IT WASbarely dawn when the train groaned sullenly to a halt a few miles away from Glengarnock. Ten miles from home. The sun hung low and pale in the sky, as if the cold had sapped its energy to climb any higher, and the brakemen grumbled to themselves as they stumbled off the train. Propane tanks were slung over their shoulders as they shuffled along the tracks with flamethrowers to unseal the wheels. Steam spluttered and poured from under the train as though it were a much older model.
Soldiers in gray-and-white winter gear ignored them as they spread out along the tracks. They kept their guns trained on the white wasteland that spread out from the tracks. Nobody talked much. Their patience for small talk had been worn down to nothing by the time they stopped briefly near Girvan.
They’d had to use them twice yesterday, once to warn off a pack of scruffy dogs who slunk up out of the bushes. They’d probably been pampered pets once—some of them still had grubby, once-glittery collars around their necks and one had the rags of a bandanna—but hunger and grime had replaced domestication. At some point between abandonment and the tracks, they’d slipped into the Wild, and the passage had rubbed the bred-in differences down and brought out something more essentially… dog. They were still tame, though, somewhere down under the gnaw of empty bellies, and the angry voices and crack of bullets made them scatter.
The man who burst out of a house along the tracks—flushed red with fever and duct-taped into a quilt as a makeshift coat—hadn’t been so wise. He’d put his faith in the envelope of cash he tried to shove into the engineer’s hand for passage. When he wouldn’t take no for an answer, the soldiers shot him in the foot and dragged him away from the tracks. They left him in a puddle of red-stained snow, his curses futile as they bounced off the train.
The wolves’ catechism predicted that “no man would have mercy on another” during the Wolf Winter, that men would set to killing each other without the wolves even setting fang to the task. It was hard to say if that was prophecy or just prediction.
“The train’s probably full of supplies,” Danny muttered as he shifted his balance on the frost-covered coupling underfoot. They were squeezed in between two cars, pressed shoulder to shoulder as they waited for their chance to make a break for the houses behind the iced-over fence. “There must be bunkers up here for rich people—politicians, businessmen, the Queen—to ride out the disaster.”
Jack grunted as he shrugged his pack onto his back. He unfolded the strap so it lay comfortably over his shoulder.
“It will be a long wait,” he said. “Three more years of winter, and then the gods will have found their home.”
The mention of the gods made Danny grimace. He started to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and fumbled as he remembered they were gone. The prophets hadn’t planned to let him be human again, so they hadn’t bothered to keep them. Even after the Wild’s intervention and the prophet’s monsters, Danny clung to his skepticism like a miser to his gold.
He always knew wolves were real—the Sannock Dead he’d seen, like moonlight, storm wrack, and rot on the beach by the bonefires—but gods? He wasn’t ready to believe in them yet, not until he saw one with his own eyes.
And without his glasses, Jack thought wryly, they’d have to be quite close.
“Ma always said don’t borrow money or trouble,” Danny murmured. He leaned against Jack to steal warmth from him, and his breath smoked around his lips. “Add gods to the list. Worry about it when—if—we have to.”
Fair enough, Jack supposed. The gods could wait. Although it did feel strange to hear those words in Danny’s mouth. The future had been all Danny ever thought about when they were teenagers. It was why he’d left to chase the future he’d set his mind on among the humans.
Maybe the future was more appealing when you thought you could do something about it.
Snow crunched under heavy boots on the rails outside. Jack stiffened and pressed himself back against the cold side of the carriage, his shoulders damp as the sheath of ice melted enough to soak into his shirt. Adrenaline scraped under his skin, twitched in his heels, and he exhaled slow mist into the air.
Hecouldchange. The idea sunk into his brain, and he couldn’t deny its appeal. Wolves had kept themselves from humanity for centuries. The last time they’d trusted a man with their true nature had been when they still served Rome, and he’d exiled them over the Wall for it. What difference would it make now, though? The age of men was almost over, his da’s authority was fractured or gone, and Jack had already been banished once.
The temptation swelled inside him and then washed away as the soldier stepped into view. A balaclava was pulled down over his head, the gray fabric crusted with ice around mouth and nose where his breath had frozen, and heavy, black-lensed goggles hid his eyes. He carried the black semiautomatic rifle with the butt tucked into his armpit, gloved finger flat against the trigger. The smell of gun oil and sour anger washed off him like BO as he paused in front of Jack to scan the scrub on the other side of the fence for any signs of life.
As a young wolf, Jack had been charged by a stag he’d brought to bay. It had smashed his ribs and broken his jaw when it trampled him. His ribs popped as they broke, a hollow sound as his side caved in, and he hadn’t known whose fear he could smell—his or the stag’s. It tumbled him ears over tail on the hard stone, and by the time it finally made a break for the tree line, he’d not known where his feet were to get them under him. Da had stood back and watched so Jack would learn the lesson. Just because something was prey didn’t mean it was weak.
A bullet wouldn’t kill Jack, but it had taxed his wolf to keep him alive under the old bitch’s knife. Then he’d dragged it into the icy Irish sea—fur frozen in spikes—to drag a half-dead dog back to shore. With the prophets to defang and a showdown with his da on the table, it wasn’t the time to test the limits of his recovery. He’d still heal, but it would take longer than usual.
Danny folded his arm over his mouth to hide the evidence of his breath and pressed back into the narrow threshold of the door.
The soldier stood for a moment, then rasped a rough “All clear” into his radio and trudged back up toward the front of the train. Jack listened for a moment as the crunch of snow and huff of tired breathing retreated, then he reached over and tapped Danny’s elbow.
“Now?” Danny mouthed as he shifted his weight forward.
Jack shook his head and leaned in to steal a kiss from cold lips. He buried his fingers in the matted curls at the back of Danny’s neck and pulled the long, lean body into his. For a second, he could taste the disapproval on Danny’s mouth, and then it softened into something else. They hadn’t been apart since Girvan. The back of Jack’s neck crawled every time Danny was out of his sight for more than a minute. They hadn’t fucked either, too cold or too tired or too bloated with nightmares.
His cock had been the one thing the old bitch hadn’t cut off, for all her threats, but it felt like she had somehow. Jack had never lain down with Danny and not gotten hard.
The tug of tempted heat in his balls was welcome testimony that everything down there was intact. Badly timed as gunfire cracked suddenly in the background, but welcome.
Although, a small voice in the back of his head murmured greasily, in some ways it would have been… simpler.
Jack told himself he didn’t know what that meant, and he ignored it. He roughly shoved Danny away and flashed him a hard, sharp-edged smile.
“Now,” he said.
Chapter Two—Jack
DANNY, MOUTHtender and cheeks flushed from the kiss, the cold, or both, stared at him in confusion for a moment. He’d catch up. He always did. Jack spun on the balls of his feet and jumped off the train. The snow around it had been pressed down under the soldier’s feet, compacted into a hard, slick-frozen crust of ice. Jack’s boots slid when they hit it and nearly went out from under him. He spared a second’s remorse for his decision not to shift—a wolf’s feet were made for the snow—and caught his balance.
