His gran had told him a lot of scary stories when he was a child, and the Run-Away Man was the star of a lot of them. The stories had all ended the same way, as his gran pinched his arm or thigh and demanded,“And what do you do when you see the Run-Away Man?”
Nick licked cracked lips as he took another step back. Panic tasted like a split lip, blood on the back of his tongue, and filled his hand with the blind, unthinking terror of his dreams. It even infected the bird, cold and insidious as it spilled over the graft that joined them. It filled his head with the batter of frantic wings and angry knock-sharp caws.
The man prowled forward, still on all fours as though he’d forgotten how to walk, and that low, dangerous growl dribbled out of his slack mouth along with his spit. There was something there that Nick needed to see, he could feel it, but there was no room for it in the panic-static that filled his brain.
There was only one thing to do when you saw the Run-Away Man, only one answer that Gran had wanted to hear.
Nick spun on his heel and fled, full of black, winged panic and his throat so tight he could hardly breathe. He tripped over a stone and went down, sliced his hands and knees up as he fell, and scrambled to his feet as a hand grabbed at the tails of his loaned coat. The Run-Away Man yanked him back for a moment, and then the fabric tore like tissue between coarse fingers. Nick staggered, caught himself, and fled between the towers and into the storm. He didn’t question how he—barefoot and breathless and lost—stayed ahead of the man behind him or where his blind flight would take him.
He ran away.
Chapter Seven—Jack
THERE WAScoffee, two thermoses of it and an extra cup to share. Jack thought of Danny, his knee tucked between Jack’s thighs and his nose cold where it pressed into the hollow of Jack’s shoulder. Dogs weren’t as immune to weather as wolves were. They felt it more. He supposed no one wanted the dogs—six of them, all chained to fresh, shiny loops sunk into the walls, some of whom Jack didn’t know—to freeze to death down here before… whatever this was.
“Here,” Millie Dance said, her voice scratched and raw as she thrust a cup out toward him. Her hand shook slightly as she held it, and the coffee spilled over the chipped rim to redden her chill-white knuckles. She ran the corner shop and post office in Lochwinnoch, with a brisk trade in Irn-Bru and gossip for the Old Man. It was a good life for a dog, and she had gotten used to playing human. Jack had never seen her without makeup and a sensible heel, never mind in a tattered dressing gown with blood matted in her hair. “Even a wolf would rather be—”
One of the other dogs—Hector Bates, a dour farmhand who’d been lying to local farmers about who ate their sheep for twenty years—backhanded the cup out of Millie’s hand. It hit the dirt floor with a thud. Coffee spilled out to steam against the cold earth and rolled until Gregor put his foot out to stop it.
“Let ’em parch,” he snapped, his shoulders hunched, and chapped lips lifted back from nicotine-yellow teeth as he glared at Jack. “We don’t owe them anything. For centuries we’ve groveled for them, done their dirty deeds for them, and now they don’t even have the fucking decency to put us down with dignity? You want to wag your tail for a pat on the head, Millie, that’s on you. I’m done showing my throat.”
Gregor laughed harshly and bent down to pick up the cup.
“Are we keeping you from your sheep?” Gregor mocked as he wiped the cup on his jeans. There was never a bad situation he couldn’t make worse with his mouth, even when his fingers were wet with blood from the injury on his shoulder that wouldn’t heal. “Scared they’ll tup some strange ram while you’re not there to watch?”
Hector lunged at Gregor and jerked to a stop at the end of his chain. The metal collar cut into the weathered slack of his throat and made him gag. Millie pulled him away by the back of his shirt.
“I’ll do as I fucking please,” she snarled at him as she shoved him against the curved wall. The old, shaped stones were limned with ice, thick glazed over the mortar and granite. She jammed her forearm up under Hector’s chin, above the collar. “Give what I want, to whom I want. You’re just another dog, Hector. Don’t try and show your fangs to me.”
Jack grabbed her shoulders, all wiry muscle under the greasy felt of her robe, and pulled her off the other dog. He didn’t get any thanks from Hector for the save. He slouched sullenly against the wall.
“Enough,” he said as he put his body between the two of them. He could feel Millie’s growl through her collarbone—a dangerous, back-of-the-throat, almost whine that wasn’t a warning anymore. “Fighting among ourselves isn’t going to get us out of here.”
It wasn’t Millie who backed down. Hector was the one who turned away with a hunched shoulder and silence, and one of the strange dogs barked out a harsh, unhappy laugh.
“At least if we kill ourselves, they won’t get the chance,” the man—his voice burred with a lowland accent and the remnants of an expensive suit hanging in filthy rags from his body—interrupted. He tugged nervously at his collar, fingers curled around the rough round of metal, and his voice dropped as though the dread had real weight to catch in his throat. “You’ve not seen them—”
He broke off as a chunk of ice caught him on the temple. It split his eyebrow open and blood dripped down into his eye.
“Shut the fuck up!” Tom, a half-blind dog kept in the Pack on Da’s charity, snarled where he huddled against the wall. He groped over the ground with clumsy, half-frozen hands for another projectile. “Monsters and murderers. You’re full of shit. That’s all it is. The prophets said they have a place for—”
“I know what I saw,” the stranger shot back. “I know what I saw themdo. Ourplaceis on the end of their knives.”
Tom grabbed a stone and cocked his arm back. Before he could throw it, Gregor stepped into the path of it and growled.
“You heard him.”
The unexpected show of support from his brother caught Jack off-balance. He gave the back of Gregor’s head a hard look and wondered if he could trust this. Probably not, he knew that, but for now it worked. Tom clumsily dropped the rock and lifted his chin in submissive acknowledgment of the reproof.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Ain’t my place, but he isn’t even pack. What’s he know about our prophets?”
“Same thing you do, that we all do,” Jack said. The question of where he stood with his brother could wait for later. The last thing Jack needed right then was to borrow more trouble. “That they’re scum, the dregs and perverts that no pack wants, and no wolf with half a brain lends an ear to them?”
Tom gave him a resentful look through his matted hair, his one eye faded blue. “Well, I ain’t a dog. The prophets told us the Winter was coming, and it did. They told us that the Old Man wouldn’t come back from the loch, and he didn’t. Now they told us that the gods got a special job just for dogs, that it’s why we were born like this… instead of like you. Why shouldn’t we believe ’em? They talk to the gods for us, don’t they?”
A mutter of uncomfortable agreement ran around the room. Some of the dogs, like Tom, seemed entirely convinced, even seduced, by the new catechism. The rest, like Millie, who nodded uncertain agreement a second too late for conviction, wanted to believe, since they knew what the alternative was. Only the stranger, fingers pressed to his eyebrow to pinch the wound shut, openly rejected Tom’s faith with a sneer as he spat onto the floor.
“We don’t believe them because the gods fucked us before,” Gregor snarled as he stepped forward to loom over Tom. “Or did you forget why we’re on this side of the Wall?”
