Two months ago, the Wild here had been as familiar to Gregor as his own face in the mirror, and he’d known it as well as his own body. Now he wasn’t comfortable in either. The Sannock’s old prison spread like a sour infection and made the native Wild swell and crease in reaction. It hungoddacross the landscape.
Gregor counted his footsteps. Three hundred of them, his stride constrained by the wire that sliced him with each step. Yet he could feel the hot looseness of distance in his thighs and between his shoulders, and his sense of where he stood—on the Pack’s land,histerritory—moved like sand under his feet.
“What did she mean?” Ellie asked, her voice so low it was almost inaudible as she fell in next to Lachlan. He growled dismissal at her and walked faster through the snow. “She can’t be pregnant—”
Lachlan turned on her with a snarl, closed his good hand around her throat, and pulled her up onto her toes. “Whatever Rose says she is, that’s what she is. Understood?”
The Old Man had never had to get physical to make an out-of-line wolf back down. Lachlan couldn’t get the job done even with Ellie’s throat as good as in his teeth. She slapped his hand away roughly and took a cautious step back but held her ground.
“She says she’s pregnant with the true Numitor’s brat,” Ellie said sharply. Her fair curls blew into her face and she swiped them away again. “If you aren’t Numitor, Lach, then what right do you have to put hands on me?”
He glared at her. “The right she gave me,” he said. “That… what she said… was just to hurt these two.”
Ellie glanced at Gregor and past him to Jack and then spat in the snow. “If she just wanted to hurt them, then she could have broken their legs,” she said. “Not written a play. I came up here, gave up everything, to follow the Numitor. Old Man or the Young Wolf, I don’t care. If you aren’t even the Numitor, why should we be at your heels?”
“She told you to,” Lachlan said flatly. He tilted his head toward the front of the group where Rose walked with her fist twisted in the monster’s slack ruff of raw skin. “You want to cross her?”
“She told the others to follow you,” Ellie pointed out defiantly. “Took their brats as surety they’d obey. I’d already thrown my lot in with you, and she told me nothing. But if something happened to you, I think she’d tell me to take over.”
“You think too much,” Lachlan said. “The Old Man’s dead, and his heir, if that’s what that is, isn’t even born yet. Maybe he never will be. Right now I’m Numitor, and if you question it again, I’ll slice your throat.”
He tossed her into the snow and stalked away.
“Wise wolves don’t make threats,” Gregor said. “They just do.”
Ellie gave him a bleak look as she scrambled to her feet. The smell of adrenaline and fear rose off her like a cloud of steam—thin and sharp as snapped fingers—and she bared her blunt human teeth at him. “And you’re wise?” she asked. “To come back here where you aren’t wanted? None of us asked for your help, neither of you, and we don’t need to hear you mouth off either. The Wolf Winter isn’t what we thought. So what? I’ll survive.”
She glanced down the row of prisoners, the tip of her head almost unconscious, and then immediately away. Her mouth twisted with bitterness.
Gregor would have asked, but Jack jabbed him with his elbow to shut him up. Habit made him want to askanyhow, but he choked it off behind his teeth.
“You trust her?” Jack asked quietly. He pointed his chin toward Rose and her monsters. “What’s left of her.”
Ellie let a flicker of confused horror show for a second. Then she slammed a game face over it. She rubbed her throat and glared at Jack. “I trust power,” she said. “Of everyone here? She has it, and we don’t.Youdon’t. Not anymore.”
She wrenched the buttons of her dress loose with one hand. Gregor got a flash of lean sides and flat stomach, the inner curve of high breasts, and then the wolf sucked it down. It wasn’t like the change the monster went through, a torture of broken bones and fever-malleable flesh. The wolf knew the template it wanted to use—the prick of its ears and the length its legs were supposed to be—and it stuck to that.
Ellie’s wolf dropped to all fours and shook itself out of the dress. It gave Gregor a curious look out of amber eyes and then trotted away. He watched her go with sour envy in his gut. Maybe the prophet’s poison and maybe just him. Sometimes it was easier to be a wolf, to shed thenoiseof humanity. Gregor missed it.
A misstep in the snow bumped Jack’s shoulder against him. Gregor reminded himself of their new alliance and didn’t shove him away. “What the prophets don’t know,” Jack murmured, “won’t help them.”
The prophet chained to Jack yanked him away with a growl before Gregor could respond. Jack’s ankles ripped open again and spilled fresh blood, musky and potent in the snow as he stumbled. Something would eat well tonight, Gregor thought as he glanced back and tracked their trail along the blood-splattered snow.
What was in the Wild was real, but it was a memory of a thing. Catch and eat a squirrel and it would satisfy in the teeth and on the tongue, but it wouldn’t linger or satisfy, not like meat in the world, where an hour later you could lick your chops and taste the meaty gravy of the prey. In the Wild anything from the world was a seductive treat, a lure as good as the smell of grease and fried starch from a Lochwinnoch chip shop on a Friday night.
The prophets had grown in confidence if they weren’t worried about what they’d bring to their door. Or…. Gregor waited for the rest of the thought to form, but it didn’t. It felt like he’d missed something, but he couldn’t pin down what.
At least it gave him something to think about as he walked, one step after the other, the weight of a collar around his neck and the itch of pain in his feet. Then, between one step and the next, he caught the tail end of a familiar scent—salt and candy floss, Nick and blood. Even the cold-thinned hint of it caught in Gregor’s throat like a hook and jerked his gaze away from his grim study of the pimple on the back of Lachlan’s neck. He looked around quickly, his eyes drawn first to the white, snow-heavy clouds in search of a cruciform black silhouette and then back down to earth.
A cliff of ancient, black trees loomed along the ridge of a nearby hill, dense as a thicket of brambles, and a herd of elk skirked along the outskirts of it. Snow lay thick over their humped backs, and as the lead male swung his head around to study the wolves as they passed, Gregor saw that he was long dead. Icicles dripped like knives from his antlers, and the skin had sloughed off his head to leave weather-scrubbed planes of bone.
Then he moved again, and instead of an elk, there was a man—most of a man, although he was still skull bones and icy horns wrapped in old rags. The Sannock locked its empty eye sockets on Gregor—a flicker jolt of stolen life battered against Gregor’s mind as if itneededin—and then pointed down the slope with an oddly mortal ugly hand.
Blood splashed on the snow three steps left to stain the ice.
Then Gregor’s foot came down, and the Wild spat him out. It clawed at him as he went, tried to hold on to his bones as it ejected the metal, and he had to struggle to keep himself together. He landed somewhere else. The scent of Nick was ripped out of his nose, and the flat, acid fear in the back of his throat turned hollow in confusion.
The prophet behind him laughed and jabbed a finger into the back of Gregor’s skull. “Finally smart enough to be afraid,” he mocked as he caught the edges of the scent. The moment with the Sannock at the tree line had been quicker than it felt. No one else had noticed. “Too fucking late.”
