Ewan straightened his shoulders and glared indignantly at Gregor. “He’s my grandson,” he spat out. That was new information. Nick had only ever spoken of his gran, but Gregor supposed there had to have been a grandfather or two. Maybe even a father somewhere. The flicker of jealousy in his gut resented that. He wanted Nick to be his alone, but it made sense. “My flesh, my blood. All I have left. You think I’d hurt him?”
“She did,” Gregor said. He wanted his wolf, wanted the bite it would mark on the edge of his word. But it was still gone, and he had to make do with his own anger. “And Nick’smine, prophet.”
Ewan looked taken aback. Maybe Rose hadn’t told him everything about why Nick had been willing to come north. But it only made him hesitate for a second, and then he gestured sharply for the prophets to get on with it.
This time Gregor went when they dragged him away.
Chapter Eleven—Gregor
OLD MOISTUREstains blotted the eggshell-blue walls and warped the once-glossy wooden floorboards underfoot. The dark oak was scored from neglect and pitted with round, golf ball dents from the hail, rough-edged chunks of which still lay along the skirting.
Gregor glanced through a door as they passed it, into a room with bowed, empty shelves and a smashed desk. He craned his neck to look up the stairs, and he could see right up through the roof, to the span of pale sky that floated overhead. The Winter had reined its storm in, but it would be back soon enough.
A prophet punched him in the back of the head. The impact made Gregor stumble forward, and he felt the wire rip something important in his ankle. A jolt of pain slashed up the back of his leg, and his toes went numb and unresponsive. They folded under him as he forced himself forward, bloody and ripped with splinters.
Jack staggered over and braced his shoulder against Gregor’s to keep him on his feet. The fact he needed the help, and from Jack, tasted like rotted meat on the back of Gregor’s tongue. He swallowed it anyhow.
“There’s nothing to see up here,” the prophet said. He sounded almost proud of the run-down den the prophets had moved into like hermit crabs on the beach. “Our lives aren’t spent where wolves can see them. Ailsa, get the door.”
The prophet who ducked past Gregor was small and dark haired, with a sallow, mean face dominated by nothing in particular. She’d already shed her coat to reveal the patchy silver-and-black hide of a wolf that Gregor did recognize. Jess had been old, maybe even older than Da, and only part of the Pack by courtesy these days, since she preferred to keep to herself in the hills.
But she’d been alive and well when Gregor had left for the Wall, and from the gore-tatted hole ripped between the shoulders of her hide, she hadn’t died well.
It looked like the prophets weren’t willing to wait for a corpse to skin anymore.
“I hope Jess took her gelt from your guts on the way out,” Jack said before Gregor had the chance. Irritation scratched at him, one more thing his brother took, but he ignored it. “She deserved better.”
Ailsa spat on the ground and crouched down to unlock the thick, iron padlock that hooked through a hasp sunk into the floor. Once it was undone, she unlatched the two steel bars and hauled up the trap door with a stink of old dirt and fresh musk muggy as it escaped.
“I deserved better,” she spat. “I deserved my wolf. The boy was only human anyhow, what business was it of the Old Man’s—”
“Shut up, Ailsa,” a prophet ordered. “It’s bad enough to have to know you, without being reminded what you are.”
She rolled her lips back to snarl at them. Not satisfied with the wolf’s fangs when she changed her skin, Ailsa had pulled two eye teeth from something and jammed them in her gums. They were gray and chipped, dead-looking and full of infection.
“What we all are,” she spat back at him. “Whatever we did, they made us all prophets the same. Now we’ll make ourselves gods.”
She pulled her hand off the ring and left shreds of skin frozen to the metal. Her frost-burned hand didn’t bleed, not yet, as she scrambled out of sight down the sharp curve of gray stone steps.
“Some of us,” said a prophet behind Gregor, his voice indistinct but thick with disgust. “Not all.”
He was told to shut up, and then it was Gregor and Jack’s turn to go down into the ground.
“What’s going to happen to the others?” Jack asked as he struggled down the narrow steps on hobbled feet. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor to care. He supposed that whatever Jack’s plan was, it wouldn’t work if the dogs died first.
“The dogs?” Ailsa asked with a snort. “You would be the one to care about them.”
She lifted her foot and kicked him down the stairs. An odd, breathy laugh escaped her as he tumbled down into the dark. Gregor lunged for her with a snarl, but the collar pulled him up short as the prophet yanked the chain tight with a laugh. Gregor gagged and stumbled back a step.
“The dogs are kenneled out back where they belong,” Ailsa said. She stepped forward, ignoring the other prophet’s hiss of warning, and stroked his face with a soft, fever-hot hand. The stink of her—rot and misery stitched to whatever sickness had sent her for a prophet—sweated out of her skin, and Gregor gagged. She smiled at him with those stolen fangs. “But you keep the breeding stock away from the curs. Someone should have told your brother that years ago—”
She was mean, but she wasn’t smart. Gregor grinned at her and then snapped his head around to sink his teeth into her hand. Hot blood filled his mouth, the familiar taste cut through with the bitter sweetness of rot as he bore down. Ailsa squealed and tried to wrench her hand away, but her flesh tore between Gregor’s teeth.
Human teeth weren’t as efficient as a wolf’s, but they could do the job if you put your mind to it. Greg ground his jaw, tearing her skin, and jerked his head viciously from side to side. Bone cracked and tendons stretched, caught between his teeth like gristle. Ailsa punched at his head with her free hand and finally got away from him as the prophets dragged him back. She clutched her bleeding hand to her chest and glared at him.
“When it’s time,” she said, “I want to be the one who kills him.”
He grinned at her, hard and bloody-toothed, and spat her little finger out onto the stones. She whined in her throat and checked her mutilated hand as though she hadn’t realized she was short one.
