No.
It shook itself bristly, nose to tail, to shed the compulsion and a layer of snow. The scentscape here was bleak, just ice and see-through ghosts and not as familiar as home. Even the finger was preserved, the scents it picked up dry and powdery.
Houses always smelled. Scents lingered in corners and worked into carpets—old food and sweat, anger and happiness, sex and death. Humans did all that inside.
The dog growled at the rodent that might be under the tree—just so it knew—and headed off toward the house. It was too lanky and dark to go unnoticed, but it skulked through the trees and slunk up on its belly to the house. The long roll of chain-link was stapled to wooden posts hammered into the ground around the house, but it had bagged in the storms. It wasn’t hard for the dog to flatten itself and squirm under, even if it lost some hair in the process.
Some skin too. It smelled its own blood, a bloom of salt in the cold air, before it felt the itch of pain across its shoulders. Nothing else. The dog prowled, stiff-legged and careful, across the snow. With each step its paws left deep, perfectly round prints in the virgin snow, but there was no help for that.
Besides, the snow that eddied around it would fill those in soon enough. The dog shook its head to get the tickle of ice out of its ears and then cocked its head. It heard the same creaky sound of something under the snow, but it couldn’t smell mole or rat. The sound didn’t move either.
The dog paced back and forth in front of the house as it tried to pin down where the noise came from. It got closer and closer to the steps and then pounced, paws first, on the sound. Instead of warm body, its feet found metal, and the sound stopped.
It dug down into the snow, kicked white, frozen chunks back between its hind legs until it had uncovered a heavy, metal grate sunk into the concrete under the stairs. The sharp smell of pepper and milk leaked up on the damp hair. The dog flagged its shaggy, whip of a tail in excitement and barked, one sharp yelp, into the grille.
There was a pause.
“Danny?” the voice was smaller than Danny remembered, pinched in by fear and walls. It wobbled for a moment and then hardened. “You stupid dog. What are you doing here? Get out. Go away. I don’t need your help!”
The dog wagged its tail and stuck its nose against the cold metal. That was her. Definitely Bron.
Chapter Ten—Gregor
FADED REDhair hung in frizzy hanks around the old bitch’s head as she limped down the beach, hunched and ruined-looking in a stained Aran sweater and long skirt…. The monster kept pace with her while the other watched them and growled through its deformed mouth.
Last time Gregor had seen Rose, she’d fled the cave of the Sannock Dead—their slaughterhouse and resting place—with a single hide. It didn’t look like it had made it out intact. The freckled skin had been sliced into scraps and used to patch Rose back together where the hot oil Gregor had doused her with had sloughed the skin off muscle and bone. It was stretched over her face like a mask, the thin skin under her eye puckered with small, black stitches, and she’d used long strips of it to pull her singed scalp back together. Patches of her own hair, gray and brittle, stuck wirily through the matted hanks of corpse hair.
It was a horror—Gregor could see that—but theideashe was beautiful caught in his brain like a fishhook. That was somehow a fact, even as the stitches gaped to show the waxy burns and hints of bone below. The dissonance of it made Gregor’s brain ache and his cock twitch with an interest that turned his stomach. He breathed in thewrongstench of the monsters instead, the reek of sick-poison flesh almost welcome, and let the revolted anger push everything else out.
Had this been it? The unearthed dead and the murdered children had just been to make her beautiful again. That wasn’t much to show for all her trouble.
Her trouble, Gregor recalled bleakly, and the life of her grandson. Nick had come back, but that didn’t undo what Rose had done. It didn’t erase Gregor’s memory of Nick’s twisted corpse on the beach or the wash of raw, sour anger that clawed up his throat.
The thin, furious snarl trickled down his nose. One of the prophets yanked on his collar hard enough to bend him backward. The hobbles laced through his ankles tore the skin as he staggered. He choked as the metal dug into his throat and cut off his air along with the growl.
“Leave him be,” Rose ordered. Her voice was harsh, the accent burned off her words but still clotted. “They came a long way to die for me. The least I can do is let them do it on their feet.”
The prophet relaxed his grip with a disgusted grunt, and Gregor straightened up. He hunched his shoulder in a clumsy attempt to rub the bruised, torn skin of his neck. Blood dripped down his ankles to stain his bare feet and soak into the almost-there beach.
“Bitch,” he said.
She shifted her chin at the sound of his voice, tilted her head toward him, and he realized she was still blind. One eye socket was empty, the edges melted like wax, and the other had been stitched closed with a stolen lid. Something moved under it. Gregor wasn’t confident it was an eye or even what was left of one.
“Where’s my grandson?” she asked.
“Gone,” Gregor said harshly.
She had the gall to flinch as though she had the right or the ability to give a fuck. Her head snapped around and she raised her hand at Lachlan, finger reconstructed from stolen skin and splints.
“What did you do to him, boy?” she demanded harshly. “Where is Nicholas and my little god?”
Lachlan stumbled forward, propelled by a shove, and dragged Ellie with him. His hand was locked on her arm as they stumbled through the misplaced seawood and stopped just in front of the old woman. His face was greasy with sweat, and an uneasy stink of fear and lust seeped out of him.
“The dark-haired man? I didn’t know he was anything of yours. If I’d known, if we’d known, we’d have welcomed him better,” Lachlan blurted out. He yanked Ellie forward, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved her toward Rose. Ellie struggled in his grip but couldn’t break away. “I barely saw him. It was Ellie who chased him off.”
Ellie stammered out a shocked denial. She buttoned her lips together midword as Rose turned her ruined face toward her. There was an accuracy to the movement that gave the creepy impression she could still somehow see through that ruined eye.
“What did you do to him, girl?” she asked as she leaned down into Ellie’s face. Her lips, smooth and pink, sagged and slipped as she talked, her own wrinkled seam of a mouth visible underneath. Ellie squirmed uncomfortably, her face puckered with revulsion and attraction, and tried to turn away. Rose pinched Ellie’s chin between her fingers and held her in place as she sniffed. “Did you bite my boy? Did you fuck him? I can smell him on you.”
