Winter Lost

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.