“I should go,” he said as he turned back to the others. “Alone.”
“No,” Jack and Gregor snapped at the same moment.
It made Danny blink uncomfortably. He’d never had trouble telling Jack from Gregor. Even though they had the same face, they wore it differently. It was moments like this, when who they were ran in lockstep, that caught him off-balance. Even if they’d reached that stop from different directions.
“What if Rose is there?” Jack asked. “Or the prophets are there to stop you from reaching the Old Man.”
“So you can put Jack’s side first?” Gregor said. “Get Da to back him?”
“Why?” Nick asked. He brushed snow off a rock and sat down with a sigh of relief. Once they left the road, he’d limped most of the last few miles. Birds and pathologists didn’t do much hiking. He tucked his hands between his knees and looked curious. “I’d think this Numitor would want to see his sons first?”
Danny’s cheeks hurt from the cold as he smiled grimly. “I forgot that you don’t know him,” he said. “Jack was told to leave, and now he’s come back. Gregor was told to stay, and he left. No one told me to leaveorasked me to stay. The Numitor probably won’t be happy to see me, but he won’t be angry either.”
“That’s what you think,” Jack corrected as he stalked over to poke a finger against Danny’s forehead. “You think he won’t be angry. You think the prophets won’t be ready for you. But thinking isn’t knowing, Danny-dog.”
Danny moved his head away with a flicker of annoyance. “What I know is that the Old Man doesn’t like to be defied. He’ll at least hear me out, long enough for me to convince him he needs to listen to what you and Gregor have to say.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
Sometimes Danny could still feel the choke of the prophets’ collar on his throat, so tight that every time he swallowed it made him retch and strangle. The prophets had never cared one way or the other about him when he was a boy, but either that indifference had been an act or they’d coarsened themselves with their rites and rituals. They’d taken great delight in the petty torment of a dog.
It had cowed him. He didn’t know why, maybe because, for the first time, he couldn’t fight back or because he’d realized he was going to die before anyone came to get him. It turned out he’d been wrong about that, but…. If the prophets got him again, would they have to start from scratch or where the fault lines already were?
A wolf would have survived… better. Bounced back without scars. Danny hadn’t, but he wasn’t going to betray that to Jack. He wouldn’t be the liability, especially not when others had suffered more than he had.
So he shrugged as he dropped his backpack to the ground.
“You get to play the hero again.” He cast a glance toward the black, sullen waters of the loch, the ice crusted outward from the rocky shore. “This time, try and get me outbeforethey dunk me in the water.”
Jack growled under his breath. “If you get yourself in trouble again,” he threatened as he scruffed the back of Danny’s neck, “maybe this time I won’t bother to get you out of it. Think about that before you dive headfirst into a fight.”
Most of Danny knew that wasn’t true. Even when they were kids, Jack was always there when Danny needed him. Even if he couldn’t always interfere—some of the fights Danny had gotten into were ones he picked—Jack was always there to drag Danny back to his feet afterward.
Butmostwasn’tall. There was always that cold sliver of doubt somewhere in his heart that believed his ma instead. She always told him to never depend on Jack,“You need him, he wants you. One day you’ll both realize it’s not the same thing, but you’ll be the one left bleeding.”
Danny never paid any attention, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t listened.
“Good thing I can swim, then,” he said as he stripped down to his skin. Then he turned it for another. “Take the long way around. By the time you get there, they’ll have either listened or not.”
The dog sneezed and shook itself from ears to tail to shed rough gray hairs onto the snow.Everythingthat had worried at Danny sloughed away like dead skin, too full ofstuffto fit into the dog’s thoughts.
It knew where they were—for Danny, for later—but the dog was built for now. What mattered was the bite of cold in its nose, the itch on its back leg, and Jack’s hand as he rubbed its ears. Tomorrow and yesterday, the prophets and their monsters, heartbreak and longing—it would worry about them when they got here.
The dog leaned against Jack’s legs and grunted happily as Jack scratched under its jaw.
“Be careful,” Jack said. “Don’t get killed.”
The dog thought about that for a second and then dropped it with the rest of the things that were for its Danny-self to handle.
It knew it was to go over the loch to find the Old Man. Once the dog had done that, it would do whatever came next. If it got stuck, then it would pull its skin back on and let Danny worry.
The dog pushed its cold nose into Jack’s palm, snorted wetly between his fingers, and then scrambled down the side of the loch and onto the ice. The dog could feel the distant echo of Danny’s exasperation as it slid over the frozen sheet and into the frigid water, but it ignored it as struck out for the far shore.
Halfway over, it realized there was already someone there before it. A figure crouched on the rocks, half hidden between them and with their scent deadened by the cold and the water, watched the dog get closer.
The dog barked, but the sound was lost in the wind that rippled the water. It hesitated for a second, tongue dangled out between its teeth to trail in the water as the wind pushed it toward the far shore.
Stubbornness was part of the core kernel of identity that passed between skins. The dog laid his ears flat to his head, sneezed out water, and forced cold-numb legs back into motion.
