Danny nodded. “Then Lachlan stabbed you in the back. They’re safe. Bron has them.”
Gregor glanced over at the altar. The small, black wolf glared at him with amber eyes as she stood over the two infants, her ears flat and head so low it was even with her shoulders. He gave her a slight inclination of his head and grabbed Danny’s shoulder to lean on it.
“I asked you,” he said as he stooped down to lay the bird on the chest of one of the dead monsters. “You will, won’t you? They might as well be yours. Bron’s your sister. Me and Jack are basically the same person. What difference is there?”
Danny grimaced. “They’renotmine?” he said. “No matter how many problems it would solve for your pack.”
“Your pack too,” Gregor said. “Jack said. Come on, then.”
Fenrir had reached Lachlan, who trembled and bled in front of him. Wolves hung off the dark, neglected hide like ticks as they bit and tore to try and bring him down. Jack picked himself from where he’d landed and loped back in to tear at Fenrir’s back leg. The huge wolf ignored them all as he lowered his head and exhaled into Lachlan’s face.
Piss ran down Lachlan’s leg and stained the snow as he inhaled. His skin flushed over his muscles as though he were about to cook from the inside, and he trembled as power filled him.
“You keep Lachlan busy,” Gregor said.
Danny snorted. “I’ve never won a fight with him.”
“You still always got what you wanted,” Gregor said. “And what you want is to keep him busy. Can you do it?”
“I guess I have to,” Danny said grimly. “What are you going to do, Gregor?”
Gregor grinned. It felt tight and awful on his mouth. “Whatever the fuck I have to.”
He gave Danny a shove toward Lachlan and broke into a jog toward Fenrir. His stomach ached with each step. It wouldn’t have killed him—even now—but his body already had a bullet hole in his chest to stitch back together and tendons to stitch in his shoulder so he could use it.
There wasn’t much left.
“Tell Nick this doesn’t get him off the hook,” he said, just in case one of the dead had an ear out. “He doesn’t get to die yet.”
Danny tackled Lachlan hard and sent them both flying into the snow. They landed against the roots of a tree, and Danny hammered his fist down into Lachlan’s dazed face. His knuckles split as he broke Lachlan’s nose and resplit his lips, the aim as much damage as possible before Lachlan recovered. Or Danny collapsed from exhaustion.
A monster, face half-covered with lichen that worked long fingers into its ears and up its nose, staggered into Gregor’s path. He ducked under the clumsy swipe of its maul-like paw, and a dog—the skin of a great black hound draped over bones of snow and wind—slammed into the monster with a whistling, windy snarl and sank its teeth into its jowls.
A wolf went flying as Fenrir shook them off. He pinned Jack to the ground with one huge paw and snarled into his bloody, one-eyed face.
Gregor reached for the Wild. He had a full hunt’s worth of it curdled under his skin, and letting it out made his bones rattle with it and his skull ache. The back of his face burned with the pressure as it ripped him apart in search of his wolf.
Maybe, he thought dully, this was for the best. He didn’t know how the prophets lived with this every full moon as the Wild chewed their scars open and rubbed their faces in what it couldn’t find.
This once he could bear it. He glanced around, hopeful for a last glimpse of Nick or a black wing against the sky. Nothing. Gregor supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. The world had spent years not giving him what he wanted. Why change now?
Gregor took a deep breath, the cold like splinters in his lung, and threw himself forward. He slammed into Fenrir’s shoulder, the full weight of his stocky frame barely enough to make the wolf grunt, grabbed a greasy, knotted hank of fur, and dragged him out of the world and into the Wild. Dragged them both.
Virgin snow crunched underfoot as Fenrir staggered at the sudden shift. He snarled and twisted around to snap at Gregor with sharp, jagged teeth. Gregor punched him on the nose and dragged himself in close enough to sink his teeth into the wound Jack had opened in Fenrir’s neck. The meat was dry, mealy with age, and the jelly of thick blood that coated Gregor’s tongue tasted like rotting apples and nails.
Gregor steeled himself against the urge to retch and swallowed the mouthful he’d torn free. It curdled as it hit his stomach, something so wrong his whole body wanted to puke it out, and Fenrir dragged them back into the World.
Danny was crouched in the snow, blood on his back and his arms, with the dead dogs clustered close around him. They snarled at Lachlan—whose eyes were wild and black with stolen power—as he stalked across the snow. Jack tore at a monster’s throat with desperation as he tried to squirm free of its grip in time to reach his lover.
“Nice try,” Gregor said as he reached up to grab Fenrir’s ear, twist, and yank them back into the Wild.
Again.
Again.
Danny as he spat blood into the snow.
The oddly shaped bundles of branches that memorialized the fallen Sannock in the Wild, lashed together with strips of human sinew and stacked for a fire that might never come.
