It would have been a good time to strike, but Danny didn’t think he could muster much of a fight. So he grabbed the pale gold hide from the tree and yanked it off the spikes. The wind caught it and then it settled around the shape of a dog.
The Lab gave itself a shake to settle in, woofed happily, and threw itself at Fenrir with all the fury of a genial but very heavy dog pushed too far. Rose screamed at it, but the Wild slid away from her words. It was just an old woman’s rage.
No matter how the Wild bent to meet the wolves’ needs, at the end of the day, it had its own vision of how the world should be, an idea that it had stitched through onto the real world as the Winter spread white and old over the country.
The Wild thought dogs should run in packs, not answer to a wolf.
Danny could feel the thread that the Wild pierced through him—the old Lab’s sorrow at her death and the memory of a pup fat and content against her belly. She wouldn’t let this wolf have the squalling thing in Danny’s arms.
“The skins,” Danny yelled. He lunged past another prophet and yanked a collie’s spotted fur off a gorse. The wind plucked it out of his hands, and he felt the collie’s furious determination to see off a predator it understood, gene deep, would prey on its flock. “Get them loose.”
The bird took half of Fenrir’s ear with it as it pushed off his skull. It raked a prophet’s face down to the bone with its talons and ripped a red, glossy setter skin off the nails that pinned it to an old fence post. It took off in the wrong direction, corrected itself in a tangle of legs and kicked-up snow, and dashed back into the fight with mad glee and unpredictable speed.
A spaniel. A shepherd. A dachshund that decided, in death, that it was finally the size it always believed it was—mongrels that had been pampered pets and ones that had been nearly as feral as wolves.
The prophets had killed a lot of dogs on their way here, and Rose hadn’t entertained the idea that someone would cut their leashes. Free of whatever spells the prophets had chained them with, the dogs darted between Fenrir’s feet and snapped at his tail. The monsters lumbered around in circles as the dogs, just hide and wind, disappeared into the storm.
Danny wrenched a curly-furred skin off an old rowan. Whatever dog it belonged to was already gone. The skin dangled limply from his fingers.
He turned, and Lachlan grabbed him by the throat. His face had healed, but not quite right. A drooping eyelid half obscured his glare as he slammed Danny back into the tree.
“Give me the baby,” he snarled.
Danny kneed him in the balls. The man really never learned. Although to be fair, he knew how to take a punch. Lachlan hunched over as Danny’s bony knee crushed his balls, but he didn’t loosen his grip. His thumb crushed Danny’s windpipe until the blood pulsed in Danny’s ears and behind his eyes.
“You can fuck every wolf you meet,” Lachlan said as he straightened back up. “It wouldn’t change shit. You’re still just a fucking dog.”
The dachshund, badger-sized and hefty, tore Lachlan’s calves open with icicle teeth. Its ears, half skin and half sheer fuck-off attitude, flapped as it locked on and shook its whole body. Lachlan swore as he threw Danny aside and turned to kick furiously at the snarling hound.
“Get the baby, you idiot,” Rose yelled. “He matters more than your pride or your hamstrings.”
Lachlan turned on her. His neck was red, the muscles in his scarred shoulders bunched as he stood in front of her. “You said you loved me! You promised meeverything, and all I got was fucked.”
Rose slapped him out of the way. The almost absentminded backhand laid Lachlan out in the snow.
“I lied.” She stalked past him. “You don’t matter at all.”
Danny scrambled backward away from her. His shoulder had popped out of the socket when he hit the ground, and there wasn’t time to push it back in. He glanced down at the baby. It looked cold, snow caught in its scant strands of hair, but when he pinched its leg, it screwed up its face and mewled weakly.
“I’m going to try,” he promised it.
The dogs harried Rose as she stalked toward Danny. They snapped at her heels and nipped at her close-stitched hides, but they couldn’t stop her. And the more dogs came after her, the fewer there were to distract Fenrir.
Danny cursed himself for a dog, because Lachlan was right. He’d gotten in over his head, made promises he couldn’t keep, and now he was going to die.
Him and the baby.
Then Bron, just so she could come to find him and kick his ass.
“Give me the fucking baby,” Rose snarled. She kicked Danny in the chest as he tried to get up and pushed him down into the snow. “Fucking Kathleen. Dog or bitch, all her whelps are a pain in my ass. I’m going to changeeverything, I’m going to rewrite the world, and all quail before murdering one child. I would kill themall, and when I’m a god, people will call it my tithe.”
The bird dropped out of the sky and shed its feathers. Nick stepped forward. “Gran,” he said, his hands held out. “Don’t. Just stop. Maybe everyone is against you because you’re wrong.”
She sneered at him. “If your ma begging me not to kill her, the pup I squeezed between my own legs, didn’t work, do you really think I care about this mongrel?”
Her heel dug into Danny’s chest as she leaned down to pull the baby roughly out of his arms. Nick cursed her and grabbed for feathers again as he took off. He shot skyward as he cawed his anger in a rough, furious voice.
Danny cursed him for a coward as Rose straightened up with the baby in her arms. It clenched its fist and puled its displeasure. She ignored the thin little whimper as she spread her hand over its chest. Fur sprouted between her knuckles and crawled toward her wrist. Her fingernails thickened and darkened, blood at the quick, into claws that she dug into the baby’s chest.
