Winter Lost

Interlude

Warren

Warren was fueling up his car when he got the call from Sherwood.

“Warren here,” he answered, trying to remember if Sherwood had ever called him before. He thought not.

“Car wreck,” said Sherwood in a low growl.

He paused and Warren heard in the background a woman sobbing hysterically, a man’s angry deep bass, and the howl of the wind.

“Are you hurt?” Warren asked, calming his voice instinctively—as if one of the less dominant wolves had called him for help. He hoped Sherwood wouldn’t think he was patronizing him. Upset dominant wolves tended to get thin-skinned. “What do you need?”

Why did you call me? But he didn’t say that one.

Sherwood took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, he sounded calmer. “Warren, I need backup, stat. Hurt not-serious but…control issue. Too loud, and the storm. And I—”

He was evidently having trouble putting words together, not a good sign. Sherwood was not a big talker at the best of times, but he usually could finish a sentence when he started one.

“Where are you?” Warren said, replacing the nozzle at the pump, though his car wasn’t full.

In halting words, Sherwood described where he was. The bass voice Warren had heard blustering earlier evidently figured out what Sherwood was doing, and called out a pair of streets Warren knew. Distantly, Warren heard sirens. That was quick—Warren would have expected the police to take a while, given the storm. Maybe they’d been in the area—or the wreck was bad.

“Got it,” Warren said, not waiting for Sherwood to confirm the address. “I’m in Pasco, but only about ten minutes away. I’ll call Tony”—who was their unofficial liaison with the Kennewick PD based largely on his friendship with Mercy. They had an official liaison, but Tony was better because the rest of the police were half-afraid of the werewolves. “Hang tight.”

“No other good choice,” said Sherwood as Warren started his car and switched the phone to the car’s Bluetooth. “My car is totaled and I can’t walk.”

Sherwood hung up without waiting for Warren’s reply.

It should have been a fifteen-minute trip, with the cable bridge gone and freezing sleet making the streets as slick as a greased pig. But Warren’s boyfriend, Kyle, had bought him an Outback under the pretext that it was a work expense. Warren worked as a PI for Kyle’s law firm, which sometimes meant tailing or watching people. Kyle said his old truck was too memorable and the Subaru would blend in. He’d been right. Kyle usually was.

The Subaru also handled the icy roads a fair bit better than Warren’s truck did. Warren suspected that it handled the roads better than even an all-wheel-drive with the traction-what-have-you and automatic-make-it-not-slide that it was equipped with should. His Subaru had an odd magical tweak.

It took him eight minutes, most of which he’d spent talking to Tony, who was headed this way as soon as possible. He pulled over into a parking spot well back and on the far side of the road from the wreck.

From his vantage point, he took a quick inventory. Three vehicles. The first two were skewed sideways in the road, a foot or so from the train tracks. The back bumper of the front car, a Mercedes, was intertwined with the front bumper of a battered green Toyota Corolla that he knew was Sherwood’s car. If he’d been in doubt, Sherwood himself was leaning against the driver’s-side door.

The front car had a piece of the broken crossing gate arm on the hood.

A third vehicle—an aging SUV with a caved-in front end to match the newly shortened back end of Sherwood’s car—was stopped a few feet back and still in its lane. The other two cars were skewed so that they blocked all of their lane and half of the oncoming lane. Someone had set out cones and flares, as if the flashing lights of the police cars weren’t warning enough that there was trouble.

He got out of his car and came close to landing on his keister. It was merciful slick. He gave the melded, road-blocking cars a more thoughtful look.

Sherwood had clearly sequestered himself away from the other people. He leaned, arms folded and head down in apparent thought. Unusually, he had a crutch beside him, positioned for easy reach. He couldn’t have missed the sound of Warren’s car—or the gentle tug on the pack bonds that was felt when one pack member came near another—but he didn’t look up.

No one was paying attention to Warren yet, and that was fine with him.

