Nick washis. Without Gregor’s wolf, Nick wasallhe had, and he already had to share him with a bird. A wet eel that couldn’t even terrorize children didn’t get to claim any more of him.
He dug his fingers down into Nick’s shoulder and willed the sharp, doctor’s wits back into vague black eyes. After a moment Nick blinked and rubbed his hand over his face.
“Can you make it leave Danny alone?” Jack asked, as though he had the right to ask Nick for anything after days spent filled with pointed mistrust.
Nick shook his head. “It’s not slain, just dead,” he said. “But the dead can’t hurt the living, not yet.”
Jack looked bleak. “Not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Nick said as he turned up his collar and tucked his chin down into it. “Just true. The old loch monster isn’t what you have to worry about.”
“What is?” Jack asked.
Nick inhaled as though he needed to say the answer. If he did, it slipped away before he could spit it out. “I don’t know,” he admitted reluctantly. His scent, that distinct dusty sweetness, was cut through with the darker, fresh-carrion smell of his god. “Something older. Something worse. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming.”
“But not tonight,” Gregor said. He put his arm around Nick and tucked him into his side. “Let the dog prove its worth, Jack. Danny did well enough in Durham all those years, and you never gave him a second thought.”
They both knew that was cruel, not true. It still worked.
Jack curled his lip in a snarl and, after one last look for a dog’s head amid the ice and waves, he turned away from the loch.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “We take the long way. Give Da time to bake a cake to welcome us home.”
Gregor laughed, a low chuff with no humor in it. “Or gather the Pack to drive us back out.”
“One or the other,” Jack agreed with a shrug.
“YOU GREWup here?” Nick asked as they rounded the far end of the loch and started up the hill, away from the shore and into the Pack’s territory.
Wolves hunted where they pleased, of course, but this was where they slept. Old crofters’ cottages, some still thatched while others had been roofed with uneven shale slates, were scattered haphazardly across the property. Some were tucked into the shadow of Da’s old stone box of a cottage, while others had been dragged stone by stone up past the boundary line of what man believed the Old Man owned and into the thin spaces where the Wild was easy to touch.
Usually there was a dirt track to follow, worn through the grass by heavy-footed hikers and runners who lapped the loch in their expensive trainers. Sometimes Gregor had kept pace with them in the trees, arrogant in how easily he could have caught them if he wanted.
Of course, he still could. His wolf was gone, but he was still more than most. It wouldn’t be effortless.
“That’s why it’s called home,” Gregor said. He hesitated for a second as he heard the words and fumbled for something to soften them. It wasn’t easy. Harsh words came easier to him, and if it kept people at arm’s length, that didn’t concern him. It was only Nick he wanted to keep close, but his tongue couldn’t seem to learn that lesson. “Or did you think I just walked out of the Wild a man?”
It was meant to be a joke, but it came out like a sneer. Gregor scowled to himself and swallowed the spiny ball of an apology. Hewantedto be kinder to Nick, to say the right things and be gentle sometimes. If he couldn’t, he’d rather no one knew he’d tried.
Nick laughed raggedly and stopped to push his hair out of his face. He pulled absently at the knots matted around his ears. “I just learned that my crazy grandmother wasn’t crazy, just an evil wolf prophet who wanted to sacrifice me to a bird,” he said. Despite everything the old bitch had done, there was still something like grief in Nick’s voice. “So, I’m trying not to make any assumptions.”
“We were both born and raised here,” Jack said impatiently as he dropped back into pace with them. “We’re wolves, not Sannock or something from a story. We can walk the Wild, but we don’t belong there. This is our world as much as it is yours—as it is man’s. It’s just that they wouldn’t share.”
“Now neither will we,” Gregor finished for Jack, the old lines of the catechism one of the few nearly as satisfying to say as to howl.
Nick looked around at the spare white lines of the frozen countryside and hunched his shoulders. “I was born and raised in Glasgow. The first time I left the city, I was eighteen and going to look at universities. The idea anyone grew uphere?” He waved his hand at the wide, empty space between the loch and the horizon. “That’s stranger than the Wild and the Sannock combined.”
The only city Gregor had ever been in was Durham and then only when it was frozen to a near standstill under that first lash of winter. It hadn’t troubled him—the streets and houses were a different sort of hunting ground to the moors and buried dens he was used it—but it was no place to live. The tarmac had been rough under his feet, and everything smelled-sounded-tasted of humans and human things, as though they thought they could keep the Wild at bay if they drowned it out. It was somewhere to pass through, not somewhere to stay.
Was that how Nick felt up here? The thought unsettled Gregor for a moment, but he shrugged it away. It was the end of the world, the winter of blood and fang, and where Nick wanted to live could wait until they knew they weregoingto live.
They’d have to decide one day, though. “Maybe the city is why your gran is crazy,” he said.
Nick absently rubbed his chest through his coat. It was the scar on his stomach, sliced under his breastbone. Gregor had one that very nearly matched, although his was still raised and new even after the rest of his injuries had patched themselves together.
“Whatever she is, that’s who she was before Glasgow,” he said. “If anything, I suppose, it started here.”
Gregor went to disagree but then held his tongue as he realized they both had a point. Maybe Rose had already been ruined when she started on the long trek to Glasgow, but the seed hadn’t been planted here, on Da’s land. He’d only allowed Job to stay in the shack behind the house, and the rest came and went as need. They certainly hadn’t been made here… that was somewhere else.
