Blood dripped from gouges in her arms and legs. The monster feinted to the right to try to shoot around her, but she grabbed it by the ear and pulled it like taffy up onto the top of its skull to haul it back. The ear ripped off and took a long patch of skull with it, revealing porous bone and oddly knit muscle, and Bron yelled her disgust and punched it in the eye.
It made a glottal, angry noise as it fell back and shook its head. Jack assumed it had been told that it could hurt, but not kill, the prisoners. Otherwise Bron would have been dead. She had a mean streak in a fight, like the rest of her family, but the monsters didn’t care for damage. The skin had already started to pinch together over the raw wound in its scalp.
Jack hit it before it could gather itself. He sank his fangs into its back leg, braced his feet, and dragged it backward. Overclocked strands of lean muscle pulsed like a heartbeat in his mouth as the thin bones cracked and flaked. Sour blood flooded his mouth and made his tongue squirm back in revulsion. The trickle that ran down his throat made his stomach cramp and try to retch it back up.
The longer the monsters lived, the worse they smelled, corruption like a layer of fat under their skin. Most of the ones that followed Rose didn’t even have enough of an identity left to pity.
Jack snapped his head from side to side. The monster’s leg snapped, and it staggered clumsily in the deep snow as it tried to get its balance. He dragged it back, one step after the other, while it clawed at the ground to try and drag itself back toward Bron and the kids. Five feet from them and it suddenly shifted its focus to him as it bent impossibly at the narrow waist to snap at him. The bony, nail-toothed snout struck out at him like a snake and laid his shoulder open in a raw mess.
Pain sliced hot down Jack’s leg, but he hung on. A muffled growl filtered through his mouthful of meat and bone, and he wrenched again. Flesh and tendons slid against bone, thick and slippery in Jack’s mouth. The monster made a strangled, nasal squeal of frustration and struck out again.
This time Jack let go and dodged back on three legs, his foreleg hitched up as he waited for the shoulder to knit.
“Danny said the Pack would come!” Bron yelled, frustration and disbelief in her voice. “Where are they?”
She reached up and grabbed one of the denuded branches from the tree that Jack had hit. It snapped off in her hands, frozen and heavy, and she swung it like a bat at the monster.
Jack snarled in frustrated reproof at her as the monster lost interest in him and turned back to her. He wanted to distract it from her. Bron showed him her teeth in unrepentant response and swung again. The monster grabbed the branch out of the air, sank its teeth into it, and shook it violently. Bron managed to hang on but ended up on her knees with a gash in her shoulder where the branch had caught her. One of the pups—Shauna—had changed her skin, and the lanky yearling wolf yapped shrill and angry as it bounced forward.
She, at least, had enough respect to back off when Jack growled at her, but her ears stayed pinned and her needle-sharp puppy teeth bared.
“Bron!” Danny yelled, his voice cracked as he pitched it to carry over the storm and the fight. He was in front of the house, lanky frame barely visible through the angry flurries of indignant snow. “Get over here.”
“What?” Bron yelled back as she let the monster have the branch and staggered back “Why?”
It was Shauna who listened. The young wolf shot between Bron’s legs, fluffy tail clamped between her legs, and made a beeline for Danny. Even from this distance, Jack could see Danny’s horror in the way his body flinched. The monster hesitated, pointy head swung between Bron and the pup. Then, like the sight hound it was built to resemble, it went after the prey in motion.
Jack snapped his teeth at Bron, growled a wordless command for her to stay, and went after the monster. He stripped chunks of flesh from its haunches, the splintered bone of its leg visible through its stitched-together skin, but he couldn’t catch it.
It strained its neck out and snapped a divot from Shauna’s back leg that made her yelp a high-pitched puppy whine that caught in the back of Jack’s brain.
Danny darted forward. He grabbed Shauna by the scruff just as she reached the steps into the house. Her heavy, dark-furred body dangled from his fist, and he tossed her aside like a football. The monster twitched its head to follow the arc of its prey’s body—and maybe there was still enough of a being there left to be surprised—and crashed into Danny. They tumbled over each other and kicked up snow in grubby arcs as they wrestled in front of the house.
“Get it into the fire!” Danny grunted as he landed on his back, hands locked around the monster’s throat as it snapped at him. “It won’t heal as fast.”
That could work, Jack supposed. He slammed into the monster with his full weight and sent both of them crashing through the blistered front door and into the flames. Fire singed his fur and blistered the pads of his feet. The smoke was sharp in his throat and eyes, but maybe Surtr remembered who’d set him loose. It was the monster who caught. The blond strings of what was left of its hair flared, and the naked, drum-tight skin blistered and scorched as the fire hit it.
Again, something of the person the monster had been scraped out of its throat as it screamed in panic. It writhed away from Jack, still lamed on that ruined leg, and fled blindly into the house. The charred floor gave way under it as it ran, and it fell with a whinny of miserable confusion, into the hot, red flames that filled the basement.
The house shuddered and groaned around Jack, the floor under his scalded paws rolling like a ship’s deck. It could have been cracked stones and weather, or it could have been the low, grating laugh of Surtr. This might not be his time yet, but he’d gotten at least one god-thing to burn.
Jack clamped his tail and backed out of the flames. The bitter cold outside was almost a comfort as it hit him and stole the heat from his burns.
“Are you okay?” Danny asked as he dropped to his knees next to Jack. There was blood on his arms, freckled skin raked down to raw meat as he slapped out the charred spots on Jack’s fur. “Jack?”
Jack pawed at his stinging muzzle and then leaned his weight against Danny’s shoulder. He smelled like blood, smoke, and fear… but still home. Shauna crawled over and put her chin on Danny’s foot, her sides fluttering as she breathed raggedly.
“Mam’s on her way,” Danny said, staunchly hopeful. “The dogs are holding their own.”
They weren’t, but Jack appreciated Danny’s view of the world. It took a dog or a human to lie that stubbornly to themselves. Jack pawed his nose again—the blisters itched—gave Danny’s face a quick lick, and threw himself back into the fight.
If Shauna had been a bit faster, Danny’s plan would have worked. The monster’s own bulk would have carried it straight into the fire without help from Jack. He headed for the heavyset, bulldog-shaped thing as it pinned Millie to the ground. The dog made a weirdly alien sound as the heavy, twisted head dropped. Jack went between a prophet’s legs, threw the snarling woman in the air for the dogs to pile on as he landed, and darted in to grab a mouthful of the slack folds of flesh that hung from the monster’s throat. It split under his teeth but stretched rather than tore as he snarled and shook it like a rat.
“… gro… oof,” the thing grunted as it threw its head back. It almost sounded like words. Jack hoped it wasn’t. He loathed the monsters, instinctive as the hackles that pricked at the smell of him, but whatever they’d been before didn’t deserve to know what had happened.
He let the folds of musty flesh drop, blood and fluid wet on the skin as it dripped out slowly, and went for the stomach instead. There was more mass to this monster than the other one, muscle layered over muscle in knots that threatened to split its skin, so it wasn’t as limber. It shook its head and lumbered around to snarl at Jack. Blood and flesh were clotted between its broken fangs.
Millie was still alive. Jack could hear the rattle of her breath, and that was all Jack could buy her. He lunged in and snapped at the monster’s face. The flattened features, eyes puffed out over slab cheeks and nose flattened over its broad mouth, held more of the human than the other monsters. Jack set his teeth in that snot-wet snout and tore it open. The monster screamed, reared up onto its bowed back legs, and slapped Jack off like a bug. The splintered bone claws that poked out of its paws raked his ribs open to the bone.