Warren passed by the police officers and accident victims without stopping to talk, taking in the group dynamics as he strolled. One driver, a sobbing girl, her face battered by an exploding airbag, was all but leaning on the broad shoulder of the very young policeman who had put himself between her and a middle-aged red-faced man who was shouting at the cop. Never a good policy, but people tended to get the sense knocked out of them after a bad scare.

“My dad’s going to kill me,” sobbed the girl, and other such words that amounted to pretty much the same thing, mostly, he thought, designed to elicit sympathy from the young cop.

“You damned near killed me,” snapped the man. “And you would have if the werewolf here hadn’t been able to move our cars before the train came. I can smell the alcohol on you from all the way over—”

“If you don’t calm down,” warned the officer, sounding less like a calm official and more like a defensive boyfriend, “I’m going to arrest you—”

It was a good thing, Warren decided, that Sherwood had taken himself out of that situation.

One of the officers stood to the side, looking uncomfortable. He appeared vaguely familiar, and when he saw Warren, relief dawned on his face. He tipped his chin toward Sherwood’s last stand as if Warren might have missed him.

Or, Warren thought, as if the cop thought it might be a good idea for Warren to be here. Because of his work for his boyfriend’s law firm, a number of the police officers were familiar with Warren and might recognize him by sight and know that he was a werewolf.

He picked up his pace a bit, and as he approached the battered Toyota, he saw why Sherwood had his crutch out. One jean-covered leg ended in a boot, and the other ended in an empty space. The prosthesis that gave Sherwood the ability to walk like everyone else was missing.

Like the girl, Sherwood’s face was battered. There was a lot of blood on the front of his shirt where his jacket was open. Warren was pretty sure that some of the stains on Sherwood’s pants were blood, too.

Sherwood raised his head, and his wolf stared at Warren. Before Warren could figure out whether to meet his gaze—Sherwood had called him for help—or to look away, Sherwood closed his eyes.

Freed from that dilemma, Warren looked away and saw something odd with the tracks on the ground next to the Mercedes. He dropped to one knee so he could get a better look at the marks in the snow where someone had pulled—not pushed—the two interlocked cars off the track.

He’d grown up in a time and place when tracking was part of a survival skill set. The marks told him a story as clearly as if he’d been here to see it. The places where Sherwood’s good foot had slipped, unable to gain purchase on the icy ground. The round mark made by something like a pipe that had no trouble breaking through the ice to the ground beneath it.

“Break your prosthesis in the accident, or did you do it deliberately so you could get the cars off the track?”

“Deliberately,” Sherwood said tightly.

“Hey, you, werewolf!”

Both Warren and Sherwood looked over to see the young officer striding toward them.

Warren fished his key fob out of his back pocket and tossed it at Sherwood.

“Why don’t you go sit in my car and warm up,” Warren said, walking toward the cop to intercept him.

Warren didn’t mind facing off with the angry cop, especially when the other officer was an ally of sorts. Tony was on his way—and if all else failed, he could threaten them with Kyle. Kyle’s specialty was family law, but that didn’t hurt his reputation as a shark at all.

Moreover, Warren hadn’t been injured in a car accident and forced to expose his greatest weakness in front of an enemy. He had a lot better chance of holding on to his temper than Sherwood did.

Sherwood caught the fob and carefully started to cross the icy road using his crutch. It wasn’t graceful.

With another pack member, Warren would have carried them over to the car—or given them his arm or escort. Sherwood wouldn’t be able to accept that right now. Warren wasn’t worried about Sherwood—much—but his wolf was old and dangerous. The last thing that their pack needed was for him and Sherwood to get in a real fight out where a scared cop and some people with cell phones could watch.

The cop tried to angle after Sherwood, but Warren got in the way.

“I’m Warren Smith,” he drawled with a big old friendly smile. “My friend Sherwood is hurt, and he’s going to take a time-out over there in my car. He ain’t gonna take off. What did ya need him for?”

The cop wasn’t completely stupid. He stopped well short of Warren and regarded him with suspicion. “I need his license, registration, and insurance, and his story about what happened.”

Warren looked at him. “I hope that you ain’t plannin’ on giving tickets to two drivers who were stopped at an active railroad cross’n. Because even a stupid hick like me knows that it’s the lady who hits the stopped cars who gets the ticket.”

