“You get what you’re given,” the other prophet said. He dragged Gregor over to the trap door and roughly shoved him through. “Like the rest of us.”
Gregor pitched down the stairs headfirst. Instinct made him try to break his fall, but with his hands and feet tethered, that just made it worse. He gritted his teeth, raised his arms to cover his head as best he could, and tried to go limp. Shoulder and hip bashed against the hard, stone edge of the step until he landed in a heap at the bottom, half on top of his brother.
He rolled over onto his back, legs still propped up the stairs, and stared up at the dim square of the trap door.
“Don’t bother,” a familiar woman’s voice said. “Even if you crawl up there, the door won’t budge. I’ve tried. And they have those things stand guard.”
“Their monsters,” Gregor said. “I’ve killed them before.”
Jack grunted as he shoved Gregor off him. “Not easily.”
“We just need practice.”
Gregor got his elbow under him and scrambled awkwardly to his feet. The taste of Ailsa’s blood lingered like sour grease in his mouth, and he glanced around the cellar. It had been a larder once, probably, shelves and cupboards on the walls and hooks strung from the ceiling. The prophets had lined the room with cots, thin bedrolls stained with blood and fluids and the metal frames scratched and warped. It was, he supposed, no easy task to become a prophet. In the corner of the room, huddled on the cleanest sheets, two toddlers and a still-blue-eyed pup stared back at him. Candlelight flashed green in all their eyes.
“I thought they took five?” he said as he looked back at Bron. “Four children and you.”
She scowled and looked off-puttingly like her brother for a second. “Greer got away from them in the Wild,” she said. Her mouth twisted around the words. Gregor’s namesake had been nearly five, one of the oldest of the children taken. He’d been a stocky little brat of a kid, always in trouble. “He ran. I hoped he’d gotten back, but….”
But he hadn’t, Gregor finished the sentence for her. Sometimes children didn’t. The Wild kept lost children, hid them. Even the humans told stories about that, although they blamed it on the Sannock.
“He’s not dead,” he said. “That’s some comfort.”
Bron grimaced. “Is it?” she asked skeptically as she reached down to rub her stomach.
Gregor followed the gesture, and his brain went blank as she spread her bandaged hand on the taut, high bulge of her stomach.
“You’re pregnant,” he said.
“I know,” Bron snapped at him. “I worked that out for myself.”
Jack snorted out a halfhearted laugh. He wiped his bloody face—from a gash on his forehead where he’d caught the stairs wrong—on his sleeve.
“Whose is it?” he asked, and a sudden thought turned the corner of his mouth down. “Not Lachlan’s?”
It was an understandable assumption. Lachlan had sniffed after Bron since she was barely old enough for it not to be creepy, as much to do with her brother as her.
“No,” Gregor said. He warily extended his cuffed hands, not entirely sure what he should do with them. “Mine. Right?”
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, or good enough. Their blood had been up from the moon hunt, and Bron had grinned at him and dragged him into her bed. An itch to scratch and, she admitted, a way to get Lachlan to back off. Lach might have been willing to play rank games with other wolves over Bron, but he wouldn’t risk Gregor’s temper.
Most people didn’t want to.
It hadn’t meant anything, but it had been the full moon, when the wolves and the Wild were strongest. Two-thirds of the Pack had been born nine months after the moon waxed, he should have wondered. He had other things on his mind, though.
Bron twisted her mouth into a thin smile. “Well, they didn’t drag me down here and chain me up for the pleasure of my company, did they? It’s yours. Congratulations. It’ll be dead like the other one soon enough.”
She looked sorry for that almost immediately as she bit her lower lip, but she didn’t try to take it back. That was Bron for you, sharp as a nail and as unwilling to bend. And hurtful or not, Gregor thought bleakly as he dropped his hands, it wasn’t as though she lied. Even as a wolf, he hadn’t been able to save his daughter, and what could he do for this baby now? He couldn’t defend himself, couldn’tfindNick let alone protect him, and now he might have to let another baby die.
The thought curdled in his chest, cold and rancid. Gregor could feel the slow burn of the prophet’s infection as it leaked from under the picked-at scab on his soul. It was just harder to ignore when he knew the sour self-loathing was right.
“It’s better,” Bron said. “Better than what that raddled auld prophet has planned for him.”
“What?” Jack asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, her hand still pressed protectively to the bump. “I don’t expect it’s a nice party, though. No wonder my brother likes you, you’re both idiots.”
Jack glanced up and then stepped toward Bron. He tilted his head toward her as he mouthed the words almost silently. “Is he here?”
