Herefusedto belong. Even if sometimes—when Jack pulled him into a kiss or slung a lazy arm over his shoulders—he wanted to. It was easier that way. If you didn’t want something to start with, no one could take it away from you.
He went to push his glasses up his nose again and huffed out a misty sigh of exasperation when he poked his eyebrow. At least there was nothing along this road he’d miss out on seeing. Even before he lost his glasses, Winter had blurred the edges of the world. It was long stretches of white and the pencil scrawl of bare trees that lined the road. They stood out black against all the white, stripped down to the bark. Ice coated the branches and hung down in long, glittering spears. The trees groaned and creaked under the weight, and occasionally one of the icicles would break free and drop down to break into brittle sprays of needles against the ground.
Abandoned cars lined the road. A few of them—left behind in the first days of winter—had pulled in crookedly to the verge and locked the doors behind them. Others had been left where they stopped, ice crusted up around their tires and doors left open, so snow filled the inside.
Danny paused for a second next to an old green Ford. There was someone inside, propped up in the driver’s seat. Danny pulled his sleeve down over his hand and scrubbed it over the window to dislodge snow and a layer of loose ice.
There was a woman inside, wrapped in a heavy parka and a tartan wool blanket. Faded red hair was clipped up top of her head and her eyes, glazed gray with death and ice, stared blankly forward. Danny wanted to say they’d been blue.
“Do you know her?” Nick asked. He’d struggled even more than Danny since they left the train. The long black coat he refused to abandon was matted with snow from hem to knees, and the cold pinched the end of his nose white. He still sounded sympathetic, in the slightly distant way that people who dealt with death—pathologists, funeral directors, very bad doctors—tended to approach grief. Danny supposed that carrion gods would have the same polite remove.
“Maybe,” Danny said. She looked about the right age to have been one of the Lochwinnoch kids he’d practiced his humanity on back then—his friends. It was Scotland. A lot of the girls had been redheads thanks to nature or a bottle. He hadn’t bothered to keep in touch with them when he left. It hadn’t even occurred to him. But with Nick’s attention still on him, that didn’t feel like something he could admit. So, he lied. “Heather, I think. I went to school with her.”
“She didn’t suffer,” Nick said. The obvious lie gave him pause, and he amended it quietly. “Not for long. If that helps.”
Ahead of them Gregor and Jack realized there was no one at their heels and stopped to listen. Jack scowled at Nick’s statement. He did that at most things Nick did—talk, shift, breathe. Danny understood the reason for it—he had no fond memories of the prophet either, and Nick shared the sharp bones of his face with her, the relationship unmistakable—but that didn’t make it easier.
“Freezing isn’t a good way to go,” he said. “We’ve seen that.”
Nick shook his coat out around him, like a bird fluffed its feathers. He stuck his hands in the pockets and hunched his shoulders and collar up around his ears. “She didn’t die of the cold,” he said. “It was quick enough.”
“He should know,” Gregor said smugly. “He’s a doctor. A real one.”
Danny scowled. It was stupid to care. He’d never wanted to get into medicine, and the only reason Gregor even cared was the fact he could use it to get under Jack’s skin. There wasn’t much need of medical care when what didn’t kill a wolf would eventually heal. Danny knew all that, but it didn’t help. The jab still rankled.
He’d grown up a dog among wolves. They’d been bigger, stronger, and healed faster. All Danny had was that he was clever and that he fought dirty. The idea that he’d lost that advantage to someone who could loveGregor, bothered him.
But one thing he had learned from the wolves was how not to react when something drew blood.
“I hope he was a good one, then,” Danny said. “I’d like to believe him.”
“That’s not how I knew,” Nick said quietly, his eyes still focused on the face behind the frost-trail-obscured windshield. He blinked and looked away with a nervous twitch of his shoulders and pulled up a dry smile from somewhere. “But I am good at what I do.”
“Did.” Jack’s curt correction dropped like a stone. “What you did, before you died.”
Nick winced at the reminder. He rubbed his chest absently with a gloved hand, dislodging a fluff of snow that clung to his coat. “I’m not sure it counts,” he said. “If you come back.”
A growl trickled between Gregor’s lips, the scrape of sound thinner than Danny remembered. He grabbed the back of Jack’s neck and pulled him roughly close. “If you drop that in front of the Old Man,” he warned as Jack shoved him away, “this truce will be over before the prophets are.”
It was an empty threat these days, but it took Gregor longer to lose a habit than it had to lose a wolf.
Danny flinched as he caught the cruelty of that thought. It was hard to pity Gregor—and unwise, there was nothing more guaranteed to rile his temper—and easy to resent someone who couldn’t be bothered to use Danny’sname. Still, as often as Danny had resented what he was, he couldn’t imagine being without his dog, alone in his skin. The discomfort of the idea made it hard to enjoy Gregor’s fall from grace.
“You’ve taken a bird to bed,” Jack pointed out with a snort. He scrubbed his hand over his nape as he stepped back. “I think Da’ll notice that all on his own, even if I don’t mention he was dead.”
The potential for violence hung in the air for a moment, brittle as one of the icicles that dangled from the trees. Then Gregor snorted out a laugh.
“Look at that,” he said. “After all these years, I’ve finally outdone you. Da’s going to hate mine more than yours.”
Reluctant humor warmed Jack’s expression as he thought about that. After a second, he inclined his head in brisk acknowledgment, his dimple a faded mirror of the deep, crescent slash that scored Gregor’s lean cheek.
“When you put it that way,” Jack said. “You win.”
Nick clicked his tongue. “I’m glad I’m good for something,” he said dryly, a hint of something rough under his voice. If Gregor noticed it, he didn’t think it mattered enough to apologize.
Danny used his nail to scrape a porthole in the smear of ice on the windshield. There was an empty white bottle of pills clutched in the woman’s hand. He couldn’t read the label, but it was unlikely to be vitamins. It looked like Nick had been right.
“We should get going again,” Jack said as he looked up at the sky. “If we can, I want to get home before nightfall. The Wild’s gotten strange as it’s gotten stronger, and there were things in it that always liked the dark best.”
