Seanan’s favorite things include the X-Men, folklore, and the Black Death. No, seriously.
She writes all biographies in the third person, because it’s easier that way.
To learn more about Seanan, go to: https://seananmcguire.com/index.php
A Memory of Witches
By Patricia Briggs[5]
WHILE MOST OF HIS WEREWOLF PACK were milling around aimlessly—or catcalling at the sight of their Alpha kissing his newly arrived mate—Sherwood Post watched the witch’s house.
Architecturally speaking, it was a lovely, two-story mansion with an interesting roof that sported skylights. If he were a poet, he might say that it sprawled out in the afternoon sun like a sleeping cat. The exterior was a warm cream stucco, a substance that withstood the extreme heat of the Tri-Cities better than wood and more stylishly than mason board or vinyl. The house was surrounded by extensive gardens and those were surrounded by acres of agricultural land. This edge of the Tri-Cities was mostly comprised of houses on acreage—some of them huge upscale places, some of them moldering mobile homes set side by side in a sort of quiet class warfare. Or possibly class assimilation.
This particular house was large and expensive, but witches came from families and those families served the witches in the same way the pack served the werewolves. Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskya’s family was large and included a lawyer and a doctor. And they all lived…had lived…in that house.
Now they were dead, all of them except for Elizaveta, who had been in Europe being wined and dined—and paid—by the Lord of Night himself. The witches were dead and everything he had seen in that house said the family had been killed by black witches who had moved in and taken over—possibly shortly after Elizaveta had left. And no one had noticed.
Adam wanted answers that couldn’t wait for Elizaveta’s return. Witches who killed fourteen witches in their own home, might be able to kill werewolves as easily.
“You okay to go back in?” Zack had been watching Sherwood for a few minutes before he broke though the invisible barrier separating Sherwood from the rest of the pack. “Witches can’t be your favorite people.”
He was being tactful. Doubtless he could smell Sherwood’s stress.
“I don’t remember anything about the witches,” Sherwood said because he couldn’t say he was okay without lying and because his lack of memory was well known to anyone in the pack. Probably anyone in any werewolf pack. Amnesia was something that most werewolves didn’t survive. Unstable werewolves—and amnesia—made containing the violent nature of a werewolf difficult. That Sherwood had survived, even though his memories had not returned, was unusual enough to be gossiped about.
“Sometimes, some memories are imprinted in your skin, though,” Zack said softly. Visceral.” He hesitated and gave him a perceptive look. “Or your wolf.”
Sherwood gave a short nod. It wasn’t a lie. His wolf did not want to go back into that house in a way that was not based on today’s experience alone.
Stupid, agreed the wolf. We don’t remember how to protect ourselves from magic.
But the wolf knew that at one time they—he could have kept himself safe from what awaited in that house, which was more than Sherwood would have guessed.
“Five years of memories,” said Carlos, following Zack, as many of the wolves had a tendency to do—especially when their submissive wolf came too near Sherwood. It was as if their protective instincts understood Sherwood was a threat. He sounded friendly enough, but he put his body subtly between Sherwood and Zack. “I don’t know what I’d do if all I could remember was the last five years.”
Carlos had been born in Mexico around a century ago and now worked for Adam, their Alpha, in his security business. That was most of what Sherwood knew about him. Sherwood had avoided becoming too close with anyone in his pack. He thought Carlos’s instincts were pretty good because Sherwood considered himself a threat, too.
Until last winter he’d accepted that his memory loss was due to his long captivity in the hands of witches. The Marrok, into whose care Sherwood had been brought, thought that the horror of being tortured to the extent that his left leg would never regenerate—something that just didn’t happen to werewolves—had given Sherwood traumatic amnesia. But if that were true, he shouldn’t still be losing memories.
We aren’t crazy, his wolf asserted with more confidence than Sherwood felt was due.
It had taken him a while to notice because he wasn’t losing years or centuries worth of memories—not that he had those to lose anymore. No one remembered every minute of every day—but he was losing the wrong moments, the interesting ones.
There was something broken in his brain—and he didn’t know what it meant—other than it made him unpredictably dangerous. That was why Sherwood had asked the Marrok, he who ruled the werewolves in this time and place, to send him away. The Marrok had been too likely to see what was going on. Though Sherwood agreed in principal that unstable werewolves had to be killed, he did not particularly wish to die.
Maybe the witches are stealing our memories, the wolf suggested, not for the first time.
That seemed like a possibility. Sherwood had spent the last few years studying witches in an effort to make his affliction make sense. There were a few of the witch families who knew how to feed off the emotional energy of traumatic memories. The idea that he was still somehow tied to the witches who had taken his leg made his skin crawl.
His revulsion didn’t feel like something new, something built over mere decades. It felt bred into his bones.
Yet you volunteered to go back inside, growled his wolf.
Mostly the really old werewolves could talk to their wolves. As if being linked to a human for so long gave the wolf access to speech in the same way their human halves gained access to the wolf’s instincts. He knew that, just as he knew that the sunset over the Parthenon was breathtaking, though he could not remember how he knew either one of those things. He was sure that he was very old because when he thought of the Parthenon, it looked a lot different from modern photos he’d seen.
“I heard Darryl say that you were going to escort Mercy,” said Carlos. “Why isn’t Adam doing it? Hell, why isn’t the whole pack going in?”
Carlos wasn’t as stupid as his question sounded. The whole pack had become a lot more vested in their Alpha’s mate’s safety since Sherwood had joined up. Partly it was because they recognized that she—a coyote shapeshifter—was a lot more vulnerable than a werewolf. Part of it was because she was directly responsible for giving the whole pack a higher purpose, a purpose that made them into heroes.
And Carlos thought Sherwood was a threat.
Even though the other wolf wasn’t wrong, Sherwood felt his eyes narrow. Carlos took a step back, bumping into Zack, who steadied him. It was the question in Zack’s face that Sherwood chose to answer.
“It’s a crime scene,” Sherwood reminded them. “The fewer of us who go in, the more Mercy will be able to discover. Adam asked me to go in because I found the witch’s traps.”
Both Carlos and Zack frowned.
“You don’t do magic,” said Zack with certainty. “Not even pack magic. What do you know about witchcraft?”
What do I know about witchcraft? Sherwood echoed the question silently because it was a good one. He didn’t like the answers that suggested themselves because he wasn’t sure regaining his memories was safe. A small dark voice in the hidden depths of his mind told him that magic was dangerous. It didn’t tell him why.