his dollar, though, I told Kelly, “You should know that historians are not sure that Robin Hood was a real person. Or if he was, if he was as significant a figure as the stories about him make it appear.”

Kelly shoved the dollar into my hand and pointed to where three other names were behind “Robin Hood” on my notebook page. “And maybe he was a werewolf,” he said.

When someone asked Sherwood directly about the Robin Hood identity, he hunted me down and asked to see the betting book. Sherwood put a dollar down on Robin Hood himself—and another dollar on William Shakespeare.

“I can shoot arrows,” he’d said. “But I’d rather have been a poet.”

I still wasn’t sure how to take that. Sherwood certainly had given no sign of wanting to be good with words. On the other hand, poets don’t need to use a lot of words to get their point across, even if Shakespeare had.

This morning, our mysterious Sherwood gave me a nod. “Upstairs?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded again, this time at all the wolves gathered in the living room, raised his cup to me, and then headed up. After milling around a little more than they had been, the rest of the wolves in the living room followed him. Still wrapped in a blanket, Aiden tagged along behind. Adam had asked him to attend the meeting, too.

Darryl and Auriele came in a few minutes later.

Auriele brushed past me and up the stairs. She pretended not to notice me, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t embarrassment or regret or anything like that driving her. She was still mad at me.

Darryl gave me an apologetic shrug—because he knew she was still mad at me, too—and followed her up.

Warren was the last one to arrive.

“Everyone else is here,” I told him. “But you have fifteen minutes before the meeting starts.” Something struck me suddenly. “You know? This is the most punctual group of any I’ve ever seen.”

“Adam,” Warren said, taking off his hat and tapping it against his thigh, “appreciates promptness. He explained that by holding meetings every four hours until the whole pack managed not to be late. It took two days and nearly resulted in Paul’s death when he was late for the next-to-last meeting.”

Paul had died by other means. We both sucked in a breath before I said, “I could see that. Punctuality was never really his thing. It is yours. Usually you aren’t the last to arrive.”

Warren was wearing jeans and boots, as he had since I met him. But his jeans now fit with an edge that said designer, and his shirt was a polo that clung to the muscles of his shoulders. His clothes had been getting an upgrade lately. In well-fitted, flattering-colored clothing, Warren looked pretty good except for the drawn face and circles under his eyes that were due to more than a single early-morning meeting.

“I would have been here sooner, except the case I’ve been working has me pinched for time,” he explained. “It’s a rough one.”

“A case for Kyle?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, and there was a little smile on his tired face as he started for the meeting room. “For Kyle.”

Kyle was his boyfriend, though that didn’t quite encompass what they were to each other. They hadn’t taken the final step—the human final step—of getting married. But Adam had told me that they were mates. I couldn’t read the pack bonds that well, but I trusted that Adam could.

Kyle was very human and a divorce lawyer—and was more than likely responsible for Warren’s wardrobe’s improvement. Warren worked for him as a licensed investigator who doubled as protection and intimidation where needed.

I’ve always heard it said that it wasn’t wise for people who were involved romantically to work together, especially when one of them worked for the other. But it seemed to be a good thing between Warren and Kyle.