The stranger waited.
Chapter Four—Gregor
JEALOUS.
Gregor stood on the shore, his arms crossed, and watched the dog’s long, narrow head as it cut through the loch.
Of adog. He licked the back of his teeth and tasted bile. This was what the prophets had reduced him to, what they’d left him.
Fangless. Fixed. Fucking pathetic.
It was a familiar litany. Sometimes the words were different, but the sentiment was always the same. Gregor wasn’t what he had been, and no matter how he postured and snarled the minute he stepped in front of the Pack, they’d all know it.
He’d been heir apparent—by default if not choice—and now he’d be nothing. No wonder he hated himself. Everyone else would.
Gregor curled his lip in a silent snarl at the taste of self-pity surrender. It wasn’t his. He’d hated himself before—both the face he saw in the mirror and the one he saw on Jack—and he knew whatthattasted like. It was resentment and scapegoated blame, all tied up with strings of raw, bloody anger that sharpened his fangs and clenched his fists.
He took his emotions—his grief, his disappointments, his frustration—out on other people, not on himself. The hunger to have Rose under his heel as he ripped her stolen skin from her sour flesh, revenge and the final fuck-you proof to Da that, even without his wolf, Gregor was better than Jack. That was his, not this self-pity that wanted him to go off somewhere and let the world rot for want of him.
That came from the raw hole the prophets left in him when they cut him open. They’d taken his wolf with their filthy knives and filthier teeth and left him an infection that festered under the thin scab that held him together. It bubbled out like emotional pus when he picked at it, like a child poked at the gap in their gum left by a baby tooth.
“What if Da doesn’t listen?” Jack asked. He stalked a short, impatient circuit along the edge of the shore—three strides away and three back. His boots packed the snow down to a hard crust of ice, streaked with mud churned up from the ground beneath. His scent was thin but sharp on the cold air, caught on the wind as it picked up, the burned-heather smell of anger with a sharp, saltwater-and-stone undernote of unhappiness. “He’s always tolerated dogs born to the Pack, but that was when they were useful to him. It’s Winter now, there’s no more bills to pay, and Rangers have played their last match.”
Gregor snorted. “What if he drowns before he gets there?” he taunted. “Or the monster gets him.”
It wasn’t a monster, of course, just old and too stupid to know it was dead, bones lost to the mud and silt at the bottom of the lake. As pups they’d all swum out to taunt it with pale, human feet or the bushy lure of a wet tail and yelped when it struck at them with a mouth full of cold-water fangs.
A chill. A scare if you’d gotten complacent. Nothing more.
At least not then. Gregor supposed it could be different now. The Wild had let other old bones back into the world, why not these?
Jack shuddered as though he’d forgotten and took a step onto the ice—it groaned under his weight, a drawn-out sigh that hung over the lake—and scanned the water for any sign. Nothing moved, but the water was dark, and it wouldn’t have been much of a game if the pups had seen the monster as it came for them. Even the long-nosed prow of Danny’s head, seal slick with water, was impossible to pick out as clouds covered the moon.
“Gods and monsters,” Jack said softly, the attempt to convince himself the closest to a prayer any wolf could manage. “That’s what the Wild has brought back, not some old fish.”
He took another step, and the tone of the ice changed to a brittle note. Gregor reached out and grabbed his arm to drag him back to solid ground.
“If itisthere, you’re only going to make it worse,” he said as Jack tried to jerk away from him. “It’s more like to miss one body than two.”
“At least I could fight it,” Jack snapped.
Gregor laughed at him. The monster hadn’t known to stop growing when it died. Its head was big enough to swallow a car whole, the spine that showed through its mud-and-kelp skin thick as Gregor’s shoulders. Even Gregor wouldn’t want to face that down, not in its own element, anyhow. Besides….
“The dog can take care of itself,” he said. Not an admission he’d make if Danny were there to actually hear him. There were lines he didn’t want to cross. “He did in Durham against Job, he survived Girvan, and he held his own against the Pack when he was a kid. I’d bet on him to reach the other shore before I would you.”
Jack yanked his arm away. “He shouldn’t have to.”
“Then he should have better choice in men.” Gregor smirked as Jack snarled at him. The hot pulse of the emotional poison faded into the background as he let himself enjoy the old simple pleasure of a dig at Jack. “Fine. Nick, is there anything in the loch?”
He glanced over at his mate as he asked the question and felt the odd tickle of pointless warmth in his chest. Nick’s bony face, all nose and personality, also pleased Gregor, but he hardly looked attractive right then. His nose was pinched with cold and his lips were chapped raw, his skin blotched red from the wind. Still Gregor had to bite a smile off his lips, like he’d just seen Fenrir himself cross the snow, as he looked at him.
Idiot, he condemned himself.
Nick cupped his hands in front of his mouth to blow into them and then hopped up to walk to the edge of the loch. He toed his boots onto the ice as he peered down into the murky depths. After a second, he flinched backward and Gregor caught him, hand braced against one lean shoulder. He glanced down into the loch and caught a dark glimpse of bone and the weed-patched memory of skin pushed up against—through—the ice.
“Still there,” Nick said after he swallowed. He gingerly shifted his foot back a step. “There’s not much of it left, not even hunger. It doesn’t want to live again. It just wants an empty lake.Mine. mine.”
His voice slipped away from him as he said that, the words wet and slippery in his throat. Gregor growled and tightened his grip of Nick’s shoulder.
