“He’s right,” Danny said in a stiff, distant voice. He used the side of his boot to scrape bloodstained snow up over a nearby corpse. “People can be worse than any wolf, but it doesn’t matter anyhow.”
Gregor curled his lip. “After what the bitch did to Nick? To Jack?” he rasped. The old growl wasn’t there, the wolf’s hackles behind human words, but he made do. “I know you’re a dog, but even a cur’ll bite a hand raised to it eventually.”
“Jesus, Gregor,” Nick blurted in surprise, the divinity offended right out of him. His eyes were dark and indignant as he dropped them down from the skyline to glare. “That was—”
Danny interrupted him with a harsh laugh. “Thicken your skin, Dr. Blake,” he said. “If you want to run with the wolves, you’ll hear worse than that out of them. And it doesn’t matter who did this, Gregor, because it doesn’t change anything. If Rose dragged her mangy hide out of the Wild or a madman with a butcher’s knife decided to play dogcatcher, we’ll still need to get over the loch to tell the Numitor the prophets have turned on him… if they were ever for him. And we’ll never get there if we stand here all day, playingColumboover a dead dog.”
“Who?” Gregor asked blankly.
Danny rolled his eyes and stalked away. He picked his way through the corpses, careful of where he stepped, but he couldn’t avoid the bloody snow. It caked his boots in heavy, stained clumps and soaked the lower legs of his jeans.
“Sometimes I wish I’d left you back in Durham,” Jack said flatly. “Danny’s right.”
“No surprise you think so,” Gregor said, contrary out of habit as he stood up and brushed the snow off his knees. “That dog’s nearly been the death of you already, and you didn’t even learn anything.”
“I learned I’m not a prophet,” Jack snapped. He could still taste the sour bite of the prophets’ brew as they poured it into him, feel the burn of shackles that pinned him out in human form like a sacrificial goat. The stink of the prophets’ monsters, only enough of them left to suffer, still woke him gagging at nights. Children’s stories and myths. That was what the Wolf Winter had always been, but somehow he’d expected the advantage to belong to the wolves. “I learned my catechism, I hated the gods, but I never talked to the prophets or went to their rituals. None of us did. That’s how they managed to betray us with nobody any the wiser. Maybe Da will know what this means. Or not. Either way, a dead prophet can’t plot anything.”
There was a pause, and then Gregor smiled at him—a hard, humorless slant of his mouth. He inclined his head slightly. “That, little brother, is one thing we can agree on.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Jack told him.
Gregor laugh was a bark of amusement that disturbed a handful of crows from the rooftops. They flew away, shadows cruciform and gray on the snow, and Jack hoped it was coincidence they were headed for the loch. He looked at Nick, whose attention clung to the tails of the birds until they disappeared behind the tree line.
If his face could be trusted, he hoped the same thing. But it couldn’t, so that didn’t help.
Jack shook himself. He missed… the wolf who’d come down from the Wall, he supposed. Back then, he’d been sure of his place in the world, sure of his da even after exile, and he’d never woken up with the taste of fear and his own blood in the back of his throat.
He’d trade a lot to have the wolf back.
“Start walking, Gregor,” he said grimly. “The prophets won’t kill themselves.”
“You don’t know that,” Gregor said. There were knives in his voice. “They’re supposed to be able to see the future. Maybe they’ll take the easy way out.”
Jack hoped not. Maybe if he killed enough prophets, he’d find the certainty they’d carved out of him. He gave the dogs one last hard look, in case there was a chance Da would know a cause for the butchery, and loped down the street after Danny.
Behind him he heard Gregor question Nick, “Columbo?”
Chapter Three—Danny
DANNY CLENCHEDhis jaw, the ache in his teeth from the cold a new constant as he struggled through the knee-deep snow that drifted across the road to Lochwinnoch. His jeans were crusted with slush and the wet denim chafed against his cold skin. His breath had frozen against the collar of his coat, a thin skin of frost where he tucked his chin down behind the zipper.
It only took a couple of hours to walk to Lochwinnoch from Glengarnock. It had taken Danny less when he’d left home with a backpack and an acceptance offer to the university, even with how many times he stopped andalmostwent back. A wolf could have done it quicker than that, even on two feet.
They’d already been on the road for half a day, slowed down by the wet resistance of the snow and the ice-needled wind that pinched ears and worked its way through every zipper and seam. It pushed them back until they had to lean into it like mimes to make any progress. Danny tried not to think about the Hunt in Durham, when he’d caught the Wild like a tailwind as he ran. This was just weather. If the Wild didn’t want them back on the Old Man’s territory, then Jack or Gregor would have said something.
Instead they took point, grimly silent as they broke a path through the snow for those not lucky enough to be wolves. All Danny could see without looking up was their sodden jeans and old, ruined boots as they kicked the fresh-fallen snow out of the way. Their uncomplaining stamina made him feel guilty for the sluggish weariness that dragged at him.
He could feel the dog’s restlessness in his bones. If he shifted, he could cut across country and move faster. The cold wouldn’t bother him as much, and the dog didn’t need glasses.
Danny grimaced at the reminder and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
He’d gotten his first pair of glasses when he was eleven, old enough to realize his ma couldn’t deny he was a dog, but she wouldn’t accept any other defect in him. The fact he couldn’t see farther than the end of his arms, the way he sneezed the spring away, and his habit of being too tall to go unnoticed all had to be character flaws. Something he could overcome if he worked hard enough.
He hadn’t blamed her, not much, anyhow. She’d wanted him to live, to thrive, and that was how she thought she could make it happen. But he wanted to see, so he bunked off school and went to the optician.
The sharp edges of the world had amazed him. His ability to land a punch in the right region impressed his ma enough she’d let him keep them. For a while, in Leeds, he tried contacts, but they’d never felt right. The glasses always had, the weight of them on his nose the evidence he didn’t belong up here.
Now they were gone, and Danny still didn’t belong.
