This time Millie pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.
“He poisoned them,” Ellie said instead. “From the smell. Something mixed in their tea. It smelled like the potions the prophets gave their favorite wolves.”
“That wouldn’t kill them,” Jack said. It would make them sick. It might have twisted Bron’s baby out of her—pregnancies could be fragile even if the wolf wasn’t. They would have been sick and weak, but not dead.
“No,” Ellie admitted. “He used a knife for that.”
He finally turned to look at her. It stung. She’d made herself over in Kath’s image, just younger and weaker. She was like a shadow… or a ghost.
“Who else?”
Her mouth opened, but the name didn’t come out at first. When it did, her voice was weak and thin.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There was too much blood. It drowned out any other scents.”
“Did it? She turned her coat once,” someone muttered under their breath but loud enough to hear. Ellie flushed, but she kept her eyes on Jack. “Maybe she helped.”
“I didn’t,” Ellie swore. “But there was a wolf. Or a prophet. They left by the Wild. I wouldn’t do this, Numitor, and I’ll kill whoever did.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll kill you myself and make sure your wolf never finds the Wild,” Jack told her. He glanced over at Danny, who had twisted his fingers into his hair while the wolves didn’t look at him. “And if you didn’t, then you don’t have first claim to the killer’s throat.”
Gregor put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “If you want an answer, ask Bron,” he said.
“What?” Jack said as he jerked around in surprise. “I thought she was… that she died.”
“No,” Gregor said. His voice was thick and rough in his throat, the way it had always gone when he needed the wolf to hide from something. But he was alone in this, the only one of the Pack who was really alone. “Not yet.”
Without really thinking about it, Jack reached up and gripped Gregor’s hand in sympathy. The fingers were cold and stiff under Jack’s, and it took a second before he pulled away.
“I don’t need your pity. Save it for your dog,” he said flatly as he jerked his head toward the barn. “Or for Bron.”
Chapter Twenty—Jack
BRON LAYon the roughly swept boards, sliced open from one hip bone to the other, like a bizarre zipper. There was an apron of blood that dripped down to her thighs, the rags of her nightgown shredded and plastered to the floor. She was unconscious, her face slack and tear-stained.
The silence was the shock. Bron was so rarely quiet, even as a wolf on the hunt.
Jack grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket by the door and pulled them on. The cuffs folded under his heels and the waistband sagged around his hips.
Nothing should have been funny right then, but part of Jack’s brain insisted that he register how ludicrous it was.
The Numitor in a pair of pants—and a title—that were too big for him.
And then there was Nick—harbinger, carrion god, collector of the dead—fish-belly gray and sweaty as he worked on her. His hands shook every time he lifted them out of her guts to wipe his face on his sleeve. As though Jack hadn’t seen him in bird form peck a frozen eyeball from a corpse’s skull like it was a melon ball at a party.
It wasn’t humor, just a bleak recognition of how ridiculous they all were.
“He doesn’t like blood,” Gregor said quietly, the same faded, terrible shred of acknowledgment in his voice. “Not when it’s come out of the living.”
Faint as it was, the macabre flicker of amusement faded as Jack walked gingerly over, as though a creaked board might be what made her slip away. He took in more injuries as he looked her over, cuts to her arms and feet, bruises on her shoulders. The smell of blood was bright and metallic—the tang of the rabbit’s blood caught in the back of Jack’s throat and made his stomach turn—with a sour undertone of infection.
Bron’s chest fluttered in fast, shallow breaths and her sallow face was wet with tears. She looked like Danny, so much it grabbed Jack’s guts and twisted. If she hadn’t healed yet….
“Just let her go,” Jack said. His throat was so dry the words hurt. “We’re wolves. We live or we die, but we don’t linger. We don’t suffer. This isn’t right. She’s—”
“Shut up,” Nick said through his teeth without looking up. “That’s the choice everyone gets. You’re not some special case. Life or death. And I know what kills people a lot better than you do. It was my—it isour—job. She can survive this.”
It was Gregor who put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, although he stopped short of trying to pull him away from what he was doing.