“Hey, Warren,” said the other officer before the angry one had a chance to respond. “Good to see you. That lawyer of yours did some righteous maneuvers for my friend whose ex tried to take his kids back. I understand that it was some of your work that made that case go the way it should.”

Hell, he’d almost forgotten that he had a little more pull with the KPD this week than he’d had before. In his defense, most of his work on that case had been completed a couple of months ago. “Your cop friend needs to have better taste in his next wife,” he said.

“That’s what I told him.” The friendly officer stepped casually in front of his angry coworker and held out his hand. “We never met officially.” Which explained why Warren couldn’t come up with his name. “I’m Trent Oliver.”

Warren shook it. “Good to meet you, Trent.”

Across the street, Warren’s Subaru started up.

“He’s getting away,” said the other cop, turning as if he planned on running in front of the car to stop it.

Trent caught his arm and said, “Stand down,” at the same time that Warren said, “No such thing, Officer.”

To be sure he was speaking the truth, Warren looked at Sherwood, who was sitting in the driver’s seat—which he had to, in order to start the car. Warren couldn’t quite read the expression on the old wolf’s face, but it wasn’t the expression of someone who was about to drive away. Sherwood saw Warren watching him, and grinned.

“He’s been sitting out in the cold for a while,” Warren continued warily. He’d never seen that exact expression on Sherwood’s face before. “I told him to go get warm.”

Apparently satisfied that his charge wasn’t going to go do something dumb, Trent released the other cop. Warren firmly turned his attention back to where it belonged.

“Warren, this officer is Cam Hochstetler. He’s new to Kennewick and doesn’t know how we do things here. Cam, Warren Smith is the best private detective in the Tri-Cities and third in our local wolf pack. What he’s trying to tell you is that he has the right and obligation to step in when he thinks that someone is getting into trouble with one of his wolves.”

Everything calmed down quite a bit after that. Warren collected Sherwood’s insurance and registration from the Toyota’s jockey box—and Sherwood’s license, too. Apparently, he kept it in his car.

Tony arrived. The drunk girl was properly cited and sent home with the aid of Officer Hochstetler—who Warren could tell was going to give the pack some trouble down the road. The driver of the first car asked Warren to thank Sherwood for saving his life because he’d still been sitting stunned in the front seat when Sherwood pulled them out of danger. The train had been going past his window by the time he’d had the presence of mind to get out of his car.

Warren tucked the accident report number in his back pocket and strolled to his car.

Sherwood saw him coming and opened his door.

And that was when Warren realized that he’d been close enough that the car’s audio had paired with his phone and started the audiobook he’d been listening to. He had a tendency to turn them off when the sex scenes started because having some stranger read about sex to him was just…uncomfortable. This was the first time it occurred to him that maybe that wasn’t the wisest thing to do.

He was today-years-old when he realized that he could still blush like a schoolgirl.

“Ah, damn it all,” he said.

“Are you embarrassed that your audiobook started in the middle of a very hot sex scene between three men in a swimming pool?” asked Sherwood politely. “There’s no reason to be embarrassed about that.”

“Get out of the driver’s seat,” said Warren. “I’m taking you home.”

Getting Sherwood into the passenger seat took a while longer than it normally would have. Between the crutch and his laughing fits, Sherwood had some trouble on the ice.

The first thing Warren did when he got behind the steering wheel was turn the sound system off.

“Saddest thing in the world is listening to nineteen minutes of a twenty-minute sex scene,” said Sherwood in a mock-mournful voice.

“They all die horribly in five more minutes, their efforts unfulfilled,” said Warren, “victims of the shapeshifting shark lurking in the deep end.”

“Really?” asked Sherwood in polite disbelief.

“I had the audio app on my phone off,” Warren interrupted him. “I have no idea why the car decided to connect to my phone and pull up a book.”

Sherwood’s eyebrows climbed up his face. “That, my friend, is a lie,” he said, sounding delighted.

Warren sighed. “Let me tell you about my car.”