Weeks of being a sort of god thing and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be afraid. That had reminded him.
“Stop! Damn you, hold fire!” a thickly Scottish voice roared, sharply audible. “Don’t shoot him. We need to get him back.”
“… not your call… make,” Malloy said, voice muffled by the snow. “… in charge here, Ewan.”
There was a pause, and then, even with half his brain still tranquilized, Nick felt the world shift around him. It felt like the tide.
“Not anymore,” Ewan said, his voice still eerily clear. “Find him. Bring him back. In one piece.”
There was a pause and then easy mutters of agreement. Nick dropped his hands from over his head, exhaled raggedly through his teeth, and veered to the left away from the noise behind him. He scrambled over a low wall and, almost on his hands and knees, up an unexpectedly steep field.
The air was like splinters when he breathed, and it made his lungs cramp painfully. But at least the wind, unruly as it shoved him back and forth, filled the tracks he left behind with soft snow.
A shadow in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he stopped in place, shivering, to track it through the snow. He managed for a few steps, and then the snow thickened, and he lost sight of whatever it was.
The Sannock?
Nick creaked out a stiff laugh at the madness that he hoped to see one of them. He still turned and headed toward the last place he’d seen it. The muscles in his legs ached as he kicked his way through the snow and then nearly tripped over what he had to assume was the shadow he’d chased.
A weathered stone bench was perched on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. He leaned on it to catch his breath, and something snarled—a high, thin noise from somewhere in the storm. Nick turned, hands raised, and a heavy, cold body crashed into him. The impact knocked him off his feet, the air shocked out of his lungs, and he pitched backward down the hill. A rock caught him on the hip and dug into the small of his back, and rough ice scraped across his back where the coat rode up.
They tumbled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, the other man on top of him with his arm cocked back for a punch. Nick swung first in a wild arc that cracked his knuckles against the sharp line of a heavy jaw, and he twisted his hip to try and throw the other man off. It didn’t work. He was slammed back into the ground hard, and the man leaned down to scowl at him.
“How come every time I lose track of you?” Gregor asked in a rough voice. He curled his lip as he sniffed the air. “You turn up smelling like shit?”
Nick didn’t have the air in his lungs to laugh. He grabbed the back of Gregor’s neck instead, fingers twisted into the snow-matted knots, and dragged him down into a cold, eager kiss. The heat of Gregor’s breath warmed his mouth and slid through him.
Even half-frozen and battered, Nick felt the hungry tug of desire under his skin as Gregor shifted his weight on top of him. It wasn’t the time, but his body didn’t care, and neither did Nick really. There was something reassuring aboutthis, the private bubble of hunger and unexpected love that pulled them together.
It wasn’t about the carrion bird or the wolves, his gran or Gregor’s brother. This was theirs.
“My gran’s here,” Nick confessed as Gregor broke the kiss and pulled back. “Back there, with some old wolf.”
“I know,” Gregor said bluntly, still no fan of wasting words. He glanced down between their bodies. “You’re bleeding, Nick.”
Nick started to disagree, but then he looked down and saw a splash of blood spread from under his arm across the white crust of snow. The minute he saw it, he felt the hot, dull ache of pain between his ribs and his head swam with woozy discomfort.
“Oh,” he said. “Can you die twice?”
Chapter Thirteen—Jack
THE OLDhouse shouldn’t have burned so easily. It was halfway to a ruin, but it had stood for decades and was riddled with frozen damp. That made no difference. The flames caught and spread inside the walls with giddy spite for what made sense. The bricks cracked, the mortar crumbled as it was kiln-dried, and unruly licks of flame poked through the shattered roof like hair from under a hat.
It wouldn’t be Surtr’s turn at the world for seasons yet, but fire was never patient, and he wanted the world for kindling. He took what he could.
Winter wouldn’t have it. Already the wind had picked up to dash thick flurries of snow into the flames where they turned to steam and made the fire crackle out thin curse words in the giant’s sizzle-and-pop language.
A prophet threw himself from a window on the top floor. Ungainly in his stolen skin, he landed badly, with a crack of bone, and lay broken on the snow until he could pull himself together. Others milled out front, half-blind in the smoke and snow as they tried to pull themselves together.
The dogs harried them with sharp teeth and quick strikes, louder than any wolf as they barked and yowled to each other. It made Jack want to put his ears back, annoyed at the noise as he used his fangs and the bulk of his dire-wolf muscle to keep the two monsters Rose had left behind at bay.
Bulldog shoulder-charged him with a pig grunt of a growl and slammed him into a tree. A rib popped, loud and hollow in Jack’s ears, and snow dropped off the tree’s branches onto him. It was heavy, almost solid, and studded with chunks of ice that battered his skull and back. His ears rang with an oddly pitched tone that made him feel unbalanced as he shook the snow off and staggered back to his feet.
Millie shot in from the snow, low to the ground and with black lips wrinkled back from her teeth. She still had something of the terrier about her, with tricolored fur and wiry muscles, but mapped onto the body of a much larger dog. She grabbed at Bulldog’s tail, a naked knob of bone and twisted nerves, and clamped down. Bulldog screamed in affronted pain, an unexpectedly shrill noise for its size, and spun around in a clumsy circle to try to grab Millie. She slipped in the snow, tumbled paws over tail, and scrambled back to her feet in time to snap at Bulldog’s nose.
It stung Jack’s pride to leave a dog to fight his battles for him, but as a wolf, he was too practical to dwell on that. He ducked his head to paw blood out of his eye, the skin over his forehead laid open from a sharp bit of ice, and let Millie keep the Bulldog busy while he shot after the long-nosed, mad-eyed monster who pranced through the snow on fingers and toes pulled out long and braided together. Its jaw unhinged all the way back to its ears, revealing serrated rows of thick, see-through teeth that it snapped at Bron as it tried to get around her to the pups.
“Fuckingabortion,” she spat as she turned to keep between them. “Get away from them.”
