“For your mother’s sake,” she said, as blood dripped onto Danny’s chest. “I won’t make you watch.”
The baby cried harder, shrill and breathy, as Rose squeezed it like a fruit.
Danny dragged in a wheezy breath through the pressure on his chest. There was one thing Rose was right about. He was his mother’s son, and Kath had taught him one thing. If you can hurt them, do it.
He craned his head forward, pain all the way down between his shoulder blades, and sank his teeth into Rose’s shin. His teeth were blunt and human, but that just meant he had to bite down harder.
Rose jumped in surprise and staggered backward. She caught herself, and her mouth twisted in mean satisfaction as she made an abrupt gesture at a prophet.
“Fine,” she said. “If you want to watch, then you’ll watch.”
Torn hides littered the top of the hill. The dogs still snarled and tore at the monsters, but there were fewer of them. Fenrir snapped them up from the ground and shook the spirits out of their skins.
A prophet dragged Danny to his feet and hauled him over to watch as Rose laid the baby out on the old stone altar next to its fetch. She held her hand and someone put a wolf’s fang in it. The tooth was longer than her hand, cracked and yellow, and she pressed the point of it to the baby’s breastbone.
“I hope you burn,” Danny said as he struggled against the hands holding him. “Burn like Surtr’s candle, for years.”
Rose snorted and dragged the fang down. “I’ll bend him over too,” she said. “After this, I’m done being ruled.”
The Sannock blew in with the storm, bloody and light-footed, and the wolves came behind. Jack and Gregor were at the head of the Pack, but just behind them was a sleek, small wolf with sharp ears and rage-bristled fur.
Bron.
Danny sagged as his muscles turned to lead and exhaustion ached in his bones. It didn’t matter. He still wanted to laugh. His sister was alive, and she’d brought the laggard wolves with her. If they told Bron to her face that they should help Rose, after the old bitch had gutted her and stolen her child, Danny would have paid to see that.
Rose wouldn’t get to kill the baby, now. Danny could stop fighting.
Chapter Twenty-Eight—Gregor
DEAD DOGSdidn’t know their place. They snapped at Gregor’s heels and jostled his shoulder for position in the fight. He growled and shoved through them. The bird shot overhead, close enough that Gregor felt wings skim his hair, and dive-bombed his bloody, scarred grandmother. It raked at her face and dragged talons over her skull, strings of coarse gray hair caught in the sharp, black hooks. She ducked twice and then grabbed Nick out of the air by a wing.
“You had your chance,” she said as she drove the bloody tooth into the bird’s throat. Feathers fluffed around the white spike as the bird strangled on its own voice. “Ihada grandson.”
She tossed the bird aside. It landed in a lump of ruffled, unruly feathers and flapped spasmodically as it tried to catch itself. All it managed to do was shovel snow over itself.
Gregor tasted his own heart, but he couldn’t leave the fight yet. His son lay on the stone, bloody and blue, and for the first time, Gregor realized what it was like to love two things at once.
It hurt. He wasn’t a fan.
Bron snarled as she raced by him, her ears pinned flat to her skull and teeth bared. She’d caught up with him in the snow, with what was left of the Pack shamed and silent at her heels. Only Ellie and James had refused to come to their senses, lost somewhere out there in the Wild or the Winter.
They’d live or they’d die. Gregor flicked a thin bone knife he’d taken from one of the fallen Sannock and opened a prophet from groin to collarbone. The wolf peeled back to expose slack, fish-belly skin, and Bron knocked the man down to rip his guts out through the hole. Two of the half-seen dogs piled in, teeth set in his ankles and wrists as they held him down.
Gregor leaped over them and raced for the altar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tawny blur of his brother as he arrowed across the hill toward Fenrir. Frustration scraped at the inside of Gregor’s skin at the unfairness of it, but he ignored the pulse of bile and spite in his gut. He couldn’t fight Fenrir, not for long enough to be useful, and they weren’t here for his pride.
He ducked around a monster, not quite quick enough to avoid a blow that numbed his already torn shoulder, and left the dogs to distract it behind him. Rose sneered at him and wiped the bloody fang on her breast before she lifted it, ready to bring it down onto the baby’s chest. Bron screamed, a human sound in a wolf’s throat, as Rose tightened her grip. Behind her, Danny sagged down so the prophet had to hold him up, and he swung up both legs to kick Rose in the back. She lurched forward, stomach split open against the carved edge of the altar, and screeched with absolute, unreasonable fury.
That was Danny-dog for you, Gregor thought with a flash of almost affection. He might not be a wolf, but he had never known when to quit. Gregor fully expected that, if it came to it, Danny would spit in Odin’s only eye just to make a point.
Rose clutched her stomach closed with one hand as she pushed herself up off the stone. She swung around and grabbed Danny’s face with her free hand. The raw meat that Lachlan had left of his face earlier split open as she squeezed.
“Your mother should have drowned you, the Old Man should have killed you, and Job should have torn out your throat,” she snarled as she lifted him up. “But I am surrounded by incompetents and have to do everything myself.”
Her hand tightened, knuckles white through leathery skin, and Danny’s eyes bulged at the pain. He moaned, but the sound was muffled against her palm.
Gregor vaulted up onto the altar. Two babies lay on it, identical except for the blood, and he hesitated for a breath in surprise.
The smell of heather and blood was the first thing he’d smelled and the glimmer of the moon above the first thing he’d seen. That he should have been alone and that he wasn’t—that was the first thing he’d known. The first irritant awareness of “the other” that would stay inside him, like grit that never made a pearl, for the rest of his life.
