The second the grip on his arm slipped, Gregor kicked out sideways and took the wolf’s knee out with a loud, grainy pop. Shock made the wolf’s eyes bulge as he folded, and Gregor took advantage of the other wolf’s surprise to pull free. He lunged forward, grabbed Kath by the throat, and dug his fingers down the tendons as he shoved her up against the wall of his da’s house and pulled the knife out of her belt. He pressed the point of it against her stomach, through the pretty blue flowers of her dress.
Kath’s eyes filmed over amber, but she held on to her skin as Gregor squeezed her throat.
“Call them off,” he ordered.
Her bright yellow eyes flicked past him, and when she looked back, they’d faded to gray-flecked brown. She curled her lip in a sneer and leaned into the knife until it sliced her stomach open.
“Trust me,” she whispered urgently against his jaw, the smell of fear acrid under the rich salt and metal of her blood. “Do what you’re told.”
Gregor could hear her heart as it stuttered against her breastbone. It could have been desperation or just pain from the sliver of poisoned knife he’d slid into her gut. Maybe, if he still had his wolf, he could have been sure. Instead he had to act on faith—something no wolf trafficked in.
She’d birthed her dog, raised him, taught him to fight. Of course, she wished he were a wolf—for her sake as well as his—but she loved him as much as Gregor had loved his wee broken daughter, and neither of them would give the prophets their due.
Gregor let her take the knife back. She scruffed him by the collar like he was her get and hauled him down the road. The others didn’t bother to get Jack to his feet. They just dragged him along.
Prisons were for humans. The justice of wolves was usually clean and straightforward—exile or death at the Old Man’s jaws. If the accused ran from it, that narrowed the options to death. Still, there were those who’d sinned enough that the Old Man didn’t want the taste of them on his tongue or the responsibility of their future on him, even elsewhere.
Wolves sent for prophets—to be lamed, ruined, and bent over so they could lick the gods’ feet—would run if they could. Anyone would. The loss of the wolf—that would have made Gregor walk into the snow to die if he didn’t have rage and Nick to fill the hollow of it—was only the first step.
That was what the old icehouse behind the farm was for. Half-buried in the ground, the low hump of the roof thick rock padded with sound-muffling turf, the stone box was the perfect physical prison. And if the prophet-to-be was strong enough or desperate enough to reach the Wild….
Kath grabbed one of the hinged steel rings from the wall. It was cold enough to stick to her skin and freeze-dried scabs to the metal as she forced the collar open. She snapped it around his neck and padlocked it shut with competent hands.
“Where’s your son, Kath?” Gregor asked quietly.
Kath glanced over her shoulder at the other wolves, her face sharp with reluctant suspicion.
“Safer than my daughter,” she whispered through stiff lips. “Safer than you, if you aren’t smart.”
She pulled the gate open and shoved him down into the dark. He hunched his head from the memory of a low ceiling and staggered down the steps into the reeking dark. A second later, Jack, a matched collar bright against his bloody neck, rolled down after him.
“It won’t be long,” Kath told them. “The prophets will be back soon. You just have to wait.”
The lock clanked shut, and Gregor was left in the dark with his twin and the source of the reek. Metal clanked in the corners of the room and eyes flashed dim blue in the scant light that filtered into the space as bodies moved away from the walls.
Gregor grabbed Jack’s collar and hauled him to his feet.
They’d found dogs, just not the one they wanted.
Chapter Six—Nick
THE DEADgirl bobbed in the storm, anchored to her corpse by an umbilical of old bones and slimy flesh. Fish had taken her eyes and her tongue—the bird envied them the tender tidbits—but it could still feel her accusation. Promises had been and were going unfulfilled.
With a flip of its wing, the tips of its feathers frost-painted, and a snap of its bone-white beak at her tether, the bird rejected the idea of a debt owed. It sheared a strip of rot-sweet tendon from its moorings and tossed it down, slick and slippery as a worm. The girl recoiled with a silent shriek of offense, her shed bones and old grudges caught up in her hands like a matron’s skirts, and the bird jeered after her.
It had hooked her out of the broth of skin and marrow she’d brewed in and as good as spat the wolf up into her hungry mouth. That she’d given him a chill in his liver and a shadow in his brain was not the bird’s fault.
In the back of his brain, Nick wondered if the wolf with the knife and the pale eyes had killed her. It was a mortal thing to think, a mortal thing to feel the sticky weight of pity and anger for the dead girl. The bird had no time for it as the storm buffeted it back and forth with no regard for its person or its calling.
A wolf killed her, it shrugged to Nick as it tried to orient itself in the storm.That one or another. The living all look the same to the dead.
The dead girl crawled back down her umbilical to the wolf she’d spat her death into her, fingers sunk in between the woven bones. The slick rope was plugged into his ear, gray tendrils of rot spread out from the root for those with eyes to see, and the wolf shuddered as the dead girl hung over his head.
Serve him right, the bird thought darkly. The aftertaste of Nick’s desperate fear was still on the back of its tongue, tight in its chest. Another mortal thing, but it stillfeltlike it belonged to the bird. The same as Gregor.
Their wolf.
Nick grumbled at that, but the bird ignored him as it labored cold-stiffened wings to climb higher. A frustrated croak of annoyance creaked out of it as it felt the weight of the Wild push down. It wasn’t a thing of the Wild—itlookedlike a bird but had hatched from a… thought, a need for a thing with wings and hunger, not an egg—but it wasn’t an enemy of it either.
