Fear locked Dylan’s feet in place. He guessed that since “flight” hadn’t done him much good last time, his body had decided “freeze” was worth a go.
The last time he’d seen Winter’s Wolves had been a year ago, almost to the day. He’d double-crossed them. It hadn’t been intentional, but he didn’t know if that would do him any good.
“You?” the wolf said. Its voice sounded harsh, as if it had to force the words out. “You…aren’t meant to be here. Our hunt is soon, but not yet.”
Dylan swallowed the dry lump in his throat.
It didn’t seem to remember him. Or maybe they weren’t the same wolves. That would teach Dylan to be wolf-racist.
The absurdity of that thought almost startled him into a laugh. Not quite. His ribs hurt too much, for a start.
“Then what are you here for?” he asked.
The wolf cocked its head to the side. It had the same expression on its face as a confused golden retriever on TikTok…just pointier and bloodier.
When the wolf continued to draw a blank, someone else answered for him.
“For our ticket,” a low, rough voice said from behind him.
Dylan jerked around.
Two thorn-wrapped wolves stood on the road behind him. Unlike the driver of the Jeep, who still looked…more or less…a twisted human, these looked like twisted wolves. Ice-crusted briars and thorny runners twisted around the original person to bulk and reshape it. They crouched on the road on paws made of dark burls and cracked the concrete of the road with frost-gray claws. Boughs of holly bulked out their shoulders and ruff, red berries splattered over them like blood.
The man who’d spoken stood between them. He had a black eye and a backpack slung over his shoulder.
“What?” Dylan said. It probably wasn’t the best question to ask, but it was the best that Dylan could come up with under the circumstances.
The man started to answer, stopped, and coughed into his elbow. It was a surprisingly polite move for a monster. When he straightened up, he wiped dirty slush from the corner of his mouth.
“Our ticket,” he repeated. “We need it to go home. So we’re going to take it.”
He waited like he expected Dylan to object. So it probably wasn’t a lost stub from Amtrak he’d dropped.
“I don’t think we’ve got it,” Dylan said.
The man’s face twisted with quick, inhuman rage as something sharp and dark writhed under his skin… and then it was gone. He grinned instead, his teeth very white and his gums very red, and tapped his finger against his nose.
“That’s right,” he said. “If the eye doesn’t see then hearts won’t feel. Turn your cheek, Sainted. We won’t tell.”
Something scraped behind Dylan, and he remembered the driver of the Jeep. He looked over his shoulder and saw the blond wolf had gotten closer.
Its coat flapped open in the wind, as much as it could with the thorns woven through it, and Dylan saw the T-shirt. It was faded and greasy, the wear of a good year on cheap cotton and cheaper print, but it was still just about legible.
It was the same Wolf Pack T-shirt a man had worn to his friend’s bachelor party at theJust-as-Higha year ago, before Winter’s wolves claimed him. The same wolves, which meant the same pack leader.
The man who, a year ago, had been going to marry the woman in the back of Dylan’s ambulance. That probably wasn’t a coincidence.
“Don’t do this,” Dylan said, and he took a wary step backward as he glanced back and forth between the wolves. “I can help you.”
The blond wolf snorted, snotty and wet, and feinted a charge in Dylan’s direction. Dylan flinched and nearly tripped over his own feet.
“You can’t even help yourself,” the groom said with contempt.
Something creaked behind Dylan. He looked around to see the back of the ambulance swing open and Alice scramble out. She hung on to the door for balance as she looked around. There was a goose-egg bump on her temple, the bruising visible through her tangled hair, and blood smeared over her mouth and nose.
“Wha’…what’s going on?” she asked. “Dylan. We gotta get her to the…to the hospital. She’s—”
The groom jerked his head at one of the wolves that flanked him. It shook itself, shedding a cloud of frost, and started forward.
