He didn’t even see the blow coming. It caught him on his blind side and slammed him into a low, rough-edged rock. The stone dug into his ribs—he felt the pop before he felt the pain—and knocked the breath out of him. He tried to suck in a breath or struggle to his feet, but he couldn’t do either just yet. His ears rang with a sharp, precise note….
Lachlan walked out of the snow. Blood coated his stomach and dripped down his thighs from the raw patches of skin on his stomach.
“Your dog taught me something,” Lachlan said as he reached the crowbar over his head. Slick muscle moved visibly under his skin. “What the fuck do I get out of a fair fight?”
He brought the crowbar down. Jack tried to move out of the way, but his body didn’t want to cooperate.
Chapter Twenty-Six—Jack
HIS FRONTleg snapped between the crowbar and the frozen ground. It stitched roughly together, but the crowbar was already back up over Lachlan’s shoulder. Jack sucked in a breath—his lungs still tender from the recent thump—and braced himself.
The dog hit Lachlan in the back and knocked him forward. He stumbled over Jack and went face-first onto the stone. The dog snapped and snarled in his ear—what was left of it after it got shredded in the dog’s teeth—while Lachlan gagged on his own blood and flailed blindly as he tried to get the dog off him.
Jack scrambled out from under Lachlan’s feet and hesitated. He had to get to Rose and stop her. If he didn’t, if she got her hooks into Fenrir, then it didn’t matter how many of her monsters and traitors they killed. They’d lose.
But it was the dog. It was Danny.
Lachlan swung the crowbar blindly over his shoulder. The hooked end caught the dog on the shoulder and tore a wet, bloody gash through the gray hide. The dog whined at the pain but didn’t scramble away. Instead it sank its teeth into Lachlan’s shoulder and viciously shook its head as it tried to rip the tendon and bone out of its moorings. Lachlan howled at the pain and dropped the crowbar so he could reach back and grab the dog by the scruff.
It wasDanny. If anything happened to him, Jack would have already lost.
He shot in and tore Lachlan’s hamstrings out with his teeth. The blood that spilled over his tongue tasted… thin and familiar. It tasted like Gregor the times Jack had pinned him down long enough to get his teeth into him, like Jack’s own blood as it coated his throat after a punch to the face.
It made him retch in surprise and back off a step.
Lachlan screeched in rage as he dragged the dog off—strips of his shoulder still caught in the dog’s jaws—and threw him aside. The dog rolled as he hit the ground and scrambled to his feet, his wiry coat matted with blood and a low, rattling snarl in his throat.
Dogs were useful to the Pack because they were likable. Happy things that enjoyed the collar and didn’t upset the human world with reminders of the teeth and hunger that waited in the dark and the trees. They were tame creatures that wagged their tails and grinned happily if they liked you.
But that wasn’t the dog that faced Lachlan and made him flinch back against the bloody pile of rocks. This was the dog that humans kept becauseitknew what waited in the dark, the loyal companion that chased off monsters while they slept and had forgotten how to run.
It was the dog that the Wild remembered, and maybe it wasn’t so far off what Danny had always been.
Lachlan pressed his hand to his torn neck and inhaled nervously.
“Just a dog,” he said, as if he needed to remind himself. He spat at it. “The Wild knew it didn’t want you when your ma squeezed you out….”
The dog took a stiff-legged step forward and gave Jack an impatient sidelong glance. It knew what Jack should be doing too.
Even without Danny’s shape, Jack could hear his voice in the back of his head,I can take care of myself. Go.
Jack didn’t want to—heneededto believe Danny knew that—but he did it anyhow. He was the Numitor, and he had a duty… at least until what was left of his pack rejected him. After that, he’d find Danny… one way or another.
He snarled at Lachlan with an old, familiar threat in his throat and left them to their fight. Monsters and Sannock stumbled out of the near-whiteout snow around him as they tore at each other, bloodied and muddied and gone again. The ghost hounds blew through on the storm, all wind-sketched ears and bloody maws as they harried anyone they came across. Jack could hear them above him, howls shredded on the wind, as they hunted the bird.
The one person Jack didn’t need to look for was Gregor. He might not know where his brother was, but they were both headed in the same direction.
Da found them first. He hit Jack shoulder first out of the storm and bowled him over like a pup, ears over tail in the snow. It was so like the games they’d played years ago that Jack was paralyzed for a second as his brain tried to make sense of it.
If Da remembered the same thing, it didn’t give him pause. He wrapped his hands around Jack’s long, narrow head and squeezed.
Gregor saved him. Again. He hooked his arm around the Old Man’s throat and throttled him until he let go of Jack to deal with the new threat. As he scrambled back to his feet, Jack groggily made a note to himself to tally who owed what and see who the loser was. He didn’t want to die in debt to Gregor.
It was stupid, but the old habit of pettiness helped Jack focus. The end of the world might have slipped out of the wolves’ control, the man he loved might or might not die at the teeth of a petty bully, and Da wasn’t dead but a traitor—all of that was so big that Jack didn’t know where to start. A lifetime of scorekeeping with his brother was just an instinct.
Jack ignored the dull ache in his head and joined the fight. He sank his teeth into Da’s wrist as Da swung it at Gregor, and he grunted in shock as Da lifted him off his feet. His jaw ached as his weight dangled from it, the hot pulse of his da’s blood on his tongue. Except it wasn’t Da, not the one Jack knew. There was something… gone, new, different… about his scent and theideaof him in the Wild.
There wasn’t time to put his paw on it as Da swung Jack around and smacked him against a tree. The coating of ice cracked and gouged into Jack’s side. He grunted and lost his grip on Da’s arm, but before Da could rally, Gregor slammed into him from the side and kicked Da’s knee out from under him with the always surprisingly loud pop of a dislocation as the leg bent entirely the wrong way.
