“Or maybe you didn’t, or didn’t want to,” Nick said. He swung his leg off the saddle, his hips sore from the long, cold ride. Even if he didn’t remember half of it. He let his shirt drop and zipped up his jacket again. Whatever warmth had been in it was gone, and he shivered. “Rose Blake raised me until social services had to step in and stop her. I know how she likes her whiskey, and she never slept more than three hours a night. I know she whipped me for pissing the bed even though she terrified me with the monsters that were under it. I love her, even though I know there’s nothing there to hang it on, and I know when she’s lying, Ewan. And when she’s not.”
“What—”
“You said the wolves killed your daughter?” Nick said. “I guess that’s true, because Rose told me that she cut me out of her daughter’s stomach herself.”
Ewan’s bony face twisted away from the truth as though Nick had punched him with it. The muscles in his jaw bulged as he shook his head.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “I know Rose. She has done terrible things—for lust, for pride, and even to save us all—but she’d never hurt Ashley. She loved her. Maybe she couldn’t show it, too much the wolf, but everything she did was for Ashley.”
Had that been her name? Nick had never known. Or if Gran had told him at some point, he’d lost it under the gorier stories.
“So?” Nick asked. “She loves me too. Otherwise when she killed me, it would have been a murder, not a sacrifice. Why did she do it, Ewan? You owe me that much. What was more important than her daughter? Her grandson.”
Ewan pulled off his hat. He dug his fingers into the wool and twisted at it unhappily. Underneath it, his hair was sparse and red. Some small, hived-off part of Nick that he tried not to think about much wondered if his mother had looked like that.
“I turned my back on everything, let them cut my wolf out of me, because she told me that the Old Man had murdered our daughter to punish her. An eye for an eye. A child for a child. That he’d taken the pup she was going to have—taken you—and sent you down over the Wall to raise.”
Nick shrugged. “She lied. Rose does that.”
A distant yelp made them both flinch. Ewan let the hat drop to the ground. He wiped his hand down his face and smeared wet from the corner of his eyes.
“I loved her,” he said. “She never loved me, but I knew that. It didn’t matter. I knew what she’d done, what she would have done, but I told myself there were limits. That there were lines she wouldn’t cross.”
Nick edged away from the bike, caught between keeping an eye on Ewan and one on the trees.
“That’s your problem,” he said bluntly. “What is she going to do? Why did she come back here, back to where she knew they’d try and stop her?”
Ewan stared at him. Conflicted emotions warred visibly on his face.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “Why should I trust you? Over the woman I’ve followed for decades?”
Nick shrugged. He didn’t have an answer, and it didn’t matter. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said. “One way or another.”
The monsters spilled into the clearing, half made and still raw from the fever that birthed them. Broken bones stuck out of wasted skin as the—curse, infection, whatever it was—pulled muscles loose to reknit their bodies to order. Plates of Kevlar were stitched roughly into their puffy pale flesh with seams of gray-green scabs and the rags of their old uniforms still strained across their swollen, hunched shoulders and thick thighs.
Gregor was in the middle of them, flesh torn to shreds and his teeth bared in a blood-streaked snark as though he’d forgotten he couldn’t turn. He shoved his forearm into a monster’s mouth, muscles shredded down to bone, and dug the fingers of his free hand into its eyes. They split and seeped pink fluid down its face. It shrieked and lurched backward as it clawed at its face. Wet, white skin slipped off its bones in ragged sheets as it pulled at it.
“Run,” Gregor yelled as he wrenched himself free and tackled the other monster. It went down in a tangle of limbs it wasn’t entirely used to yet. “Get out of here. I’ll catch up.”
Liar.
Nick tightened his grip on the knife and lurched forward, but a hand on his shoulder pulled him back. Ewan bore down hard enough that Nick felt his collarbone creak.
Ewan’s fingers tightened and he took a breath as though he had something else to say. It never came out. Instead he threw Nick aside into the snow and stalked forward to wade into the brawl. Like a man with a misbehaving terrier, he grabbed the monster by the ear and dragged it off Gregor.
“Enough,” he ordered. His voice was harsh and thick with authority. “If we wanted him dead, we’d have told you. Back, you fucker.”
He bullied the two monsters and got them to crouch beneath one of the trees, slabber hanging in strings from badly hinged jaws. They growled and shifted uneasily on blistered, flayed paws, the compulsion to obey their master’s voice conflicting with the bloodlust in their swollen eyes as they stared at the bloody mess they’d left of Gregor.
“You should have let them finish,” Gregor said. He propped himself up on his other elbow, his breath ragged and his arm slack and bloody. “I won’t give you the same quarter.”
Nick dragged himself out of the snow. His hips and ribs ached as he staggered to his feet. It wouldn’t kill him, so he ignored it as he limped over to Gregor. He dropped back to his knees in the snow and tried to patch the gory wounds with wads of cloth and pressure. The blood oozed between his fingers, wet and potent with life, and Nick tried to focus through the woozy nausea.
He’d eaten an eyeball—or the bird had. He wasn’t going to puke at the sight of some blood. It was a lie, and it didn’t even help. Gregor sucked his breath in between his teeth at the pain and gave Nick a hard, green look.
“I told you to run,” he said.
“And I didn’t,” Nick said. The cold slowed the blood but not enough. He knew Gregor would heal if he got the chance, but some lizard-instinct in Nick’s brain didn’t believe that. Every wet red flower of blood that bloomed on the rucked-up snow made the tension in his chest ratchet tighter. “What are you going to do about it?”
