“Hey!” someone yelled. Surprise and alarm cracked in their voice, no authority. One of the brakemen, then, not the soldiers. “What the hell…! There was someone on the train! Fuck. Fuck me. Lieutenant!”
Jack bolted for the fence, and some instinct made him glance to the right. They’d made no agreement about when to break for the fence before they split up, but it didn’t matter. They still made the break from the train at the same time, almost in step as they ran through the snow.
Except Gregor was alone, and Danny was at Jack’s heels.
Or the other way around. Long legs and a coursing dog’s turn of speed, even in human form, sent Danny past Jack at a sprint. Snow kicked up from his feet in grubby arcs of white and off-white. It sprayed into Jack’s face, wet and musty with an aftertaste of smoke and oil from the trains.
“Stop!” a man barked behind them. “Stop right there and put your hands up.”
Danny hunched his shoulders up and head down, as if that would help. They’d go for the center of mass, the biggest, steadiest spot on a moving target.
Gunfire stuttered across the ground in front of him. The bullets churned up the snow and threw up chunks of hard, gray concrete.
“Fuck,” Danny spat as he zagged away from the line cut through the snow in front of him. The cultured vowels he’d picked up down south had slipped and let the Scottish out. “I thought I’d at least get home before someone tried to kill me.”
Jack barked out a laugh. The air was cold as ice water as it hit his lungs.
“If you don’t stop…,” the man barked. Jack glanced around and saw the soldiers running awkwardly toward him. Heavy boots and thick thermal gear kept them warm enough to function but made them lumber through the knee-deep snow. The man at the front jerked his gun up to his shoulder as he stopped. “We will fire.”
Nick swooped on him from above. The huge, black bird dropped out of the sky and onto the soldier’s head. He dug his claws into the balaclava and jabbed down with that thick, bone-cracker beak. The Wild—or something like it—caught between the blue-black feathers of his wings as he flapped to keep his balance.
The soldier yelled in surprise and swatted at his head with one hand. The gun swung loose from the other as he tried to drag the bird off his head.
Despite his distrust of Nick and what went on behind those bird-black eyes, Jack laughed. Ahead of him, Danny reached the fence. He jumped up, grabbed the top of it to haul himself up, and kicked with his heavy boots at the frozen metal struts. Chunks of ice and snow dislodged as he scrambled up. A gunshot zipped past Jack’s ear and hit the metal post inches from Danny’s knee. The post rattled with the impact, and the sheath of ice cracked from top to bottom.
The sharp stink of fear punched through the cold air. Danny gasped out a curse and jumped off the fence. He landed clumsily on the other side, on his hands and knees in the snow, and then scrambled back to his feet.
Jack turned to flash a growl at the soldiers, a flash of white human teeth and a throaty roll of something not human at all in his throat. The Wild was weak here, buried deep under the worked-iron-and-rail skin of the world, but for a second, it flickered green and sharp in his nose. Somewhere, not quite here, he caught the stiff creak of long-frozen trees and the distant thread of a wolf’s howl in the wind.
One of the men shuddered and stepped back. His gun sagged between slack fingers and he looked around nervously, as though it would help to have something solid to blame the chill at the back of his neck on. The other soldier, balaclava gone and tracks of blood over his forehead, didn’t have the same vestigial awareness of… something. He set his jaw, tight under a few weeks of salt-and-pepper stubble, and tightened his finger on the trigger.
The magazine exploded off the gun in a spray of broken bits and unfired bullets that flew over the snow-packed station. Splinters of metal tore up the soldier’s sleeves and shredded his face with small, razor burn cuts. Drops of blood welled and dripped down his face.
“Son of a bitch,” the man yelled in shock as he flung the deconstructed gun away from him, trigger guard twisted and the innards of the rifle exposed. “What the hell is going on here?”
Jack laughed. He turned and ran at the fence. One smooth leap got his hands on the top of it, and he swung himself up and over. He landed in a crouch on the snow and then toppled head over ass as the crust gave way under him and spilled him down the bank in a miniature avalanche.
The Wild giveth, and Winter taketh, he supposed as he sat up and shook chunks of ice and grass out of his hair.
“Show-off,” Danny accused as he offered a hand.
Jack grabbed it even though he could have gotten to his feet on his own. He kept a grip on cold fingers as he dragged Danny away from the tracks and along the high-walled gardens that backed onto it. Halfhearted gunfire chased them, stuttered across the ground and bounced off the trees behind the same way they’d chased off the dogs. Even though he knew it was stupid, Jack found himself vaguely offended. He was a wolf, and definitely more of a threat than a feral mongrel who used to feed from a dish and wore boots when it went for a walk.
He ignored the brief urge to prove that to the soldiers and instead thumped ice-locked garage doors and rattled padlocks on the way past until they finally fell through a broken blue gate into someone’s abandoned garden.
“Leave it!” one of the soldiers ordered behind them. “Crazy bastards didn’t have anything with them, and they’ll freeze soon enough. Get back to work. We need to get moving again.”
Danny swore breathlessly and bent over, hands braced on his thighs. Steam wreathed his face as he panted, the smell of spent adrenaline thick and musty on his skin.
“All that time I was gone,” he muttered as he wiped his sleeve over his mouth. “Not one person tried to kill me.”
Jack laughed and grabbed Danny’s jacket to drag him up into a quick, cold kiss.
“I always knew the south was fucking boring,” he growled against Danny’s mouth and tasted the reluctant tilt of a smile. For the first time in days, he felt like himself again.
HE SHOULDhave known it wouldn’t last.
“Fuck,” Nick muttered, and his voice slid thickly Glaswegian as all those practiced vowels deserted him. He turned and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as he gagged. The hunch of his shoulders tried to conjure disgust, but Jack would smell the sharp nutty sweetness of hunger off his skin. “Are those…?”
