Gregor finally stood up. He shook his head to shed the snow and brushed it off his sleeves. The branches of the stunted trees cracked and rattled as he stepped through them. Nick hesitated but then scrambled to his feet to follow. He crunched uncertainly through the snow.
“So, you’d rather watch someone else do it for you, Ewan?” Gregor asked as he stepped over the dead man. His lip curled up in a sneer. “No wonder you were sent for a prophet.”
Ewan—Grandfather. Nick tried the word out for size in his head and flinched away from it. Ewan pushed his hood back. His face underneath was spare and bony, freckles stark against pale skin. A thick woolen hat covered his head, and his eyebrows were thin and gingery over deep-set eyes.
“You make it sound like I had no choice. I choose to be a prophet rather than an animal, a man and not the Old Man’s beast.” His attention shifted to Nick and his face… tried to soften, but it couldn’t quite find the lines. “Nicholas. Are you okay?”
It was Nick’s cue to answer, but he didn’t. His tongue just refused to move. He felt like he had the first time he drove up to a foster home in a social worker’s Ford Fiesta, the crisp-bag-and-old-receipt detritus of a nonstop day under his feet, and hadn’t wanted to move. As though life might miss him if he just stayed still enough.
No encounter with Nick’s family had ever left him better off than before.
Gregor stepped closer to him—not quite in front of him, but near enough that Nick could feel the comforting threat that coiled under Gregor’s skin. Despite the situation, he felt warmth slip down his spine as he remembered that lean, dangerous body bent over his.
It was hardly the time, but he stole courage from the heat as he lifted his chin and swallowed.
“Who?” he asked. “Me or the bird?”
The prophet stared intently at him. His eyes, intent behind a sandy fringe of lashes, flickered over Nick’s face—lingered on his eyes, flicked away from the beak of a nose—as though he thought he might recognize him.
“I couldn’t see it when you were asleep,” Ewan said. “I can now. You look like your mother.”
The unexpectedness of that made Nick flinch. It made sense, he supposed. To have grandparents, they had to have had something to do with his parents. At least one of them.
“Don’t. I—” He stopped and took a deep breath. The lungful of cold air steadied him, even as the ice-cream headache jabbed deeper between his eyes. “We’re not here for a family reunion. That’s the last thing I need.”
“Whatever they’ve told you,” Ewan said, his voice low and earnest. Something in the rhythms of it tried to lull Nick into trust while, at the same time, it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up in unease. “You can’t trust it. You can’t trust any of them.”
“I trust Gregor,” Nick said.
Ewan’s lip curled, and he lifted his hand from his side to show the blood that coated his palm and fingers.
“Never trust a wolf.”
The sight of blood made Nick grimace and look away. It wasn’t as bad as if he had to touch it, but fresh blood always made him dizzy. His training tugged at his fingers—muscle memory of sliced-open flesh and neatly lined stitches—but he curled them into his palms.
“You’ll heal,” he said.
“Of this, yes,” Ewan said. “But some hurts wolves do never knit back together.”
“Enough,” Gregor said. This time he stepped in front of Nick, as if muscle and shoulders could stop words. “I didn’t shoot you. The humans did, after you dosed them with your sacrificial wine. What do you want with them, Prophet? What does Rose have planned?”
Ewan pushed himself up off the quad. Blood stained the metal, frost roses of pink around the edges as it froze.
“What we should have all planned for,” he said grimly as he stepped forward. Blood ran down his leg and stained the snow behind him. The wind staggered him as he walked, his legs unsteady under him. He might heal, but it wouldn’t be quick. “What we were made to do—save the world from the teeth of wolves.”
Nick laughed, the ghost of the god harsh around the edges of the sound. The reaction made Ewan rock back on his heels in surprise. He had the gall to look affronted, and then his face settled into grim lines.
“Save the world,” he repeated, “and finally get justice against the people who killed my daughter. Your mother. This is the winter of the wolves, and they will not see spring again. You have my word on it.”
Out in the storm, something tried to howl. It sounded wet, like it tore at the throat as it got out. Gregor turned his head toward it, and something answered, the garbled shriek more distant but close enough to make Nick’s shoulders twitch with the instinct to fly.
This time he felt something under his brainpushat a shape that wasn’t him. Feathers and scaled toes, the weight of a carved, bone beak where his nose was. The shadow of the crow fluttered over his vision and then was gone again.
“That’s why you killed the humans,” Gregor said. “No witnesses.”
Ewan glanced at the dead men and looked regretful. Maybe even guilty. “They aren’t far gone enough yet. We thought military men would bemoresusceptible to Loki’s brew, but it takes longer. The venom eats away their inhibitions, but duty is harder to erode. Maybe we should have let the politicians in, after all, but too late to change plans now.”
“Why?” Nick demanded. He shoved Gregor out of the way and stepped forward. Decades of frustration cracked his voice as he confronted his grandfather. “What is Gran doing to do?”
