Nick didn’t need to see the end of the fight to know it wouldn’t make much difference.
Chapter Nineteen—Jack
THE HARE,scrawny in its patchy winter coat, threw itself across the snowy field in a desperate dash for safety. It jinked and turned in a frantic attempt to stay ahead of Jack’s teeth. A snap of his jaws caught him a tuft of tail fluff and the sweet bloom of blood on his tongue. It wasn’t enough to bring the rabbit down, and as Jack collected himself from the lunge, it gained an inch on him. It might have been enough.
On a summer’s day, with the Old Man’s sheep penned up in the field and someone willing waiting for him, Jack might have called it a day. The hunt then had been as much about the chase as the catch, a sop for the wolf who sometimes chafed at even the barely there domestication of the Scottish Pack.
Jack would have spat out the shit-matted fur, rolled off his frustration in the heather, and mocked Gregor for running his paws bloody for a stringy mouthful of squirrel. It would have been the hare’s lucky day.
In the summer, but this was winter—The Winter—and Jack needed the kill. His world narrowed down to the slip of snow under his paws and the yellow flash of the hare’s hind feet ahead of him. Cold air scraped at the back of his throat, caught like glass in the lungs that labored in his chest as he ran. Snow sprayed up from under his feet as he pushed himself faster, each millimeter of space the hare claimed with an impossibly tight turn won back on the straight stretch. Ellie fell back, the reserves of speed in her muscles exhausted.
Jack flicked his ears. Even over the rasp of his own breath in his throat, he could hear the hare—the stutter-fast beat of its heart as he ran it down, the panic-fast huff of each breath that powered the desperate stretch of its body.
It went left, but it should have gone right. Jack had solid ground underfoot and lunged as the hare’s body twisted. He bowled it over into the snow and tried to pin it down with his paws as it squirmed. It rammed a foot into his eye, hard enough to make him yelp, but then his teeth closed around its neck. Jack bit down, bone crunched, and the hare went limp.
He lifted his head, the long hare body dangling limp in his jaws, and looked around. There was nothing there, but his wolf still wanted to retreat to shelter before he ate. Jack tossed the hare up into the air and then snapped his jaws back around its midsection as it fell, so he could carry it easier.
As he loped toward the shelter of a nearby cairn, he felt his hackles go up between his shoulders. It felt like eyes on him, but there was nothing to watch him. The world might not be empty, but this particular stretch of moors was. The half-fed hare in his jaws was the only living thing he’d seen since he left Danny sleeping to check out the boundaries of his—his, now—territory.
Alone like an idiot, a mental voice that made the effort to sound a lot like Danny noted inside his head.
Jack snorted at the thought, for all his wolf agreed. The wolf wanted the comfort of the pack, the reassurance of a dozen kin at its heels.
And a dozen hungry bellies who could have seen him bested by a hare.
The stomach always won for a wolf. They were a hungry breed.
Despite the distraction, he still felt watched. He hunkered down under the stones and tore into the softness of the hare’s stomach. It was still warm, full of sweet meat and the bitterness of guts. He wolfed it down, cracked the bones between his teeth, and scraped the fat from under the fur.
A single hare shouldn’t have been enough to fill a wolf’s belly, but Jack’s hunger was more than just physical. Whatever prayers the hare had for the God of Chased Things added spice to the meat and thickened the marrow. The prophets left their kills uneaten for the gods, but the wolves took it all for themselves.
Let the moon bitch climb down from her chariot if she was hungry, tear her white robes on the briars and stain her pocked skin with blood. Jack hadn’t sired her that he should chew her meat for her.
When Jack finished his meal, there was nothing but a stain in the snow and plucked hanks of fur left. He licked up the bloody frost as though it were a Popsicle and crunched it between his teeth. The shock of cold stabbed into his skull, just behind his eyes, and he shook his head until his ears flapped to dislodge it.
The wind sidled around the stones and pulled at his fur with cold fingers. There was a storm on the horizon, the sky bruised purple with the weight of it. Tonight was the moon hunt. The Wild would wax as the bitch-goddess opened her blind eye, and the prophets would try to put their twisted plans into action.
Whatever they were.
Apparently, it was too much to hope for the Winter to sit it out.
Jack finished, licked his chops of any dregs of blood, and stood up. Chunks of ice were matted into his fur, and the cold had bitten down enough that even a wolf could feel it in their bones. He shook himself and stretched to enjoy the feeling of a full stomach against his ribs.
Speculation and prediction were human things. There wasn’t room for them in Jack’s fur-skin. The wolf knew that the Scottish Pack would survive whatever the prophets threw at him. What else could the prophets do but lose? They were made for it.
Then….
Then.
The wolf hackled at the thought of losing Danny again, but the Old Man’s son knew his duty. Jack couldn’t remember the last time the two had been at odds inside him.
He shook himself again as though he could shed his thoughts as easily as the snow and raised his nose to the sky as he howled. In the odd stillness that hung before a storm, his voice trailed upward, thin and sharp, and hung in the air.
Someone answered from down the hill. It had the raw-edged scrape of a dog’s voice—not Danny—but somewhere between the cell and the fight, his brain had fit them in as pack. The sound rippled back across the landscape—call and response—until something to the north, near the storm, squalled a coarse gargle of sound into the mix. It was an old, ruined voice, cut through with other voices. It was dissonant, with a pus-thick edge of sickness that made it glottal. Other ruined voices picked it up—the shades of dead friends stitched to coarse throats—in mockery and challenge.
Prophets didn’t raise their voices to the pack. They held their tongues except to howl the catechism. Or they had.
Unnerved, the Pack fell silent. Jack waited until Rose’s distant voice raggedly trailed off.
