The radio blurted out static again, a few words buried in the noise, and then a muffled man’s voice growled an impatient response.
“Not yet,” he snapped. “And after he dragged my ass into the cold, if I see the bastard, I’ll shoot him rather than bring him back.”
The other end of the radio snapped something but was clicked off midword. Something dark, a shadow against the white, arched through the snow and cracked against a tree or a rock—something hard enough to make it crack and splinter.
A second later the muffled voice in the storm growled a frustrated “Fuck it.”
Gregor loped toward the voice. Wolf paws, with broad pads and thick fur, were made to hunt in the snow. Human feet weren’t, but barefoot was better than booted. Gregor could feel the ground underfoot, adapt to the bite of a sharp rock against his sole or the hip-jarred drop of a snow-concealed hole.
The man was a squat block of gray and white against a world of white and gray. His heavy, winter-hued camo gear padded him from the shoulders down and smudged the edges of him into the landscape. It worked well enough, but camouflage only worked until it didn’t. Enough winter-coated rabbits had learned that lesson at Gregor’s fangs over the years.
Something made the hair on the back of the man’s neck stand on end. He started to turn in reaction, heavy rifle half-raised in his hands just as Gregor tucked his shoulder down and tackled him. A startled grunt escaped the man, and as they crashed down into the snow, his finger tightened on the trigger. The gun fired blindly into the storm and hit something that howled. It sounded human… until it didn’t.
Gregor’s ears rang from the retort of the gun, a pulse of blood against the bones of his skull, and he had to struggle to ignore the pain. He threw a quick punch at the man’s black-masked face, but the man jerked his head to the side. Gregor’s knuckles caught the smoked-lens goggles and knocked them up onto guy’s scarred forehead. Brown eyes, whites blotched with blown red blood vessels, squinted up at Gregor.
“Get the fuck off me,” the man spat through his frost-crusted mask. “You crazy son of a bitch.”
He jabbed the gun up in a quick, harsh blow that caught the side of Gregor’s head. Blood dripped into Gregor’s eyes and he snarled in frustration at himself. Weeks of fights against the prophets’ monsters, just violence and flesh that almost healed around Gregor’s fangs, had made him careless. Even a human could be dangerous.
Not as dangerous as Gregor—still, even now—but still.
The man drove his knee up into Gregor’s groin. The impact was blunted by the thick padding of the snowsuit, but it still hurt, and then the man tried to throw him off. Gregor spat a curse between his teeth and yanked the gun out of the man’s hands. He tossed it away and grabbed the hood pulled tight around the man’s head. Then he punched the screwed-up, half-masked face with a balled fist until his knuckles came away bloody and the man went limp under him.
He was still alive. Gregor could hear his heartbeat hammer against the inside of his chest and smell the sharp, acrid chemicals pumped out with fear and pain. When Gregor slapped his battered face, he groaned and tried to turn away. Conscious too.
Gregor rolled off the man and scrambled to his feet. He wiped his bloody face on the back of his wrist and bent down to grab the guy by the collar.
“You and me need to talk,” he said.
THE MAN—the tag sewn onto the front of his jacket said BOYD—leaned back against the tree, shivering as the wind battered him with icy snow. The dense grove of trees was some protection, but not much. They creaked in the wind with a deep groan like frozen dark water. Blood hung in the air, metallic and salty-appetizing, and Gregor could feel the Wild’s expectation close in around him. The Wild was built of things that had happened before, and a bloody warrior in an isolated clearing was made for sacrifice.
He ignored it. This once he found himself disinclined to serve the Wild any more than he already had. It was a glutton, but it should have had its fill today.
If Gregor killed the man, it would be for Nick, nothing else.
The Wild still waited. Blood was blood, and Gregor knew it wouldn’t care why he shed it. But he did.
“Not going to tie me up?” Boyd asked thickly.
“Why bother?” Gregor asked. He picked up a handful of snow to scrub his face clean. Cold and impossibly clean, it stung in the gouge over his eyebrow. He rubbed the pink melt over his fingers, worked it into the creases between his knuckles to scrape out the blood. “I don’t need to keep you long.”
Boyd laughed, a choke with no humor in it, and reached up to peel the bloody, half-frozen mask away from his face. His skin was pale, blotched with chilblain-raw blisters, and bruises stood out like paint against his skin. He’d been handsome in a blunt way before his nose was broken, canted to the left as his eyes puffed up around it.
“You’re not a professional,” Boyd assessed. He was breathless, his words choppy as he spat them out on smoky lungfuls of cold air and shivered as the cold soaked through his suit. “Otherwise you’d know to try and… put me at ease. Make me think… I can trust you.”
Gregor brushed his hands together and thought about that. “I don’t care if you trust me,” he said after a second. “If you answer me, that’ll be useful. If not….”
He tilted his head to the side to listen to the storm. The sound of occasional gunfire could be heard over the wind as anger and blindness made the other soldiers twitchy.
“You aren’t out here alone,” Gregor finished as he turned back to Boyd.
Boyd licked chapped lips. “That’s not—” He stopped, and some shred of wit clawed through the murk the prophets’ brew had filled his head with. “Who do you work for? What do you want?”
“Stupid questions,” Gregor said. “Look around you. Does this look like the world you made? A world where your alliances mattered?”
“It’s just a storm.”
Gregor shrugged. It wasn’t his job to teach some stranger the catechism of the wolves. Ignorance might be a kinder state to die in.
