Not as far as it knew.
It finally burst out of the sullen bubble of the Wild that hung over the old farmhouse, tatters of it caught in the bird’s stiff feathers. The bite of winter was still harsh, bitter with generations of divine patience as it spread through the world, but the winds that battered the bird were impersonal.
After a moment the bird steadied itself, shook off the sour residue of the Wild, and drifted into a slow circle over the scattered collection of buildings. Through the veil of snow that blew sideways over the countryside, the bird’s sharp black eyes picked out the shadowy outlines of wolves on the ground as they slammed the door to a hole in the ground.
Discomfort crawled under the bird’s feathers and raised the ruff around its throat like a dog’s hackles. Once things went under the earth, they weren’t for it anymore. Corpses on battlefields or in ditches, strung from gallows or bloated in the street belonged to it. The slain, the murdered, the angry were its business. Maybe the occasional shallow grave could come under its remit, but tombs were its brothers’ to stalk out.
Gregor, Nick thought from where the bird had put him.He’s safe.
His relief was alien. The bird stitched it into his experience—wet beak, full craw—but it only mostly fit. Mortal things were a strange delight. It knew lust, the peacock preen of feathers and a well-chosen mating gift, but this?
Love. That was something it had only seen in the aftermath, when tears and blood had been shed.
Nick flinched at that thought. He believed it didn’t have to end badly. People could just be happy.
People could, the bird agreed as it stooped on wide, black wings to perch in the bare, brittle branches of a wild hawthorn. The thorns poked at its toes as it shuffled into a comfortable perch and fluffed its feathers out against the cold. It tucked its beak in and preened at its breast feathers, flakes of snow cold on its tongue, around the knot of scar tissue that ran down its chest.Butyoualready ended badly.
There was no answer to that. The bird chuckled to himself, smug that he’d won, and plucked a stray black feather from its breast to drop into the snow. It lay there for a second, like an arrow pointed to the wolves’ den. Nick wondered, with a flicker of suspicion, why it had done that. The bird yawned, tucked its feather back under its skin, and croaked with laughter as Nick fell off the branch.
Fuck!
Thin branches whipped against Nick’s thighs and back as he tumbled gracelessly out of the tree. With a jolt of pain and shock that ran from his tailbone to the back of his skull, he hit the ground backside-first and sucked in a shocked mouthful of air and iced needles. His chest cramped painfully, and his hips ached as he dragged himself to his feet.
The bird chuckled hoarsely at him as it nested down into his… soul, he supposed. Nick thought about that for a second, but it was too long, and he shied away from the idea as he felt his composure start to slip. He’d built his whole life, his surgical career, on the rock-solid foundation that his grandmother had been crazy, and he was nothing like that. The world made sense in a way that could be taken apart and pinned down, like an autopsy of reality.
Then he found out his grandmother was not only sane but right about the world, and that somehow made all her old cruelties worse. Superstition and fear were what stitched the world together against the monsters—the bird clicked its beak at him and he amended the thought—and gods outside, and the stitches had started to fray.
And he haddied.
His life had fallen apart under him, the history he thought he knew snagged on gran’s secrets and her murder of his mother, and he’d accepted that. In a way it was easier to stop his decades-long resistance to the fairy-tale reality his gran had constructed for him when he was a child. It was only when he poked at the edges—when he tried to find the logic—that he tasted panic in the back of his throat.
He would have to deal with it one day, let his new reality sink down into his bones, but not yet. Nick grimaced to himself as he chafed cold hands over his pale forearms—naked in the storm wasn’t a good time to do anything.
We should go.He poked at the bird. It wasn’t abirdexactly in his head, just a sense of something dark that was all hunger and wickedness. Despite that, it still managed to convey that it had tucked its head under its wing and wasn’t paying him any attention.
The wind shoved at Nick to dislodge him from the sad shelter of the wind-blown hawthorn’s bent trunk. It poked snow in his ears and pinched at his thighs and between his legs as he hunched over on himself. The old scar on his stomach—nearly the same age as him, where his gran had sliced him open—itched and flushed red against his pale skin.
Thirty minutes. That’s how long it took hypothermia to set in. Less if you were stupid enough to go out naked in the snow. In the back of his head, the echo of his own calm, clinical voice diagnosed the cause of death in too many cold, stiff bodies back in Girvan.“Reddening of the extremities due to frost erythema, damage to the extremities from frostbite, in the gastric lining, evidence of Wischnewski spots….”
Nick exhaled, smoke on his lips, and pushed the nag of a voice to the back of his head. His body was used to being alarmed by the signs of extreme cold. It pulled the blood from his fingers and toes to make his heart race and make him shiver. But he’d already died, bled out on a beach in Gregor’s arms, and the bird had brought him back. It wasn’t going to lose him to a bad chill.
The bird chuckled darkly in his head. He ignored it too.
He gritted his teeth, pushed himself off the tree, and froze as the snow picked out the outline of one of the Sannock Dead. It looked tenuous as frost and shadows, but it was solid enough to leave footprints in the snow as it walked toward him.
Nick glanced down at the tracks and corrected himself.
Hoofprints.
It was what killed Nick the first time, the fossilized ghosts of rage and extinction that were all the wolves had left of the other Wild things that had lived in Britain. Maybe that was why they’d followed him up the coast—to see how he’d done it.
They’d fallen behind while he rode the train, the steel made their edges bloat and split. He still caught sight of them as they paced along through the trees and through the frozen, abandoned towns. Despite the horns and hooves, they somehow never looked out of place.
Nick swallowed as the Sannock joined him under the hawthorn. The pronged rack of its horns rattled the branches and dislodged thick, half-frozen chunks of snow, and it stamped neat, split hooves in the snow. There was no heat from its body, no wisps of breath on its lips. It did smell, though, with a faint bitterness that reminded him of mothballs and Sunday knit dresses.
It should have looked human. Other than the narrow hooves and horned brow, it was shaped like a man with bony callused hands and a wide, sensual face. Something about the eyes and the mouth—a little too wide set and green, too lush and red—made it off, unmistakably other. It compelled and repelled at the same time. Nick was reminded of a school visit to the zoo and the poison dart frogs in their damp glass aquariums. The bright colors warned of toxins, but he still wanted to pick them up and marvel at them.
“What do you want?” Nick asked, as his teeth chattered. It made his voice unsteady, the words stuttered as though he were nervous, not cold. Maybe he was both. “I can’t help you. I don’t want to help you.”
