“What is it to you?” Boyd snapped. He leaned forward, his chest braced against Gregor’s arm, and got into his face. His breath stank, the oily, sharp reek of the drink caught on his tongue, and he stared into Gregor’s eyes. Too close, too direct. It made the back of Gregor’s itch with the urge to rise to match the aggression. “I don’t know you. You could be part of this.”
“Obviously,” Gregor said. “What does this doctor want with Nick?”
“Who?”
Gregor growled at him. The sound made Boyd recoil uncomfortably, his nerves on edge at a sound that didn’t belong in a human throat.
“The bastard that dragged you out in the snow,” Gregor said. It was easy to let the anger into his voice as he remembered Nick’s body in his arms, cold again and sour with the smell of fear. “The one you were going to shoot.”
“What?” Boyd asked with a sneer. “You want to fuck him too?”
Gregor punched him with a short, sharp strike to the nose that bounced Boyd’s head back against the tree again. Blood splattered down Boyd’s chin, bright against his pallor, and he grabbed Gregor’s wrist with one hand. A hard yank pulled Gregor forward as Boyd rammed his elbow into his chest, hard enough to jar his heart through his breastbone, and then swung it up at his jaw. Gregor grunted, realized he didn’t have time to dodge, and took the forearm to the base of his jaw.
He gagged as his throat spasmed shut and something popped distinctly under his ear. Pain stabbed from the nape of his neck down to the small of his back, and he felt a shadow of chill numbness weaken his muscles. Boyd grunted in satisfaction. If he’d run then, he might have gotten farther. Not far, but farther. Instead he pushed his luck as he twisted at the hips to try and hammer his knee into Gregor’s side.
Gregor blocked with his forearms, tucked his shoulder, and rammed it into Boyd’s stomach. The breath escaped Boyd on a grunt, and he pawed angrily at Gregor’s shoulders. With a quick heave, Gregor lifted the other man off his feet and then tossed him into a packed drift of snow. Boyd landed awkwardly and writhed as he tried to suck in half a lungful of frozen air.
“… fuck….” He tried to roll over onto his stomach to scramble to his feet.
“Stay down,” Gregor told him. He craned his neck from one side to the other to make the bruised joints pop. Then he stalked over. Boyd tried to ignore his advice, but Gregor put his boot between his shoulders and bore down until Boyd’s braced arms gave way. He went facedown into the snow, body tight and resentful. “You broke your radio. If you had someone else’s, could you use it to call this doctor?”
Boyd spat and slapped his hand against the ground. It was surrender or frustration. Human body language was hard for him sometimes—the broad strokes were the same, the monkey was still there under the wolf, but the subtleties had never interested Gregor. Scent usually filled in the gaps when he needed it to, but after they drank what the prophets gave them, it pumped anger out with their sweat.
“Yeah,” Boyd forced out through his teeth. “I could do that.”
Could, not would. Gregor understood the difference, but it would do for now. He yanked Boyd up from the snow and tried to remember where the nearest body he’d dropped was. This had taken long enough. If he left Nick on his own any longer, the crow would get himself in trouble.
He had a talent for that.
“Why do you even want to speak to them?” Boyd asked raggedly as Gregor dragged him into the storm. “What good will it do you?”
Gregor thought of Rose’s promise, and then he buried it.
“That’s my business.”
Chapter Seventeen—Gregor
“HER NAMEwas Harris,” Boyd said. He stood to the side, hunched down against the wind that battered him as Gregor ripped the woman’s jacket open to frisk her. “Katie Harris. She had a daughter down in London.”
Her radio was buckled to the inside lining of her jacket, a strip of tape on the back with Blake written on it in black letters. Gregor wordlessly showed the label to Boyd, who grimaced and looked away.
“She stillhada name,” he said. “Even if I hadn’t had a chance to learn it. She could have a kid. A family.”
Gregor glanced down at the dead woman. Her red hair was frozen stiff, fanned in a short halo around her face, and frost glazed her brown eyes to a shabby gray. Whatever she’d been was gone.
“Do you think I thought she didn’t?” He got up and held the radio out toward Boyd. “Call in, say you need to speak to this doctor.”
If anyone knew what Rose wanted—todayandtomorrow—it was him. And Gregor had something he wanted.
Boyd took the radio. He pulled his mask down, coughed dryly as the wind caught him, and thumbed the button.
“Command, this is Alpha 4,” he said. “Come in. Over.”
He let go and waited. Silence except for the drone of the wind and the distant grumble of thunder. Gregor’s skin itched under his clothes as he remembered the lightning that came to the snap of Jack’s fingers back in Durham. Maybe, he thought dourly, the Wild had already had its favorite, then, long before he lost his wolf.
“How long will it take them?” he asked.
Boyd shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Soon. If they answer. It’s been….”
