“If my mam had killed you, you’d be dead,” Danny said flatly. One of the prophets grabbed for him, and he dodged away from the swollen hand. He knew the face under the dead wolf, the too-small eyes and too-wide mouth of a girl he’d grown up with. She’d never been particularly nice, but he wondered what she’d done that the Old Man had sent her for a prophet. He growled at her and backed away. “I won’t let you have my sister’s baby.”
Rose leaned forward. Her stomach squelched as it folded around her knee. She tilted her head, and her eyes glittered. It was a look that sourly reminded Danny of Nick. “Are you sure that’s him? Is that therightbaby?”
Danny glanced down. It had been too early for the baby to come, and it had spent hours sweltered in Rose’s curse-foul guts. Yellow-gray crud coated the pale, bluish body like grease, and it had a jellyfish translucency to it. Danny could practically see its heartbeat through its skin. The wean wouldn’t win any prizes, but it was a baby.
The other—
He glanced at what the prophet held roughly by the back of the neck. It looked the same, the rough edges of inhumanity rubbed down from instinct. Danny fumbled the baby he did have as he tried to convince himself that Rose hadn’t exchanged babies in the minute it had taken him to reach her.
She hadn’t.
She couldn’t.
It was possible.
Danny glanced down at the little thing in his arms and tried to see something of Bron in it. When he couldn’t—his little sister had always been bonny, no matter what a goblin she could be—he tightened his grip on it anyhow. Whatever it was, it was new and soft and had no idea why anyone wouldn’t love it. It moved weakly against his chest.
Dogs weren’t that bright either, after all, and a puppy didn’t even need to smell like them for them to take it in. It didn’t even need to be the same species.
“Go fuck yourself,” Danny said harshly. It was satisfying to finally get to spit it the words in her face after days spent in Girvan stuffed unwillingly into his fur. His throat ached with the memory of the too-tight collar. “Maybe I can’t stop you, but I’ll kill him myself before I let you touch him.”
“Liar,” Rose mouthed at him. Then she glanced past Danny into the darkness of the storm and raised her voice. “Do you hear him? He’s going to kill your son, my love. You’ll be trapped again, because of some dog that doesn’t know its place.”
The reek washed over Danny. He retched, the sting of bile in his throat better than the greasy glue of sweet infection and old musk that filled his nose and stuck to his teeth. Danny tightened his grip on the baby and turned around. The shadow under the trees got its feet under it and rose, stiff and unsteady, onto its paws. Wolves were always bigger than people imagined, and the Scottish wolves bigger still. Jack and Gregor were dire wolves the size of ponies, so big that humans just didn’t believe their eyes when they saw them.
The wolf that lowered its scabbed muzzle to sniff the air was the size of a Clydesdale. Its eyes were raw pits scabbed with ice and blood, and its lips were stitched with old, white scars.
It made a passable Fenrir, although Danny balked at the idea it was the real one. He didn’t think he could deal with that, but this was just some old thing from the Wild. A long-dead wolf who—like the thing in the loch—had forgotten the actual boundaries of his body.
Danny had spent his whole life dealing with things bigger and meaner than him.
“It’s not a child,” he said as he backed away. “She made a changeling, some empty thing she stitched together from skin and old bones, a baby she dug up from some hole in the ground.”
Fenrir snorted, his breath visible as it steamed in the cold air. It stank too, like sour milk and morning breath. The baby whimpered, and Fenrir turned his blind head toward it. He twitched a torn ear. Danny scrambled backward. He caught a glimpse of a prophet out of the corner of his eye and twisted to face the man. The baby’s neck felt very small as he closed his hand around it.
“Get away from me, or I’ll do it,” he threatened desperately. “I’ll kill him rather than let you have him.”
He tried to sound like he meant it. He tried to mean it. His mam would have meant it. She’d have killed any of them before she let Rose use them. Danny just hoped that when he didn’t do it, his sister would forgive him one day.
For a second, he thought he heard her voice—the shrill rasp of a howl that was never as piercing as she wanted no matter how she practiced—on the wind. It wasn’t her. If Bron had come up from the loch, she’d have shamed the world into coming with her, but Danny thought maybe she would understand if he was weak.
The prophet spat at him, but he must have thought Danny sounded convincing enough. The scabby-hided man backed away a step.
Fenrir slammed into Danny from the side and knocked him flying. Stones and old sticks scraped at Danny’s back and hips as he rolled. He tried to hunch around the baby to protect it from the impact. He slammed into an old tree, and the frozen paw of a dead dog draped over his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something in the snow—the outline of a fat Labrador in frost and leaves. It bristled at the wolf as it came closer, ears flat as it snarled and snapped. Fenrir swiped a paw through it when it got too close, and the wind pulled it apart.
There was no time to panic or hurt. Danny got his feet under him and shoved himself up. The baby sniffled, so at least it was alive. Fenrir heard it too, and his scarred lips wrinkled back from yellow, ax-sharp teeth as he growled.
“You were in the Old Man,” Danny said. His back was pressed against the tree so hard that he could feel the bark. The reminder made Fenrir pause. “He knew me, he trustedme. Not the old hag.”
Fenrir hesitated, and the growl died away in his throat. It was hard to read his face. He was a wolf, but the scars and his torn-out eyes twisted his expressions out of true. Rose swung her legs off the altar. Her stomach lay open, unzipped like a carrier bag, and she stuffed it with one of the dog hides to fill it up.
“The Old Man didn’t want you,” she said viciously. “No one’s everwantedyou, wolf, no one but me. Now you’re going to turn on me? Betray me?Me?! When I made you a home from my own womb? When Ibledfor you?”
Fenrir flinched like a beaten dog at the accusation. He pinned his ears flat and struck at Danny. His teeth were so close that they were all Danny could see, and then the black bird dropped out of the storm and slammed into the side of Fenrir’s head.
Broad black wings battered at Fenrir’s face while a carved white beak tore at the wolf’s ears and cheeks. Gobbets of flesh were pecked out and discarded as blood filled the carved line in the bird’s beak.
“Nick!” Rose howled in fury as she stood up. “You ungrateful little bastard!”
