The bird dipped out of the storm overhead. Its wings were rimed with frost, threads of it spread over black pinions like lacework, and it cracked on its beak as he croaked at them. It turned on one weighted wing, buffeted by the wind, and headed toward the frozen sea of the moors.
The dog lifted his head off Jack and focused on the bird, ears pricked forward as though it were prey. The side of its face was still bloody, half-frozen and raw, but it ignored that as it bolted after the bird. The big gray dog plunged over the lip of the hill and skidded down through the shale and snow, his momentum all that kept him on his feet and aimed at the right one.
“Not going to be shown up by a dog,” Gregor said dourly as he pushed himself up straight. He flashed Jack a shadow of his old, challenging smirk. “Last hunt, brother. Let’s see who’s best.”
He followed Danny down the hill, nearly on his ass as he slid down, one misstep away from a fall. His boots kicked deep muddy furrows in the virgin sheet of untouched white. Jack tensed to lunge after him—old habits and older instincts—and then hesitated as he remembered the Sannock. Before he could check on them, they surged past him and ran over Gregor’s trail, gleeful as malicious children as they kicked stones and trampled the brittle leaves of frozen heather underfoot.
The Sannock had been tragic and dead, but even in memorial, no one had ever claimed they were nice.
Jack chased after them and growled to himself in annoyance at being last. The wind yanked at his ears and tweaked his tail as he dodged through the Sannock’s legs. It buffeted him roughly, a rude shove that banged his shoulder against a rock or rolled the snow away from under his feet.
Overhead the bird pitched and rolled on the wind. Its wings battered the air, wrenched and awkward as it tried to make headway.
Did the Wild agree with the rest of the Pack that they should let Fenrir rise, no matter how? Jack’s head ached at the thought, but he roughly pushed it away. He didn’t serve the Wild any more than it served him. If it wanted to stop him, it would have to do worse than a breeze.
Maybe it didn’t want to. The closer Jack got to the bottom of the hill, the more the push and pull of the Wild felt less angry and more… impatient. It reminded Jack of sleepy mornings and the clip of his da’s hand around his ear to hurry him on down to the ferry.
The memory made Jack’s heart rattle painfully against his ribs as he sucked in his breath. He let it ache as he reached the bottom of the hill. It felt right to mourn here, even if he couldn’t stop to do it.
The bird was already gone, tossed on the storm. It was the unsteady cross of his shadow they chased over the snow. The dog raced ahead on long, rangy legs, just a shadow of lean haunches and tail in the storm. For once, there wasn’t any sense of joy in the long stretch of the lean body, just determination. At some point they slid out of the Sannocks’ way, into the Wild and back into the world, where the snow was tinged with gray and the air was stale with use.
Jack pushed himself into a dead run and ignored the danger of the uneven ground underfoot. His lungs ached, swollen with the cold, and his muscles were hot and liquid as they stretched and pulled along his bones. The Wild pulsed through his veins, green and sharp as nettles, and stitched him back together—a cracked ankle as his paw plunged into a pothole, the burst blood vessels that spat blood up his throat and onto his tongue—so he could run.
He didn’t have to stop. The thought itched through his head that he’d never have to stop, he could just let the Wild have him. A distant howl caught his ear. Twisted on the wind, it almost sounded like one of his wolves. Like home. He could stay here, where it didn’t matter if the world ended in blood, fire, and ice. The Wild had existed once and so it always would. The wolf could stay and hunt, chase endless prey whose meat was so clean it was almost candied. Forever.
Jack sucked in a lungful of air. Snow melted on his tongue, and the cold was sharp and seasoned with Danny. Layered under the sweat-and-hair smell of the dog, Jack could taste Danny’s clean, familiar smell. If he stayed in the Wild, Danny couldn’t stay with him.
That wasn’t a choice at all.
Jack powered up a steep hill and caught up with an exhausted Danny at the top. He stumbled to a stop and stared down at the line of prophets and monsters as they struggled into the storm. The wind that was at Jack’s tail, under his feet, had shifted to be in their faces. They hunched down and huddled together against the cold as the wind pried at their stolen hides and pinched their noses. Patchwork wolves loped along beside monsters with chill-blistered skins and blackened extremities. Some of the wolves, their fur matted and hides full of rotted holes, were hard to tell from the monsters.
In the middle of the group, Rose stumbled grimly along, her arms folded under her swollen, bloodstained stomach as though it might tear away from her ribs if it slipped. A hunched figure sloped along beside her, wrapped in dog hides tied with dirty lengths of string around wrists and over a barrel chest. The figure staggered in the snow and fell with a thud to the ground. A length of the twine slipped out of Rose’s fingers, and she cursed a sharp, foul retort.
The thing on the ground rolled away from her and scrambled onto all fours. It struck out at one of the prophets with a clawed hand—paw?—and tore the woman’s stomach out in one wet handful. Blood splattered the snow a shocking red, and the figure shouldered the woman out of the way as he made a dash for freedom.
He ran like a bear, a lumbering shuffle that covered more ground than you’d expect as he charged into the storm. The mishmash of hides tied around him flapped raggedly in the wind as he ran—a flayed leg, a dry bush of a tail, an ear that had always torn loose from its moorings.
Lachlan tackled the man before he could get away, and they crashed into the snow in a tangle of limbs and stolen skins. They snarled as they punched and kicked at each other. The hide-covered man came out on top, with Lachlan pinned to the ground by the shoulders, his thick cable sweater torn to rags as the drool dripped onto his face from the man’s snarl. Just before Lachlan lost his nose, Rose grabbed the loose end of the twine from the ground.
She yanked, and the man came to heel.
The roughly tied hides had bagged and torn in the shuffle. Under them, blood smeared the man’s body in thick, clotted streaks that had dried into scabs on his thick hair. It didn’t quite hide the old blue-black rank marks that curled over his shoulders and circled thick thighs.
Jack took a shocked breath of cold air, and it cramped in his chest. His ribs squeezed in around the weight of recognition as though that might contain the pain. It was Gregor who managed to put it into words.
“It’s Da,” he said. “What the fuck has she done to the Old Man?”
As if he’d heard them, the Old Man snarled and scraped at the thick, pale leather collar that dug into his throat. His nails tore open old sores and dug new ones into the blotched, irritated skin. Rose yanked on the lead again and then winced. She reached under her coat and pressed her hand to her stomach.
“Look at that,” she crooned as she pulled her coat open. Her stomach hung, bruised and stretched until it was ready to tear, in a heavy fold over her hipbones. She rubbed it with her hand as though she were a real mother instead of an old monster who’d slit her own grandson open. Then she dug her finger and thumb down into the loose skin to pinch at whatever was in there and make it squirm. “The baby wants to meet his da.”
The Old Man snarled at her. It didn’t sound like him. The sound was too deep, too…bigto come from him. It felt more like something else was behind him and snarled through his mouth.
Lachlan scrambled to his feet. His torso was raw, and great swatches of skin had peeled off to reveal raw meat and muscle underneath. He scraped snow from the nape of his neck and spat at the Old Man.
“We should kill him now,” he said. “He’s just slowing us down.”
Jack tensed and glanced behind him. They had left the Sannock behind, shadows in the snow. It wouldn’t take them long to catch up, but it might be too long for Da.
