Prologue
FOR THEfirst time in generations, the Numitor came down from his high perch, crossed the dark waters of the loch, and walked into town. He arrived on four feet, drenched and with ice heavy in his thick ruff, but shrugged his skin back on and padded naked through the empty streets.
A courtesy he remembered, although to whom had slipped away from him.
Wolves wore the years lightly enough. The Numitor might be old, his hair run to gray and most who’d loved him in the ground, but he was strong and straight. Every full moon he led the hunt, and only a few of his wolves could keep pace with him. But if age couldn’t claim her tithe from his flesh and bones, she’d take her due from his memory.
She’d give him fifty years, a hundred even, but after that, she had first pick. It had seemed like nothing at first—a first kiss whose face was worn down to the scruff of ginger stubble and theideaof love, a brawl he could remember every detail of except it floated unmoored in the “when,” a promise he’d made to someone important enough it was ingrained in his bones even when the idea of them was a ghost—but what was gone was gone forever.
Now, when he looked back over his long, bloody life, it was like an old house someone had started to shut up for the night. Some rooms were lost, bricked off, and others were only lit by a few fairy lights of sweet memories. And every time one of his old friends died or some touchstone wore to nothing under the passage of years, another light went out.
Frost crusted on the thick fur that layered his body even as a human and pinched his toes and the tips of his ears as he walked through the abandoned brick boxes of Lochwinnoch. Most people had left early, locked their doors and drawn their curtains behind them. For a few days after the town was all but abandoned, it still lit up at night, clockwork precise as the old lamplighters, until the wind tore up the electricity pylons. Some villagers had left it until the last moment—the priest, old farmers in their crofts—as though they thought the old gray stones of this place somehow belonged to them.
The Numitor had sent the Wild to the wolves to show them their error. Broken doors and slaughtered herds, supplies that rotted overnight or sprouted like they’d been planted and seen the year through to harvest.
He’d no desire to kill them. The people of Lochwinnoch had been tolerable enough over the decades, insular and incurious about their neighbors and the sullen, wild children who came over the lake to have figures and letters drummed into their heads no matter how much they snarled about it.
They were wolves, but they were men too. A wolf had its fangs and its speed, but a man had the brain between his ears and what he put into it. The Numitor had no room in his space for a fool who wouldn’t keep both honed.
Tolerable or not, there was no place for them here but in the ground. The Wolf Age had begun, and there was no place for men but as prey.
Most of them had realized that on their own. They’d left their houses open to the elements, once-scrubbed hallways full of snow and the things they held precious left to crack and ruin in the cold. Better the things than the people. For now, anyhow.
As for the ones who’d stayed, the Numitor had come to deal with them himself. Some things you didn’t delegate.
The old gray walls of the church were limned with ice. It dripped down from the snow-tipped spire and clotted around the windows and the high peak of the door. The Numitor’s skin stuck to the black iron gate, the metal hinges frost-cracked and broken, as he pushed it open and walked up to the door.
It was unlocked. Not that it would have stopped him if it weren’t.
Candles burned on every surface—thick yellow wax dripped in long trails down the altar and walls, and cast unsteady, gray shadows over the walls and windows.
The priest was still there, seated in black robes and a heavy parka on one of the old oak benches. A black fisherman’s hat was pulled down low over his ears, and white tufts of hair stuck out under it. The head was in his lap, loosely cradled in his arms. It had been severed roughly at the neck, the skin torn in ragged strips and the pink-stained vertebra cracked.
Blood puddled around the old man’s boots, dark red and curdled with the cold as it sank into the stones. It was still fresh, the salt and metal tang of it sharp as it rose off the cold stone.
The bittersweet nostalgia that had dogged the Numitor’s heels like weeds from the lake withered under a raw-meat flash of anger. He had no real desire to murder an old priest tonight, but that someone had dared to snatch his kill from between his teeth made him growl. The sound echoed off the high bare walls.
“So, whose balls dropped?” the Numitor asked. He walked into the church, and his feet left wet prints on the stone as he paced from flag to flag. The air smelled of blood and hot wax, cut with a bitter undertone of some spiced incense that itched the throat. He coughed and spat to clear it. “Or was it your fangs? You here to challenge the old wolf?”
Somewhere in the building, something scraped, metal on metal. The Numitor turned toward the noise and took a step forward. His heel came down in the puddle of blood, unexpected warmth between his toes, and then he heard the heavy rasp of labored breathing outside.
More than one. Had he grown old enough to miss such an obvious trap, he wondered, but then he felt the evergreen tug of the Wild in his bones. He took a deep breath of it—a cold so clean it burned—and let it ripple through the church. For a moment, haphazard old trees, trunks glued together with moss and frost, took the place of the walls. The eerie blue of a sky untouched by smog shone overhead, and a stag’s raw head, antlers glassy with ice, was strung from the branches. Misshapen shadows moved through the trees, snouts wreathed with the wet steam of their breath.
In the Wild they stank of rot, greasy sweet like old pork in the back of the Numitor’s throat, and a hint of that sweet, pickled incense. He let the woods and the trees slip away from him, burst like bubbles on the hard-edged stone of this world, and he could almost taste the smoky burn of perfume on his tongue and something like….
Sickness.The nicotine and sour smell of a sick room, of curdled ulcers and the hopeless sweat of someone who didn’t think they’d get better. The stink of it reached down the Numitor’s throat and stoked the heady flush of anger. Another scent cut through that fetid stink, though—a familiar one.
He pulled the wolf up until it pressed hot and itchy against the underside of his skin, the fangs and ache behind the bones of his skull.
“Jack,” he said. He should have known. What other wolf would walk the Wild to come and challenge him here? Now, at the end of things. The reek of them… there were strange things in the Wild these days. Old things. Maybe they’d killed something foul and rolled in it. “Gregor. Which of you is it, boy? Who’s come home?”
It shouldn’t have been an easy choice. He’d tried to love them both, and he would mourn the fallen, but he knew which son would take something of who the wolves were now through the long wolf age.
The wolf split through his skin. He let the thick, dense hair bristle over his shoulders and crawl down to his knuckles, the sharp nails on the ends of his fingers split to let claws through, but no further. The wolf pushed at the back of his throat, but he scruffed it back. He wanted to say goodbye to his last son.
It was the first time he’d been challenged and not wanted to win. He’d kill his child—again—if he had to. The wolves needed a strong leader, but if Jack, or Gregor, put their teeth in his throat, he’d not curse them for it.
Age had already closed up the windows and boarded the doors of his life. Maybe it was time for him to turn off the lights and leave before winter.
