Adam was worth everything.
“What if—” Zack’s voice was almost breathless. He stopped speaking as if he were trying to put something difficult into words.
When I looked at him, he didn’t appear worried or sad or anything else I would have thought appropriate. Instead, there was something approaching awe in his face. Zack’s hand was still on my arm, but the rest of his body was twisted around so he could look Sherwood in the face.
“What if?” I asked when it didn’t appear he was going to finish.
To my surprise, Zack gave me a brilliant smile. He let go of my arm and sat back in his chair. “What if everything just remained the same?”
All three of us stared at him.
Around the question of who is Alpha, there is no room for wishes or wants. Any doubt about the ability or suitability of their Alpha makes the whole pack more dangerous—not to their enemies but to themselves and to their allies.
Warren is more dominant than Darryl, my rebel self observed. And because Warren wishes it, Darryl is still our second. But I knew that the situation wasn’t remotely the same. Darryl wasn’t an Alpha, and neither was Warren.
“You know it doesn’t work that way,” said Adam. He might have been answering my thoughts, but he was talking to Zack. Because the other wolf was a submissive and as fragile as any werewolf I’d ever known, Adam’s voice was gentle.
In response, Zack turned to stare at Sherwood.
Submissive wolves don’t generally do things like that.
I looked at Sherwood to make sure he wasn’t going to take offense. And all the little niggling things my subconscious had noticed finally came together and I saw what Zack had seen.
Sherwood was giving Zack a fond-but-exasperated look. It was a look I’d seen directed at me, but not by Sherwood.
“You’re a Cornick,” I said in shock. “I’d recognize that exasperated expression anywhere. Samuel uses it when I beat him at chess.”
3
I KNEW... I knew. But I waited for Sherwood’s response in case I was wrong.
Beside me, Adam quit breathing for a moment, his body tightening like a bowstring. Once I’d pointed it out, he saw it, too.
Bran Cornick, the Marrok, looked like a grad student most of the time, though he was the most powerful werewolf in North America and possibly the world. His firstborn son, Samuel, shared his hair color, but was about eight inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. Bran’s younger son, Charles, took after his Native American mother more than his father’s side of the family.
It was only when the Cornicks were together that it was apparent they were closely related. Their alikeness was subtle, the way they moved, the expressions on their faces—but it was unmistakable. Sherwood looked more like them than they looked like each other.
There were no other Cornicks that I knew of. Bran’s parents were dead. Charles and Samuel were his only surviving children. Samuel had no surviving children. I didn’t know about Charles, but he was half-Salish, and Sherwood showed no signs of having Native heritage. Besides, though Charles was a couple of centuries old, Adam had told me that he thought Sherwood was one of the really old wolves.
“You beat Samuel at chess?” asked Sherwood. I noticed that he didn’t comment about being a Cornick.
“Sometimes,” I answered. Twice was sometimes.
“A Cornick,” said Adam. Only someone who knew him very well would have heard the relief in his voice.
“Does this help?” I asked him. I thought it did, but I wasn’t sure why.
“If he is a Cornick, it might,” Adam answered.
Sherwood half lidded his eyes. That was a Charles-like expression if I’d ever seen one. “If I am?”
“Well, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in the betting pool,” I said, to buy Adam a little time to think. “But Ben will be happy.”
I didn’t understand why I felt relieved that Sherwood was a Cornick rather than any of the scary monsters in the betting book—assuming that being related to Bran meant that Sherwood wasn’t Merlin, King Lycaon, or the Beast of Gévaudan (someone had written “He’s dead, idiots” beside the Beast of Gévaudan in block letters). The problem of Sherwood’s dominance did not just go away because we knew he was related to the Marrok. I knew that it didn’t. But reality apparently didn’t affect how I felt about it.
Adam looked at me. “Ben said that Sherwood is a Cornick?”
“Ben said ‘Bran’s flunky,’ ” I said.