Nick shifted. “Nothing,” he said. “Before Girvan, I thought she was dead. I hadn’t spoken to her since I was taken into care.”
For a second the horror of the ruined old wolf with the knife and Nick’s smile on her face was cut through with contempt. Every wolf in the Old Man’s territory knew to stay under the radar of the authorities. They went to school enough not to raise alarm in their neighbors, and when they had to go into town, they behaved themselves… more or less.
None of the Scottish wolves cared that much for humans, but only a fool ignored that they could be dangerous if they had the numbers. A fool or a prophet, he supposed.
“She never talked of the wolves before that? Of the prophets? Her plans?”
The bird-bead glitter went out of Nick’s eyes, and he looked simply human again as he hunched down into his coat. He pulled the cuffs down over his hands.
“Nothing useful,” he said. “Children’s stories, about the Wolf Winter and the wolves who’d come down over the Wall.”
“Is that why you can’t sleep?” Jack asked. “You think we’re going to kill you?”
Nick glanced past him, into the shadows. His eyes flickered as though whatever he could see had moved. “Wolves weren’t the only monsters in her stories.”
Something cold tickled the back of Jack’s neck, a thread from his T-shirt, a rough tag, or a single ragged nail. Jack tried to ignore the itch. He couldn’t stomach it for long and snarled in frustration to himself as he spun around to see what Nick saw behind him. Nothing. Even when he tugged at the Wild, the smell of cold heather sharp in his nose, there was nothing there, just a faint stink of old meat and old milk that clung to the tarred oak walls.
The smell hadn’t been there before. After a few days in the car, doors pulled shut against the sporadic inspections of the armed escorts, Jack knew what every corner and board smelled like. The faded stink of human sweat, fresh—or it had been yesterday—blood from the man who’d tried to catch a ride on the train and went under the wheels instead.
Nothing like milk.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Nick said. His eyes still looked human, unusually dark but without the obsidian glitter of an animal. There was something sad in the set of his mouth, and there wasn’t anything of his grandmother in that. “An old grudge.”
Jack shook himself. He was a wolf. The strangest thing he’d ever met was himself, but the Wolf Winter had brought more than snow and blood out of the Wild. Maybe the prophets knew what. Nick’s grandmother had certainly known how to open the way across… even if they had stopped anything at the threshold.
It had been an insult originally, the prophets. The wolves only sent the dregs of their kind to parlay prayers, the caitiffs and the degenerates, to show what they thought of the gods. In hindsight that might also have been a mistake. The prophets knew more than they told in the catechism or read in the auguries, and they hadn’t shared all of it with the wolves.
At least—Jack thought grimly of Job’s claim that the Old Man had full knowledge of all this—he hoped they hadn’t told.
“Go to sleep,” Jack ordered roughly, as though there wouldn’t be anything there if Nick didn’t get to see it. “We’ll reach Irvine tomorrow, and there’s no more free ride after that. We walk.”
It was the god who laughed, a caw of scratchy amusement as Nick tilted his head to the side. “You’ll walk.”
It wasn’t the Wild. Jack knew the Wild—the smell and taste of it. Whatever it was that flickered around Nick was something… else. Something that smelled like the charred bones and long dead of the bonefires on the beach.
Whatever it was wiped Nick away and let the bird out. The coat dropped in a heavy puddle to the crate below. An empty sleeve dangled limply over the edge, and a black crow-like bird mantled a thick ruff of feathers. A black eye glittered at him down the pickax length of bone-white beak, old words carved like scrimshaw along the smooth plates, as it turned its head to watch him.
It was only the human gods the wolves had issue with, the ones that had made them and used them and then shat on their long service. The gods of fur and feather—the coursers and feasts of their masters—they were neutral too. In theory. As the first wolf in centuries to come snout to… beak… with one? Jack felt no kinship with it. There was something essentially alien behind that bone-carved beak.
Maybe that was because it was a bird. And at least it didn’t look like the old bitch.
He curled his lip in mute warning he wasn’t roadkill for its breakfast and then went back to his nest of blankets and lover. Jack wrapped himself around Danny, who turned sleepily into him with a yawned “What?” and an arm curled over Jack’s hip.
“Nothing,” Jack said. He tangled his fingers through Danny’s hair, grown out in messy curls after his days being leashed, and brushed a kiss over his forehead. “Don’t worry about it.”
Danny grunted something skeptical but let himself slide back into his dreams. The soft huff of his breath was warm against Jack’s throat, a metronome to count down until dawn. He’d told the bird to get some sleep, but Jack had no intention of taking his own advice. Not until he had to.
Wolves didn’t dream like men did, or—Jack absently stroked Danny’s hair—like dogs, but Jack didn’t want to dream at all. He already knew what the Wild wanted to show him, but he didn’t feel like doing what it wanted right now.
In Durham—with Danny back in his bed and Gregor at his back instead of his heels for once—he’d plotted a hero’s return to the Scottish Pack. Whatever the wolves thought about where Jack put his cock, the Wild had chosen him. Even the Old Man would respect that. Then the old bitch had carved the pride out of him, and the Wild had let her.
Without the Wild’s seal of approval, Jack was just another exile, come to beg for scraps.
Jack laughed a dry choke of noise, as he rolled away from Danny and stared up into the dark at the ceiling. The rattle of wheels over frozen tracks vibrated through his bones and hummed between the plates of his skull. He ran his hand up under his shirt and spread his fingers over hard muscle and healed, naked skin. No, not just another exile. One who had taken the time away to double down on what made him unwelcome. Not only had he refused to fuck one of the women in the Pack, he’d taken a dog as his mate. He didn’t even have proof of his rank anymore.
What else could the Wild show him to make it worse?
