“Dogs,” Danny said flatly. “They’re all dogs.”
The soldiers on the train wouldn’t have trouble with any feral packs for a few miles from the look of it. The streets of Glengarnock were full of dead dogs. They’d been slaughtered in the streets, blood spray left to dry on the churned-up snow and the gray walls of abandoned houses. Skinned carcasses were hung from street signs and splayed out over cars.
“Your grandma left us a message,” Jack said, the words rough as he dragged them up out of a dry throat. “Or maybe it was a packed lunch for her darlin’ boy?”
Gregor glared at him, green eyes cold behind frost-flecked lashes. Whatever fragile ceasefire they’d cobbled together since Durham, it was still tainted by years of resentment and competition. If it came to a choice between Jack and the bird, Jack wouldn’t win.
Not that Jack would pick Gregor over Danny, if it came to that, but that was different. Danny had been Jack’s since the first time he saw him, and Danny wasn’t a carrion god in a bony man’s skin.
The crack of Nick’s laugh, more tension in it that humor, broke the silence. “If it was for me, she’d have left the eyes.”
Danny made a wet sound in the back of his throat. “That’s disgusting.”
Nick hunched his shoulders up to his ears and grimaced. His voice was dry as bones as he admitted, “I know.”
The body of something that, in life, had been a mastiff of some sort was lying curled neatly in the middle of the road. As though it was asleep. Jack walked over and crouched down, cold jeans pulled tight over his knees.
“Careful,” Gregor said as Jack reached out of the dog.
It should have been ridiculous, but after the last few months, Jack supposed Gregor had a point. Every wolf pup in the Scottish Pack had been raised with the Wolf Winter as the bloody golden ring at the end of their long exile. Hadrian had sent the wolves he found in his legions up over his Wall, and Fenrir would lead them back down again. It had always sounded simple enough, but now the Wolf Winter was here, nothing had gone as Jack expected. Nothing that had come out of a prophet’s mouth could be trusted as fact, and even a dead dog couldn’t entirely be taken at face value anymore.
Jack touched the dog. It was solid. That’s why they hadn’t smelled the charnel house on the way into the town. The flesh and muscle were frozen solid and furred with a light coat of hoarfrost. The warmth of Jack’s fingers left wet, red prints on the shoulder of the corpse.
It had been a quick death. At least the animal’s throat was slit from ear to ear before they skinned it. The skin was gone, the canines and guts.
And the eyes.
“Sacrifice?” Gregor suggested as he crouched down next to Jack. Other than his hands, the backs still riddled with slow-to-fade thick white scars, he was Jack’s mirror image. For a while there’d been differences between them that Jack had relished and resented in equal measure, the side effect of too much time spent as a wolf. They’d faded since the prophets had cut Gregor’s wolf out of him, reset him to the template they’d both been cut from. Identical twins, always a bit interchangeable. “Whatever she wants, it’ll have a price.”
“What’s a dog worth?” Jack asked.
Gregor shrugged. “To the gods, who knows? To me? Nothing,” he said. There was a thread of cruelty in his smile as he glanced over Jack’s shoulder at Danny. It was an unexpected courtesy that he dropped his voice. “To you? We’ll find out when we face the Old Man.”
That made Jack flinch. Sometimes he forgot that no one, not even Danny, knew him as well as Gregor. Understood him, hardly ever, but they’d shared a womb and grown up cheek by jowl. They’d never been able to read each other’s minds, but they didn’t need to when their thoughts were written on the same page with the same pen.
Yet somehow a neutral thought always turned shitty when the other read it aloud.
“Go to hell,” Jack said quietly.
Gregor smiled sourly. He scratched at the scars where they clotted between his knuckles.
“I’ve been there,” he said.
Something dark flitted through Gregor’s eyes as he said that, shadows under the green. Jack looked away before he had to acknowledge the familiarity. So, they’d both suffered. That wouldn’t change anything. One day he might have to kill Gregor—he’d known that since he was a pup, a fact of life like the moon or the cuff of his dad’s hand—and he couldn’t let sympathy make him hesitate.
Not when he knew Gregor wouldn’t.
“I hoped the Sannock Dead’s prison would hold her longer,” Jack said instead as he pushed himself to his feet. The warmth of his body near the dog had been enough to thaw the outer layer of frost. He could smell the stink of the raw meat. “It held them long enough.”
“Wolves are better,” Gregor said. “Otherwise it would have been our prison, while the Sannock Living walked abroad and told their children horror stories of us. Who else would do this?”
It was a good question. There were plenty who’d have seen their absence as an opportunity and who wouldn’t be thrilled to see the pup princes back to stake their claim.
They would have tried to kill them, though. Maybe from ambush with the weaker wolves as backup, as though the twins were prey, but honest enough in its way. It would have come down to the simple question of who lived and who didn’t. Not… this.Catsplayed games, and toothless prophets.
“People do terrible things,” Nick said. He’d turned back around, but his chin was tilted up so he could stare fixedly at the horizon instead of the carnage. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his coat, and he shivered under it as he nervously shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I was a pathologist. My gran’s a wicked old woman, but she wasn’t the only monster in the world, even before the… the Wild… cracked open.”
Jack glanced around skeptically at the slaughterhouse explosion of what had once been a quiet main street. He’d seen humans who liked to kill. Like any other animal that had a sickness, Da either had them chased off or put down if they came onto his lands. Glengarnock didn’t seem the sort of place such a thing could go unnoticed until it exploded like this at the first opportunity.
