Nick couldn’t blame them. He pushed himself back into motion, but he had to take awkward, high-stepped strides to make progress, his body angled into the wind as it pushed him back and his thighs and ass tight and sore after a few yards.
Or a bit more than a few, he realized as he stumbled over the crest of a hill and into a low stone wall. Even if it wasn’t as the crow flew, he should have been back to the wolves’ town. The pitched roofs and matchstick chimneys he’d focused on resolved themselves into a rough-edged green hillock decorated with precariously stacked, narrow towers of slate and granite.
The bird shuddered, a feathery itch against his brain stem, and thought he was lucky that was all he saw. As they walked, it let Nick sneak a glimpse at what it saw—spires of old yellow bones stitched together with cords of dry sinew. A strung fence of unraveled tendons and nerves, brittle from the cold that silvered them, and inside it… something huge, damp, and moldered.
“What is it?” Nick asked as he drew closer. He was vaguely aware he shouldn’t want to approach it, that the smart thing to do was turn and run, but he still climbed up the hill.
The bird didn’t know what it was. It was also lying.
The stink of rotted flesh hung sour and sick in the air, and bile stung the back of Nick’s throat as the bird made him hungry.
Carrion, Nick supposed for a second, another dead thing.
Except corpses, even the wet, restless bones that crawled through the corners of Nick’s world, didn’t steam like an overworked horse in the cold. And corpses smelled of rot or nothing in the cold, not that sugary, yeasty stink of infection and fever.
Nick reached out toward the brittle wires of flesh, but he hesitated, his fingers trembling, and the bird closed its eyes. He was left flat-footed in the snow, hand outstretched to pluck thin air. Whatever had been caged in the center of the stones was gone. In its place was a long, carved stone mounted on top of a low, rocky cairn half-covered with dirt and grass under the snow. Someone had left a bright red coat draped over the stone, the thick wool stiff with ice and welded to the granite. If Nick went inside, he supposed he’d find a sweater as well, or a shed pair of shoes left where they’d fallen in the snow. Then, somewhere in the dark, a cold, naked body curled up in the snow where they’d dropped once delirium couldn’t take them any farther.
The cairn had probably seemed like shelter when the owner of the coat found it. Now it was serving double duty as a tomb.
“Enough,” he said as he turned away from the stones. He squinted into the snow that blew in flurries and tangles around him. The cottages, roofs humped high with snow, had been difficult to pick out from the landscape, but he should have been able to see the big farmhouse, at least. Nothing. He’d gone the wrong way. “Whatever point you wanted to make, it’s made. I need to get back to Gregor.”
He reached for wings, and they were pulled away from him again. There was no reason why, but there didn’t need to be. The wolves might change their skin at will, but Nick needed the bird’s help. It didn’t need his. Today it thought he needed to stay grounded, although it didn’t share why.
Panic scratched at the back of Nick’s throat. His head was full of the clammy memory of the first time he’d met Gregor, the bloody ruin that the prophets had left of him. Nick had felt Gregor’s wet flesh and the pulse of blood between his fingers as he tried to keep the wolf alive. He’d known he was going to fail. That had been hard enough then, before Gregor had a name and before Nick had fallen in love with him.
In the back of his head the bird got distracted—briefly—as it dipped its beak in the memory. It knew, they knew, how Gregor tasted—his mouth, his skin, his cock—but it wanted this bit of the wolf too.
“Salt and copper,” Nick told it shortly. “The same as a cow or a dog.”
The bird didn’t bother to argue. They both knew Nick was lying. Even before he’d had his feathered hitchhiker, warm blood had unsettled him with the sense of something potent and electric in it. That was why he’d been a pathologist, not a surgeon.
It had been easier to remember he wasn’t crazy when he avoided the crazy things.
Nick raised his hands and exhaled onto them. His breath made the cold skin sting, the web between his fingers pinched with pain, and thunder grumbled overhead.
He hadn’t been an outdoorsman either. The closest thing to the countryside he’d seen before he was twenty had been a scabby local park where the drug dealers—only a few years older than him, and then a few years younger—hogged the swings. If the bird wasn’t going to help, Nick wouldn’t find his way back to the wolves tonight. Not in the dark in a storm.
“He’ll be fine,” he told himself, the words stripped from his lips by the wind. “They don’t lock someone up if they’re going to kill them.”
The bird didn’t agree, but it wasn’t going to take flight either. Not now. Not here.
Nick tried to put the memory of bloody, frozen strips of skin out of his head as he stepped past the narrow towers. His feet found gravel under the snow, the curve of an old path, and slicked his feet as he edged toward the cairn.
Something howled. Or… didn’t, Nick realized as he spun to find the source of the noise. The back of his neck prickled in reaction to the almost-sound, and his heart pumped harder as adrenaline made him shudder. He licked dry lips and reached up mindlessly for his gran’s pendant, the twist of iron that had hid the truth from him for so long. He’d left it back in Girvan, but sometimes he missed being able to lie to himself.
A dog with no… dog in it—just the skin draped over something that remembered the shape it wasmeantto have—leaped between the stone towers and raced toward him. Snow flew up from under its paws, but it left no tracks behind it.
It howled a throaty bell of alarm as it headed for him. Nick stumbled to the side, out of the way, but it never reached him.
Something else—someoneelse, because it looked like a man even if it ran on all fours—burst out of the cairn and caught up with the skin dog before it got more than a few yards. A big hand scruffed the black skin, flayed hide pulled up in clumsy, fatty folds, and ripped it off the dog underneath. With nothing to animate it, the skin went limp in the man’s fist, blown backward in the wind while the dog faded away. Nick could still hear its aggrieved bark in his head, echoed as though it came from somewhere very far away.
The man sniffed the skin for a second and then tossed it away as he lost interest. He was massive, built like a bull with thick shoulders and layers of muscle under a dense fuzz of gray bristles. Salt-and-pepper hair hung around his face, tangled around chunks of ice and snow. Under the coat of fur, Nick could see thin red patches on the man’s hands and on his cramped legs, where the skin had frozen, peeled, and healed over torn muscles.
Nick stumbled back a step. The crunch of his foot against the ice brought the man’s head swinging around. Under the unruly bangs, his eyes were bright mindless yellow, and slaver dripped in wet, sticky strands from the corners of his mouth. The man peeled his lips back from broken shards of teeth, shreds of meat and hide caught between them, and growled.
That wasn’t what made Nick take another step backward, a whimper caught in his closed throat. It was the face.
The Run-Away Man.
