If they’d missed this kitten the first time through, they might have missed another animal. But nothing else was alive.
The spell killed every living thing in this house except that kitten, said his wolf. I wonder how that happened.
A remnant of the divine is left when a god performs a miracle, Sherwood thought, arrested. He knelt on the floor beside the bundled kitten and brought it to his face.
He couldn’t feel it, but his wolf did.
Yes. He felt the wolf’s attention switch from the kitten to the coyote with sudden interest.
Coyote, the wolf said.
Sherwood knew it wasn’t talking about Mercy—and that the possibility that the stories about who Mercy’s father was might be more accurate than he’d assumed.
He considered the kitten again. It was struggling weakly in his hold—afraid of the wolf, possibly. But given that it had spent time in this place, it was likely frightened of everything.
He accepted that the wolf remembered more of magic than he did. But he looked at the dying kitten he held, touched by Coyote, and thought of the presumed god that waited to consume him.
He became aware that Mercy was staring at him.
“Missing an eye,” he told her soberly.
She whined in sympathy and then closed the distance between them. She licked the kitten’s filthy fur—grimacing at the taste—but the little creature relaxed under Mercy’s attentions. When Mercy stepped back, Sherwood stood up with the kitten held as gently as he could.
“Have you seen enough?” he asked Mercy.
She padded over to a metal door set in one corner of the room. Sherwood put himself in her way.
“No. You don’t want to go into the freezer. There are some things you don’t need to see. We should go.”
It had been the thing in the freezer that had made Adam think that Elizaveta had given herself over to black magic. Between Elizaveta’s room and this basement, Sherwood didn’t think that Mercy needed more convincing.
Mercy flattened her ears at him and looked pointedly around the room at each of the bodies. He’d told her there were fourteen bodies here, hadn’t he. She was one short. But that wasn’t in the freezer.
The kitten had given up fighting and lay limply in his hold, mouth open and panting a little in distress.
“This should only take a minute,” he assured it—him—Sherwood’s nose told him. He wasn’t sure that the time mattered, though. He doubted the kitten would live. The kitten had survived whatever had killed every living thing in this house of horrors—by a real miracle. But his senses told him that it was dying now. It seemed like a waste of a miracle.
Sherwood took Mercy to the large bin that held the last body. There had been one witch in the house who hadn’t been working black magic. Possibly because he had no way to do so. He pried the lid off and showed her the body. Mercy looked at it and displayed her fangs in distress.
“Adam said this was Elizaveta’s grandson and that likely Elizaveta had done most of the damage to him herself.”
Mercy sighed and inspected that body—for what, Sherwood could not tell. Then she went from body to body, sniffing carefully at fingers and faces. When she’d finished, she shook herself and trotted up the stairs. Sherwood had no trouble keeping up with her—but the smell clung to all three of them—Mercy, the cat and him—as they escaped out the front door and into the fresh air.
Sherwood rode in the back of Adam’s SUV with the kitten on his lap. He’d rearranged his shirt to be a bed rather than a straitjacket, but nothing was going to make the kitten comfortable. After a few miles it started making soft mewls of distress. He’d sort of curled into Sherwood and had started shivering. It probably wasn’t a good thing. The cat’s noise attracted Adam’s attention. Sherwood could feel it, even if his Alpha kept his eyes on the road as he drove.
“He’s dying,” Sherwood told them, feeling the malaise of that house creep further into his bones. The little cat had saved him—at least for the moment. He wished he could return the favor.
“He made it this far,” Adam said. “It’s just a mile more to the clinic.”
Because his wolf thought it might help, Sherwood slipped his hands under the limp body and pulled the cat up to his face, careful not to hurt it. He took in its scent—its real scent, not the filth that matted its fur—and gave the cat his own. If the cat breathed his last here and now, he’d know he was safe from the witches.
Witches.
“Did you know?” he asked Adam. “About the black magic in that house?” He wasn’t talking about the magic that had killed today, he was asking about the older magic that permeated the walls. Elizaveta’s magic.
Adam shook his head. “No. I’d have put a stop to it. I had no idea.”
Sherwood nodded. He’d known that from Adam’s reaction earlier. He’d just needed to hear him say it. Adam was a straight shooter and saw things mostly in black and white. Good and evil. He didn’t know why he’d needed to ask.
His wolf said, I remember the witches.
The wolf asked Adam, using Sherwood’s voice, “And what are we going to do about it?”
“We will do nothing,” Adam said. “This is something for me to do.”
The wolf wasn’t sure he liked that answer. That was the sort of answer that people gave when they were working out how to save a friend from the consequences of their own actions.
“There will be no black magic in my territory,” Adam said, his voice very soft.
That soft-voice implacable rage settled over the wolf, and Sherwood felt his shoulders relax a bit.
No black magic, purred his wolf.
They stopped at the emergency vet hospital in Pasco. As soon as he walked in, Sherwood felt the tension in the air: grieving families, worried pet owners and terrified animals. The emergency vet wasn’t where you took your animals to get vaccinated.
The kitten, who had mostly stopped making noise, let out a frantic sound and struggled a bit for the first time since he’d brought it up from the basement. It attracted the attention of everyone in the room. Sherwood saw the people take notice. The kitten was a rack of bones. They didn’t have werewolf noses to smell the filth on the cat’s fur, but they could see it. The dogs in the room quieted and a few of them showed their bellies to the werewolves. Cats hissed from their carriers.
He also realized that he didn’t have a shirt on. Sherwood was mostly indifferent to clothing, but he usually made some kind of effort to blend in.
Adam chose that minute to say to the receptionist, “My friend’s cat needs to be seen.”
Ownership implied responsibility. Sherwood had to admit that anyone responsible for the state this kitten was in should get the kind of looks that were being turned his way. Sherwood wasn’t exactly sure when the kitten had become his cat. But he wouldn’t have given him up to anyone else at this point, either.
“Adam Hauptman,” said a woman in the scrubs that seemed to be the vet’s office uniform. “You’re Adam Hauptman the werewolf?”
Adam smiled and nodded—and that smile swept through the room, breaking the tension in the air.
“I am,” he said. The dogs relaxed and even the cats settled down at the sound of an Alpha wolf’s voice.