10

“It’s not quite the biggest crane in the world,” said the Lampson guy to the police officer. He’d introduced himself as Marley.

The Pasco police officer, whom I’d seen before but didn’t know personally, was Ed Thorson. He was the only police officer left on the scene because I’d asked him to get rid of as many people as he could. No one is proud like a dominant werewolf in front of an audience. If there were too many people here, we might end up with him jumping, even if he didn’t intend to do it in the first place.

Above us, nearly forty stories up, on the top of the Transi-Lift LTL-3000, was one of our werewolves. I couldn’t see him, I’m not sure I could have seen him even in the daylight without binoculars, but he’d been seen climbing up it at the end of his shift, and everyone was very sure that he hadn’t climbed back down—or jumped.

Three days had passed since we’d confronted the fae in the hotel meeting room—and we hadn’t heard anything from them. We’d had to step down our security because we just didn’t have enough people to stay at high alert for very long.

Though Adam made sure that there were at least two werewolves at our house at any given time, mostly everyone’s lives had returned to normal. Even Aiden’s setting something on fire when he slept felt normal—one of Adam’s techie guys was working on rewiring some smoke alarms so that instead of shrieking, they just buzzed a little.

Back to normal meant when Adam got called to work after dinner, he left me in charge. So when the police called to tell me that one of our wolves was sitting on the top of the big Lampson crane and they were worried about him jumping, I was the one who got to go fix it. If Darryl, Warren, or George had been our guard wolves, I’d have sent one of them because I’d exchanged about four words with Sherwood Post. “Yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” only counted as four words, even if they’d been said every time I’d tried to strike up a conversation with him. But as luck would have it, Ben and Paul were the watch wolves on duty, neither of whom I could trust not to drive a suicidal werewolf right off the edge—both metaphorically and literally speaking. Sherwood Post had come to us a month ago from the Marrok. He was too quiet, too polite, and missing his left leg. Werewolves heal. They heal broken things, they heal crushed things, and they heal amputated things. But apparently not if witches were involved.

About four or five years ago, there had been a nasty coven of witches in Seattle. Their leader had been killed by the Emerald City Pack. When the pack went to clean out the home of the leader, to make sure that there were no nasty magical surprises left behind, they had found, among other things, an emaciated werewolf in a cage. He was missing his leg.

He hadn’t remembered who he was or where he came from—and neither did any of the packs. He also didn’t remember what had happened to his leg. As best anyone could figure out, he’d been brought over from Europe and traded around among various black witches for years, if not decades.

Bran took him home, eventually coaxing him back into human shape. When he couldn’t do anything that could make Sherwood’s leg regrow—yes, that’s as bad as it sounds—he sent Sherwood to doctors who provided a prosthetic for the human form. The wolf just ran on three legs.

Sherwood took his name from two books that happened to be lying on Bran’s desk when Bran told him to pick a name. That Bran would read Sherwood Anderson was not surprising. I wasn’t sure if I was more amused or horrified that Bran had been reading Emily Post.

According to Bran, Sherwood had approached him in January and asked for a transfer to somewhere with a shorter, more congenial winter than Montana. Most places have more congenial winters than Montana, so Bran had a lot of places he could have sent Sherwood, but he sent him to us.

When the call came in about Sherwood and the crane, I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Adam other than to leave him a voice message. His office wasn’t answering, either, which meant whatever he was involved in was some security issue with the government contracts he held. I couldn’t feel anything through the pack bonds that suggested Sherwood was about to kill himself, but Bran hadn’t been able to tell when my foster father had gone out to commit suicide, either. Sherwood felt just as he always did to me—quiet.

I squinted, trying to see him, but he was too far up, and it was too dark.

I might not have known Officer Thorson, but I liked him. When I explained that all the extra people who’d been there when I arrived were problematical, he’d listened gravely. Then, without arguing, he’d dispersed everyone until there were just two guys from Lampson, Officer Thorson, and me. Marley continued to talk to the officer about his crane with the enthusiasm of a golf addict describing his new putter. “So not the biggest—that mark keeps moving. But it is the largest twin-crawler crane in the world, and the biggest crane we’ve ever built. So far, anyway.”

I hadn’t quite worked out if Marley was the night manager who’d summoned the police or if he was security, the CEO of the company, or someone in between. He wore scruffy jeans, a Western-style button-up shirt, and needed a shave. He also smelled like beer, but I think most of that was coming off his boots, so maybe he’d come over from a bar or party. I did wish he’d shut up about how big the stupid crane was because I was pretty sure I was going to have to climb it and see if I could talk Sherwood down.

I’d seen the crane before; you can’t help but see it when you drive across the suspension bridge—which we had not been able to do tonight. There were no estimates about when that bridge would go back in use. They had to figure out how badly it had been damaged, first. I didn’t know why I felt guilty about that—I didn’t turn loose a troll on the city. Still, even without being on the bridge, you could see the crane for a long way.