“Terrific,” he said. “Just what we need right now, a witch-maybe-vampire territorial dispute.”
“I’ve given you my current conspiracy theory,” I told him. “Maybe it is a coincidence?”
“But it makes me go hmm,” he said.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he said. After a moment he said, “Did you hear Sherwood turn on the water?”
“No,” I said, sitting up. If Sherwood had taken a shower, we should have heard it. “Sherwood?” I called his name. He was a werewolf; he should hear me easily.
There was no reply.
“I can’t reach him through the pack bonds,” Adam said, getting out of his chair and heading toward the basement. “He’s there, but I can’t contact him.”
Adam didn’t run, but he didn’t waste any time, either. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and held up a hand for me to pause, too.
The basement was quiet, too quiet, and dark. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel magic at work. I would have sworn there had been nothing there when Sherwood had headed down. Come to think of it, Sherwood, unlike most werewolves, was sensitive to witchcraft—and this was witchcraft. If it had been there, he’d never have gone down.
Adam started down the stairs, but I grabbed the back of his jeans. He could see the darkness and hear the silence, but he couldn’t feel what I could.
“Wait up,” I whispered. “There’s a lot of magic right here on the stairs.”
Adam turned and gave me a quick kiss. “Mercy,” he said in a normal voice. “Neither you nor I can do anything about the magic, and one of my wolves is on the other side.”
I released him. “When you put it like that . . .”
He continued down, and I followed. As his foot hit the fourth step down, inky shadow boiled up, like a weird, black, dry-ice fog. Adam didn’t even hesitate. I put a hand on his back as he waded into the darkness ahead of me.
Maybe I should have stayed upstairs where I could have called for help if no one came back up. But he hadn’t asked me to do that, and I wasn’t going to suggest it. One of our wolves was trapped down there.
I knew when we came to the bottom of the stairs because I was counting, and because Adam stopped abruptly. He snarled and the muscles under my hand tightened to rock-hard as he put pressure on whatever lay in front of him.
“Blocked,” he grunted.
“Let me try,” I said, slipping by him.
The barrier that had stopped him felt like a giant warm cushion blocking the way. It tried to keep me out, as it had Adam, but everywhere it pressed against me, it softened and yielded. Going forward felt like I was voluntarily suffocating myself in warm wax that slid into my ears and nose and required almost more bravery than I possessed. But Adam had my back, and that knowledge combined with Sherwood’s need kept me moving forward.
I shut my mouth before any of the nasty, witchcrafted jelly goop could invade my mouth as well. I grabbed Adam’s hand as I struggled forward, hoping I could pull him in my wake.
It wasn’t easy or quick, but I made progress. Cool air touched the top of my head, and then I could hear the furious roar of Sherwood’s wolf as the warm, insidious magic slid reluctantly away.
As soon as my nostrils were free, I could scent black magic and . . . a strange werewolf whose scent was overlaid with something I’d smelled a lot today. I didn’t dare open my eyes until my lids were clear of the barrier, but my nose told me enough.
We had a zombie werewolf in the basement.
I’d leaned forward, so my upper body cleared the barrier first, which meant I was trapped from the waist down and blind when there was a zombie werewolf less than thirty feet away.
I wiped at my face with my free hand, pushing aside the magic until it felt safe to open my eyes. My legs were still stuck in slow motion, but at least I could see.
This zombie was different from the goats, better made. His black coat didn’t exactly glisten with health, but it wasn’t ragged, either. Hard to tell for sure, with both combatants moving so fast, but I thought the zombie wolf was a little bigger than Sherwood, which would put it in the same size category as Samuel or Charles. If it hadn’t been for the smell, I might have believed that it was a living werewolf.
The goats I’d dealt with this morning had been driven by one purpose: to feed. That had made them easy to hunt because they had been blind and deaf to anything else. But this dead wolf fought with intelligence and training.
Sherwood was missing one back leg—which was annoying, I’m sure, even in his human shape. But it was a huge liability in a fight where he was a wolf, as he was now. He compensated for the lack with tactics, forcing his opponent to move into his space, where his hampered maneuverability wasn’t such a problem.
Outside of Adam, I don’t think there would have been a wolf in the pack who could have taken Sherwood if he’d had four legs. But he was losing his battle against the zombie.
“Mechanical damage,” I yelled to Sherwood, as if he needed my help. With my newly acquired experience with zombies, I continued more quietly, “They don’t feel pain. So you have to do mechanical damage. Getting you some help in a minute.”
I redoubled my struggle to get my legs free without losing my balance. I pulled my left foot out, turned, and reached back into the barrier and locked my free hand on Adam’s, so I could haul with both of my hands. I wasn’t going to be a lot of help with a zombie werewolf—we needed Adam.
Pulling him through was like a game of tug-of-war. I made progress, but it was unholy slow. At some point in the process, my left foot came free. In helping Adam, I’d reburied my face in the muck. I couldn’t see Adam, just felt the grip of his hands in mine as we both strained to pull him through.
There was a terrible moment when I thought it wasn’t going to work—that both of us were just going to suffocate in the blasted barrier. Then finally, with a vast, horrid sucking sound and a zing that went through me like that time I touched an electric fence in the rain, the spell was gone.
Adam stumbled forward, pulled off-balance by the sudden lack of resistance. But he regained his footing almost immediately, his attention on the fight. I dropped his hand and stepped back, gasping for air, as he stripped off his clothes and called on the pack bonds to quicken his change. But he didn’t wait for it to take him before he waded into the fray.
Even with the help of the bonds, it would take him five or ten minutes to change. He might have been better off staying human—but he didn’t have any weapons and we didn’t keep any down here.
“Zombies,” I muttered, staring at the dead wolf who fought like a demon. “What do I know about zombies?”