Once his hands weren’t leashed to the bed, Nick pulled the heavy, padded cuffs off and rubbed his eyes. Then he threw the sheet back. He was naked, all pale skin and the old scar on his stomach, but all his bits were still there. Someone had bandaged his feet in fat, overstuffed socks of gauze and surgical tape, but when he wiggled his toes, it didn’t hurt.
If he’d somehow made it from Girvan to here without the bird inside him, he wouldn’t have toes or fingers.
He scrambled out of the cot, goose bumps pimpled over his skin at the chill, and hunted through the cupboards and drawers—pills and rolls of bandages, a scalpel left in a tray, shreds of gray flesh still stuck to it. He grimaced at it but set it aside for later. He didn’t know where he was exactly, or why anyone else was there, but he knew doctors. Every last one of them would have a spare set of scrubs stashed somewhere to change into after you were bled on, barfed on, or both.
Bottom drawer beside the single cot. The gray tracksuit bottoms were a bit short on him, the cuffs just above his bony ankles, but they’d do. He zipped the hoodie on over his bare chest and left the bandages on as he shoved his feet into the grubby white sneakers. It meant they almost fit.
Now what?
It wasn’t a hard question. Or it shouldn’t have been. It doubled Nick over, his hands braced against the edge of the counter, as he tried to convince his lungs to let in the air he’d sucked up. His brain felt pinched, and behind the scar on his chest, he could feel his heart batter against his breastbone.
The old go-to mantra bounced around his head—Gran was crazy, I’m not—but it didn’t help the way it used to. He reached up and dragged his fingers over his collarbone, but there was nothing there. The old nail pendant had been left behind in Girvan, and it had never been meant to help him. Not really.
Nick squeezed his hands into fists until he felt his nails slice into his palm. The pain cut through the fuzz of panic like a razor and let in clarity.
He couldn’t do this.
The first time he’d stood over a corpse in medical school, with a scalpel in his hand and his voice still Glasgie-thick, he’d realized the same thing. Then he sliced that cold body from sternum to pubis, because that’s what he had to do to get what he wanted.
This was the same. Whether he could or not, he had to.
“Goddammit, Gregor,” Nick muttered as he pushed himself upright. “You’ve got to learn to time your rescues better.”
Because he knew Gregor would find him. All he had to do was not die or get turned into a monster by his gran until then. Nick shoved the sleeves of the stolen hoodie up his arms and turned to grab the scalpel. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror hung on the back of the door as he did so. It didn’t look… right.
Nick wiped the scalpel on his jeans and walked over to the door. He had to crouch down slightly to see. The mirror had been hung at the right height for the doctor whose too-short trousers Nick wore. When he saw his face, he flinched in surprise. Hectic red stained his cheekbones, stark against his pale skin, and his eyes were pink and sticky. He leaned in closer to the glass and pulled his eyelid down with one finger. Strings of the discharge stretched between the white of his eye and the lashes. The skin exposed was tender red and splattered with hard, white blisters. It stung as the air touched it.
That Malloy had looked at that and still wanted to feel Nick up was testament on its own that there was somethingwronggoing on here.
It looked like an allergic reaction or—Nick drew back from the mirror as it occurred to him—like a reaction to a caustic agent.
Nick let go of his eye and scrambled around the bed. There was a puddle of saline on the floor, pinkish with diluted blood. Most of the liquid had drained out of the bag and it dangled flaccid from the hook. Nick reeled up the tube and licked the needle. It tasted like blood—salt and metals, nothing that made his stomach twist or the bird in his head ruffle—and something sharp and ethanol sweet. Nick spat it out on the ground, twice, to clear it off his tongue and wrenched the tainted bag off the hook. He threw the bag against the wall, where it hit with a wet slap and flopped down onto the floor.
Gran had said it made wolves seefarther, not that it blinded them. But his gran said more than her prayers, and whatever Nick might have been born, he wasn’t a wolf now.
He roughly rubbed his knuckles over his eyes until they smeared oily color across the backs of his lids. It wasn’t likely to help, but Nick couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t help but imagine what he’d see if he weren’t half blinded.
It would wear off, Nick reminded himself. He’d seen that in the people his gran had poisoned before.
Eventually. Mostly.
Nick shuddered that thought away before it could root. Most of his life, he’d wanted tostopseeing things that weren’t there, but now the thought of being blind to them made him flinch. Without the carrion bird, what would he be to Gregor? Not that he’d had much time to spend with the wolves so far, but they didn’t seem like they needed a pathologist or even a surgeon, if he could remember what it was like to work on living people.
Worry about that later, he told himself. Blind was better than dead. Maybe.
He padded over to the door and pressed his ear against it. All he could hear was the panicked rush of blood in his ears.
Shit.
He rolled the dice and opened the door. There was no one outside. Nick let his breath out between his teeth and stepped out the door. He hesitated in the starkly lit hall as he weighed up his choices. Left or right? The flip of a coin in his head made him turn right. The soles of his sneakers squeaked on the floor as he padded down the hall. Just before he reached the end, a familiar voice stopped him dead in his tracks, feet nailed to the floor. Between one breath and the next, he was a little boy again, damp with night terrors and holding his breath in case his gran knew what he was doing.
“What about Nicholas?” Gran asked. Her voice was still rough, scorched from fire and smoke. Behind her he could hear the sound of laughter and things being broken over the dull thump of bass-heavy music. “Is it still in him?”
“… yes. The carrion god is still inside him,” a man said. He had the same accent as Gran, same as Gregor and Jack. Highland born and bred, without any attempt to soften it for the English. “I’ve just blinded him to it for now—”
The crack of a hand against skin made Nick jump. He could almost feel the sting of the slap against his cheek, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from yelping.
“If you have damaged him or it, I will crack your ribs open and use your beating heart as a snack to lure the bird back to us,” Gran said flatly. “He’s a god, Ewan. The first god to walk our world in millennia. The others need to see that before they’ll trust us.”
