But my first shot had taken it in the chest. I had been aiming for the forehead, but the zombie was moving fast. The bullet knocked it back, rolling it down about five steps and onto the space between the staircases before it caught its balance again.

Ears ringing with the cannonlike bellow of the rifle, I drew a deep breath, reminded myself I needed to cause mechanical damage, and hit the wolf’s front left leg with the third bullet, as it attempted my stairs again. Because of the porting of the barrel, the muzzle flash from the Marlin was over two feet long and, for some weird reason, explainable only by battlefield conditions because a muzzle flash doesn’t do anything, that reassured me.

The next shot took the bottom of its jaw off, but the next and last bullet went into the wall when the wolf moved faster than I’d seen it move before and swiped the end of the rifle barrel.

I let it go—I was out of bullets anyway—and the rifle hit the wall with a noise that left me pretty sure that weapon wasn’t going to be useful ever again. But I was too busy dodging a swipe of the wicked-sharp claws to mourn my long-dead foster father’s rifle. That swipe had more in common with a bear’s attack than a timber wolf’s. If it hit me, it could kill me with a single blow.

I leaped for the sword and stabbed the wolf with the reflexes I’d been working on since well before I’d been gifted with my cutlass. I’d executed the move smoothly, and if I’d been using my cutlass or a katana, it would have slid into its heart.

But Peter’s sword was a freaking cavalry saber and the tip was heavier than I was used to—and the tip and the handle were not in line. The only thing my sword thrust did was release a vile-smelling stream of effluvia all over the white carpet. And then it got stuck in the zombie.

I didn’t bother trying to hold on to the sword. Instead I leaped over it, over the railing of the stairwell, landing right on the edge of the first step of the basement stairway.

The zombie had a little trouble turning . . . but I saw to my horror that it was healing the damage I’d done. Its destroyed leg wasn’t bearing weight yet, but it no longer hung from the shoulder. And when it bared its fangs at me, the lower jaw I’d all but shot off was fully functional.

It was healing itself faster than a werewolf could. That wasn’t something the miniature goat zombies had done.

The zombie followed my jump, but betrayed by the bad leg, it fell badly when it landed and struggled to get to its feet. It acted as though it hadn’t yet realized that one of its front legs wasn’t working.

I scrambled into the kitchen and grabbed a knife out of the block and turned to face the zombie, but it hadn’t followed me. I heard a battle by the stairs and ran back until I could see what was going on.

Adam had stopped the zombie werewolf from following me. There was fresh blood all over my mate, but like the zombie, he had already healed most of the damage. He was still changing, and if he’d healed as much damage as it looked like, he’d been drawing heavily from the pack to do so. That was probably why the pack bond felt like it was on fire.

I wondered where the zombie was getting its power from.

It saw me and lunged. Adam grabbed the dead wolf by its shoulder and ripped it (literally, because its claws were dug into the carpet) away from me. The creature fell all the way to the foot of the stairs and . . .

Magic hit me, as it had earlier this morning when the goblin had flung his magic around. This power surged from the bottom of my feet and traveled up my body in a shock so hard that for an instant, every muscle in my body locked up with painful intensity in a giant, hellish charley horse–like cramp and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, couldn’t think. When that subsided and I drew in a first, panicked breath, I smelled ozone, as if I’d been too close to a lightning strike.

I collapsed in a heap on the ground and my body vibrated to even more magic, gentler magic this time that my senses wanted to interpret as music, a wild wailing sound of grief and rage echoing through my flesh and not my ears.

And then it was over. I scrambled instinctively to my feet—the floor is a terrible place to be in a fight. Adam stuck his side against me so that I didn’t go right back down to the floor.

The last I’d seen Adam, his body had been poised to follow the zombie down the stairs. Evidently my weird reaction had kept him upstairs.

“I don’t know,” I told his worried eyes breathlessly. “Some big magic.” I rubbed my arms.

There was a scraping noise from the basement.

We both looked down the stairs, but the zombie was nowhere to be seen—though I could certainly still smell him. There was a puddle of the same foul, squishy liquid muck that Peter’s sword had extracted in the carpet at the foot of the stairs. Something big had been dragged through it.

“Sherwood?” I called.

The sound of his growl should have reassured me.

Adam’s ears flattened. He glanced at me.

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

So I waited while my mate went down the stairs to see what had happened.

5

Sherwood growled again. This time it was a pained sound that had elements of human vocal cords in it. He had been all the way wolf when I’d seen him, not five minutes ago.

Adam, out of view, didn’t make any noise at all. And a wave of magic rolled over me again. I always had trouble with heavy magic use, but it seemed to me that my reaction to it was getting worse over time. That, or I was just being exposed to more powerful magic users.

As soon as I could stand up, I took a deep breath and decided I was done waiting. I traveled cautiously down the stairs. The bottom two were wet with repulsive goo from the original barrier that we, Adam and I between us, had brought down. But beyond a certain squick factor because I was barefoot, I didn’t pay much attention to that. What I saw in the room stopped me cold, right in the middle of the gooey spot.

Adam had paused about halfway across the room, presumably for the same reason I had.

At the far end of the room, where the shadows were deepest even in the middle of the day, was a giant beanbag chair. Beanbag chairs were one of the few pieces of furniture that were equally comfortable for wolf and human, so we had a few scattered around the room.

The remains of the zombie wolf were laid on the chair as if his comfort mattered. The dead werewolf looked lifeless, really dead and going to stay that way. Sherwood knelt on the floor next to the beanbag. He was a mess. I’d heard his human voice amid the wolf, and his body was like that, caught halfway back to human in a way I’d never seen before. He was stuck in a bizarre mismatch of human and wolf limbs and features that looked incredibly painful and completely unsustainable. If his outside was so wrong, I couldn’t imagine what his internal organs looked like.

But he had two human-shaped hands resting on top of the pile of hide-covered bones. Sherwood’s eyes—golden, feral eyes—tracked from Adam to me and back.

Adam sat on the ground where he was, all the way down, belly to the floor. I’d have sat down, too, but there was a deep puddle of goo under my bare feet. I hoped that the combination of how much less of a threat I was than Adam and the fact that I was farther away would be enough to make my presence not an issue for Sherwood.

Sherwood apparently agreed with me. He watched Adam for a moment more, then, satisfied that we would leave him to his work, he turned his attention to the dead-again werewolf.

And he sang.

The words were mangled by the caught-between-change shape of his mouth, but he was pitch-perfect and the song ruffled the hair on the back of my neck and broke my heart with its magic-carried grief.

We waited where we were, Adam and I, while the scent of black magic dissipated. The scent, the feeling of black magic, lingers for a long time, years or even decades. But the dead wolf and the basement—and me and even my unholy rank-smelling hair—were all being cleansed as Sherwood sang.

I don’t know what Adam could feel, but it seemed to me as if magic swept out from Sherwood and washed over us all. I couldn’t tell what kind of magic it was—a rarity for me. It just felt like Sherwood, masculine and reserved, werewolf and gruffly kind. Not werewolf magic—that’s another thing altogether. This was something . . . more primal. More wild. And I didn’t think there was a thing more wild than pack magic.

As I observed Sherwood grieving over this werewolf who had been a zombie, I thought about the power of what he was doing. Of what I’d felt course through me.

I thought about how Sherwood had ended up in our pack, sent by the Marrok who had ruled us all and now ruled all of the werewolves except for our pack. And how short a period of time lay between when Sherwood got here and when those ties had been cut.