A glimpse of Nick, one hand cupped over the wound pierced between his ribs, as he dragged a bloody prophet out from under Bron’s feet.
Again.
Again.
The thin, weak mewl of Gregor’s son on the wind, the gray-blue stain of the cold on newborn skin as it squirmed.
The dead hounds at the horned Sannock’s heels as they loped after Lachlan. The damned wolf, gray and choking on blood from his own lungs as he ran, and the wild bay of the new hunters on the wind.
Again.
Again.
It was Fenrir who gave up. His sides, ribs prominent through his staring coat, heaved, and his breath smoked from between his jagged, flesh-picked teeth. A long red tongue hung from his mouth, and his anger pushed at Gregor like the tide.
“You don’t need a body to walk the world. Not you,” Gregor said. He rested his forehead against Fenrir’s. The stink of old meat and sweat wasn’t as sweet as Nick’s scent, but it mingled with it in Gregor’s lungs. “You just want one, lonely old wolf. So take me.”
Fenrir tried to recoil in confusion, but Gregor didn’t let him go. He could taste the infection the prophets had left in his spirit when they cut his wolf out, the rot-hollowed cyst it had left.
Why?
The voice was the howl of the wind between trees, the gargle of blood in a throat as fangs bore down. Gregor stepped back and stared at Fenrir. He could feel the blood in his stomach, the ache in his chest as his heart slowed and struggled.
“Because you won’t fuck off otherwise,” Gregor said. “And you can’t have my son.”
Fenrir stared at him with blind, ruined eyes and waited. If Gregor hadn’t been dying, he might have won that contest.
“Because it’s the last thing I can do for them. The Pack has Jack, Jack will have my son, and my son will have them all to take care of him.”
That only left Nick. Gregor didn’t have a generous enough spirit to hope Nick would forget him or be better off without him. He’d survive, though. After this, Jack would feel guilty enough to take care of him.
But that wasn’t enough for Fenrir. He waited, slabber thick on his jowls as he panted.
Finally, Gregor tipped his head back to look at the ice-blue sky and admitted bitterly, “I miss it,” he said. “I was never made to be human.”
Done.
Gregor set himself and waited. That had been Rose’s mistake. She’d tried to stuff a god into a human skin and then pull the flaps back together, when there was obviously more room the other way around.
He felt Fenrir’s teeth as they tore into him. The pain cracked his bones as the hot red darkness swallowed him down.
Epilogue
“ONLY ONEof them’s real,” Bron said. She braced her arms on her knees and watched with wary eyes as the babies rolled on the floor. “The other’s just something Rose made.”
Danny sat cross-legged on the floor. The Pack’s old home was charred bricks and stones now, his grief burned down into the dirt. They had taken over the empty streets of Lochwinnoch while they licked their wounds and got ready to go down over the Wall.
“Do you think it knows that?” Danny asked. He picked up a blond, green-eyed baby and grinned at it. The baby scowled like Danny had embarrassed him, and tried to grab his glasses. “If they don’t know, how can we?”
Bron snorted at him. “Maybe ifsomeonehad kept better track of them, we wouldn’t need to wonder,” she said. “How hard is it to keep two babies apart, Danny?”
He put the baby down and rubbed his jaw. He traced the scar that ran up to his eye, a rope of thick wax that might melt one day. It might not.
“I had a lot on my mind,” he said. Then he chewed his lower lip, sighed, and asked, “If we knew… would you stay, Bron?”
She looked up from the twin blond babies and gave Danny a surprised look. Her eyebrows twitched toward her forehead.
“Fuck off, Danny,” she said. “As long as it thinks it’s real, who am I to burst its bubble? I was never going to stay, although I expected Mam to be the one who’d raise him. There’s a whole world out there, Danny. You got to see it, why wouldn’t I want to?”
