“Do you see him?” Bron sniffed as she glared at Jack. She met his eyes for a second and then flushed uncomfortably as she looked away. She tapped wait on Jack’s shoulder and turned to look at the children still cuddled together in the corner. “Shut up! Stop whining, you little mutts. Everyone’s already dead for all we know.”
The older girl, Shauna, wiped her nose on her sleeve, coughed, and then wailed like a banshee. Her voice, piercing as only a child’s could be, dug down into Gregor and found the one tender spot that flinched to comfort her. The boy didn’t quite have the lung capacity, but the undulating shriek he pumped out was still impressive. Even the pup threw its head back and tried its best to howl gummily toward the ceiling.
“Did you send Danny here?” Bron asked under the cover of the cacophony. She shoved at Jack with one bandaged hand, and he stepped back. Once. “He’s a dog, you dick. You can’t just use him to get what you want. What if one of those things had got him?”
“Where is he?” Jack asked.
She scowled and shoved him again. Jack grabbed her arm and moved her back a step.
“Where is Danny?” he growled.
Gregor moved forward with a soft snarl of warning in his throat, but he didn’t intervene. Bron wasn’t helping, and it wouldn’t hurt her for Jack to put her back on her heels, but Jack wouldn’t hurt her. The children faltered, but Bron hastily gestured for them to keep it up.
“He’s outside,” she said, her eyes focused acceptably on Jack’s chin. “He said he had a plan, but we had to wait for you. All these years, and you can still get him to heel.”
Jack’s fingers tightened on her arm, blood around his wrists as the wires dug in, and Gregor thought he’d misjudged his brother. He tensed, but Jack let go before he had to do anything.
“What’s his plan?” he asked, voice clipped.
Bron huffed in annoyance. “Like he’d tell me the details,” she said. “Clever dog’s plans are too complicated for his dumb little sister to follow. He just told me what to do when you got here.”
“And?” Jack prodded.
Shauna’s voice finally gave out, and she sniffled herself into silence. She wiped her eyes on her grubby sleeve, lower lip wobbly as though her performance had reminded her she had plenty of reason to cry. Bron patted her hands together in a silent clap and then gave her a thumbs-up. It earned her a watery smile from the little girl, who slouched back and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
Gregor wasn’t a tender man. He didn’t think often of his dead child if he could help it. It hurt when he did, so what point was there to it? But the sight of the grubby, frightened little wolves made Gregor think of her. What point was there to a pack that couldn’t keep their own pups safe, alive, and fed?
He let himself be angry. It was easier—a simple emotion that didn’t leave room in him for anything else.
“Whatever it is,” he said harshly, “get on with it.”
Bron glanced nervously at the ceiling, waited for a second, and then crouched down to pull a pair of wire cutters out of her boot. She fumbled them in her bandaged hand as Jack thrust his out expectantly. Blood dripped from his torn wrists as Bron pinched the wire in the cutting hinge of the tool. She caught her tongue between her teeth as she snipped through the strands, first on his wrists and then his feet. The collar took longest, the hasp of the padlock too thick for the cutters, but she was able to wear through the steel enough for Jack to twist the lock till it snapped.
As he freed himself, Bron turned to Gregor. Dark curls hung over her face as she did, and this close, Gregor could smell the faint milk-and-honey smell of pregnancy on her skin.
“I’ll kill him myself,” he said quietly, “before I let her take him.”
Her prickly mask slipped, and she gave Gregor a grateful look. Then she tucked her chin and went back to work on his cuffs. “Danny will try and stop you,” she said quietly. “He’s soft, stupid dog. Don’t let him.”
“I’m not the brother that loves him,” Gregor reminded her.
She snorted. “Wolves don’t love dogs,” she said. “They use them. Danny was fine where he was. He liked humans. He liked coffee. Now he’s here.”
Gregor shrugged. He hardly cared about his brother’s soft spot for the dog, but he supposed that someone could say the same about him and Nick. That idea put his hackles up. “Everyone’s here now, Bron,” he said. “The end of the world isn’t just in the north.”
She cut sharply through the last wire and left him to do the rest himself. He sucked in air through his teeth and pulled the wire from between the bones of his wrist. It didn’t hurt like the knife in his shoulder had, but the hot sting of it as it sliced through raw flesh caught the same nerves that nails on blackboards put on edge. Done, he crouched down to do his feet. They were bruised and puffy-looking, the skin so swollen that it folded around the wire in fat pleats.
He had to dig down into the raw meat, almost down to the bone, to get to the strands.
“What now?” he asked as he discarded the bloody slinky and dragged the cuffs of his jeans down to cover the raw-meat mess of his ankles. He tossed the cutters to Jack in a mute request for help with the collar. Their truce still held, apparently, since Jack cut him loose without comment. Gregor scratched the back of his neck once he was loose and looked expectantly at Bron. “You whistle?”
Bron shook her head and produced a battered lighter from her pocket. She tightened her fingers around it like a talisman. Her wolf glittered ferociously in her eyes, wild and dangerous from being caged.
“We burn their fucking hospital down.”
OR ATleast smoke them out. Gregor balanced on his brother’s shoulders as he stuffed wads of petrol-greasy cotton into the cracked plaster tubes that went up inside the walls. The fumes rose like rainbows, sweet enough to make his mouth water as he packed the fabric tightly.
“Danny said there’s speaking tubes that go all through the building,” Bron said under the cover of the kids’ renewed wails. She unraveled the bandage from her hand—the missing finger healed into a smooth stump—and clambered up the stairs to wedge it around the edges of the trapdoor. On the top of it, something shifted and gargled out a suspicious growl. She snatched her fingers back an inch and then shook the chill off and finished the job. “It should get everywhere. He’ll see it.”
