“The dog’s already dead,” Gregor spat as he tried to shove Jack out of the way. “Even Lachlan isn’t going to fuck that up.”
Overhead the bird’s caw was a sharp, insistent sound that made Lachlan flinch and cast a quick, nervous glance at nothing. At most, at a shadow.
“Shut up. Shut up,” he muttered as he shifted away. He dug his fingers into the dog’s nose until his nails broke the skin. “I didn’t do it. Leave me be. Bother them!”
He backhanded the hair with his ruined hand. Outlined by snow and blood, Jack saw a sketch of a girl. The brief glimpse of her profile was dark as loch water, and her expression was mean and pinched with anger.
Then the bloody snow drifted away and the faint lines of her were gone. Jack was left with the idea that she looked familiar, although he couldn’t place her. Lachlan still could, or at least he knew she was there.
Someone groaned—a harsh, raw splutter of grief. Jack looked at Gregor first and then over at the Old Man. He’d stopped his slow crawl through the snow and stared at the space the girl had been, his battered face twisted with ugly intensity. It was bleak and angry, but for the first time, it was Da and not some angry beast that glowered out of those dark eyes.
“Da,” Gregor said as he recognized it too.
The Old Man didn’t look at either of them. His bloodshot eyes were focused on Lachlan, who shuddered and stepped away from the weight of that banked rage. The dog squirmed in his grip and kicked him. His nails raised welts on Lachlan’s legs.
“I’ll kill the dog!” Lachlan yelled, but his voice cracked, and he jerked his head away from something at his cheek. “I killed its ma, didn’t I?”
The Old Man growled and dragged himself to his feet. He staggered as though something hooked into his shoulders was trying to pull him back.
“Not. Again,” he ground out through his ruined teeth. “You won’t. Betray us. Again.”
Something gave at that idea—a wolf-god’s centuries-old resentment toward his traitors, maybe—and the Old Man roared forward. Lachlan dropped the dog, who splayed out awkwardly as his paws hit the ground, and pulled a stained knife from the back of his jeans.
He sliced the Old Man’s throat open down to the bone and then jammed the knife hilt-deep in his gut, through the torn muscle, and into the soft organs. His elbow pumped as he jabbed the knife in again and again.
The Old Man got his hands around Lachlan’s throat, but he didn’t squeeze. His battered fingers twitched weakly, and then he grunted softly as though it surprised him. He fell backward into the snow and cupped his hands over the ruin of his stomach.
No one moved. Lachlan looked more shocked than any of them, almost guilty as he stumbled back with his bloody hands held in front of him. The dog nudged the Old Man’s fingers with its nose and then scrambled to its feet to snarl at Lachlan.
A newborn squalled, the sound drawn out like taffy by the wind, and the Old Man died.
Jack held his breath and waited, but that was it. He’d been wrong, he thought dully. The Wild didn’t ring with Da’s passing. He was gone, and there was meat where he’d been. Jack was truly the Numitor now. He could feel it in his bones.
Chapter Twenty-Seven—Danny
THE DOGfelt sick and sorry for itself as it snarled at Lachlan. It hurt from its nose to its paws, the Old Man smelled like a dead thing—and that was wrong—and the stink of blood and screams from the fight made it flinch under its skin.
It wanted to run, but it stayed. For Jack, for Bron’s pup.
Loyalty the dog could understand. The rest of this it would leave for Danny to make sense of.
Lachlan grinned at them, his teeth bloody in a face that hadn’t worked out how to put itself back together.
“It’s done,” he said. “You’re too late, Jack. Fenrir is born again in blood and in death. And I killed the Old Man. You all treated me like shit, like a dog, but I’m the one who put him down!”
The dog snarled and lunged for Lachlan. He flinched back in surprise from bared teeth and then jumped away from the chill touch of something the dog couldn’t see. It wasthere. The dog knew that in the hackles over its shoulders, and so did Lachlan. They just couldn’t see it. Lachlan spat at it and laughed as he staggered into the storm.
“You should have showed throat when you had the chance,” he yelled over the howl of the storm. “Maybe Bron will. She was still alive when I left her. I should fix that.”
The dog snarled furiously and charged after him. Jack shoulder-checked it off course, and Gregor grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and hauled it up onto its back legs.
“Leave him,” Gregor snapped. “Lachlan doesn’t matter anymore. We need to get to Rose, before she kills another fucking child. Bron’s child. Mine.”
The dog showed its teeth to Lachlan, so he knew, and backed, stiff-legged, away from him. It whined sadly as it passed the Old Man. Danny’s feelings for the Numitor were complicated, but the dog’s world had always been simpler. It could just do what Danny couldn’t easily do—mourn.
Somewhere in the storm, the wind caught the threads of the child’s thin, weak cry and tossed it to them. It caught at Danny’s instincts with the knowledge that this was his kin, his sister’s pup.
“Follow Rose,” he said. “You’re fast enough to catch her. We’ll be behind you.”
