“If you’re looking for prophets,” he said, “we know where to find them. Some of them, at least. They’re up in the hills, near the Run-Away Man. Gran likes to keep all her monsters close.”
DEATH WASN’Tcomplicated when you were a wolf.
A hole to bury the body and a howl to see the spirit through to the Wild. That was all the dead needed or the living wanted. The Pack had thought the Old Man sentimental when he put a marker on the twins’ ma’s grave.
Danny wasn’t a wolf.
He’d lived in the human world, loved humans, and even nearly convinced himself he was one of them. Maybe he’d learned to grieve like them too.
Someone had washed the blood off Kath’s face and wrapped her loosely in a white sheet that was now smeared with streaks of crimson. It ended at her collarbones and left the raw gash in her throat exposed, enough flesh scooped out to reveal tendons and bone.
Danny took a corner of the sheet and pulled it up to her chin. His hand, the knuckles split and bleeding, was steady, but he flinched away from touching cold skin.
“What do you want to do?” Jack asked. “About the body.”
“Burn her,” Danny said flatly, the words clipped off between his teeth. It sounded too hard for Danny, but Jack bit his tongue on the disagreement. Then Danny relented enough to look at him. “If we lose—”
“We won’t.”
“We might,” Danny contradicted him. “And if we do, I won’t have some prophet walking around in my mam’s skin. Burn her. It’s just meat now. She’s gone.”
Jack crossed his arms. He’d changed into jeans—his own—and dragged on a T-shirt. For once he felt like he might need a jacket. The cold in Kath’s cottage was understandable—the fire in the hearth had gone out—but it felt deeper than that.
There were still bloodstains on the floor, and the odd hormone-and-saline pickle of amniotic fluid hung in the air.
“You don’t want to say anything?” he asked. “I’ll listen.”
Danny shook his head. “Why? You probably knew her better than I did,” he said. “I left. You stayed.”
“She understood.”
Danny smiled with a quick, dry quirk of his mouth. “No,” he said. “She didn’t. But I’m who she raised me to be, so I guess that was her own fault. Something else she wouldn’t understand, Jack? Why we’re wasting time with the dead when the bastard who did this is still alive.”
The anger in his voice was flat and steady, as though it was here for the long haul. It left Jack uneasy, but he could hardly blame Danny for it. He was right to be angry, and this was a waste of time they couldn’t spare.
It didn’t mean it wasn’t important.
“You should stay goodbye,” he said.
“I never did before.”
Danny headed for the door, but Jack caught him before he got there and pulled Danny into his arms. He cupped the back of Danny’s head, curls springy against his palm, and pulled him down into a rough, hungry kiss. For a second. Danny was stiff in his arms, but then he shuddered and leaned into Jack. A wet, salty sob hitched between their lips—Jack would swallow that secret for him—and Danny wrapped his arms around Jack as though he were scared to let go. The edges of his glasses dug into Jack’s cheekbones and eyebrow, the awkwardness of it familiar enough to be bittersweet.
Jack broke the kiss and rested his forehead against Danny’s. He could feel Danny’s breath, damp and ragged against his lips. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, and this time Danny pressed his mouth over Jack’s in a hard “shut up” kiss. He touched Jack’s cheek for a moment and then pulled away.
“Don’t,” he said. “Not now.”
Jack could have protested that Danny didn’t know what he was going to say, but Danny probably knew better than Jack did.
“I’m glad it wasn’t you,” he said anyhow. “I’m glad you were in my bed instead of here. Kath would be too.”
Pain twisted Danny’s face into a hard mask. “I could have done something. I could have—”
“Died,” Jack finished for him. “Then I’d have killed us all. Instead we’ll kill them and get Bron’s baby back.”
Danny shuddered. The full-body tremor wasn’t a human expression. If he’d been in the dog’s skin, his hackles would have gone up and his tail down. The same emotion was somehow conveyed without ears or tail to flag what he felt.
“I can’t believe that,” he said apologetically. “It’s too hard. What if we’re wrong?”
