“Leave it,” Jack interrupted harshly. He glanced at Danny and then turned back to the Pack. He could feel the rightness settle into his bones, finally as certain of something as he’d been of the Wild’s favor back in Durham. One way or another, the Pack was done here. “All of it. Take children, the injured, the old—anyone who can’t put on fur to fight—and anything you want to keep. They’ll go to Lochwinnoch and then south, with or without the rest of us. This? Let it burn.”
Chapter Twenty-One—Danny
OLD STONEgroaned like a living thing as it burned, and slate tiles snapped like bones as the flames reached them. Flames wriggled eager, bright fingers through dried-out mortar and tapped at glass windows that warped as they melted in slow motion.
The walls would still be standing when the fire finally guttered out—centuries took more than one disaster to wipe away—but no one would mistake this for safe shelter again.
In the middle of the conflagration, the Old Man’s farmhouse squatted resentfully, ice still caked on the roof and walls as though the winter had retreated there for its last stand.
Danny watched it burn from the edge of the lake, flames reflected dim and strange in the dark water, and tried to feel… something. It seemed like he should. He’d never belonged here, but he’d spent more time not fitting in here than he had anywhere else. There was also the fact that his mam’s ashes were mixed in with the sparks and smoke that rose, black as an eel, against the storm-white sky.
If there was anything, he didn’t have time to feel it. There was a hollow, black pit in his gut that opened when he walked into the slaughterhouse that had been his mam’s kitchen, and it ate everything—grief, anger, satisfaction. It flashed through him and then dropped like a stone, just like his heart had done as the door creaked open until it caught on Bron’s arm.
He’d known something was wrong. It had dragged him out of the warm, Jack-musky nest of blankets and out into the cold—an itch in his hackles, a ghost of a scent that woke a snarl in the back of his throat, and gut instinct.
Not this.
It was like something popped as he crossed the threshold, a thin film that had blocked the hot salted-penny stink of blood that washed over Danny. He saw his mam first, sprawled on the ground with empty eyes and a ripped-open throat. She hadn’t died easily. There was blood on her fingers, bruises on her knuckles. Bron lay curled on her side nearby, in a puddle of wet red blood that spread slow and treacly over the tiles.
The kitchen should have smelled like beeswax and family, his mother and his sister. Instead it just smelled like meat. Danny’s knees hit the floor before he realized he was on his way down, and his throat felt raw as an awful, hurt whine clawed out of him.
Then Bron’s heart tried to beat—a ragged creak of noise—and all that pain just slid into the hole.
It wouldn’t last.
Danny knew that. He’d dealt with enough bereaved students back in Durham—mostly dead pets, sometimes a grandparent, and the occasional visit from grave-faced cops with bad news about closer relatives—to know that. The hollow was to help him coperight now. Once this was over, it would collapse in on itself and he’d have to sink or swim with what he had left.
Not yet, though.
Danny dragged his eyes away from the fire and slogged through the snow to where the kids and the old wolves waited. Bron was laid out on a makeshift stretcher, strapped down with sheets twisted into ropes and with blankets piled on top of her. Despite the layers, she trembled hard enough to make her teeth chatter. Her eyes moved restlessly under her bruised lids, and soft whimpers scraped at the back of her throat.
His scrappy, pain-in-the-ass little sister. She’d never needed him for anything, and if they made it out of this, she’d deny she ever had. Danny bent over and kissed her forehead under the stringy tangle of her curls. Her skin was hot and dry under his lips, slick with metal-bitter salt.
“I’ll give them a kick in the throat before I kill them, just for you,” he promised. Then he looked up at Millie. “If we don’t come back, head down the coast to Girvan. We left people there that have no love for the prophets.”
Millie scowled. Her arm was still broken, but she had a terrier’s heart. It would take more than being on three legs to truly cow her.
“We’re part of the Pack too,” she said. “If you’re going to fight, we should fight with you. It’s the Wolf Winter. It’s Ragnarok. There aren’t any noncombatants anymore.”
Danny tucked the blankets in more securely around Bron’s shoulders. Her bones felt sothinunder his fingers, and she seemed so small. It frightened him a little how delicate she was without her horrible personality to buoy her up.
“We’ll fight now,” he said. “And if we lose, you fight later. Bron will make sure of that. Once she’s back on her feet, she’ll drag you all up into the Highlands by the scruffs.”
Millie didn’t quite laugh, but her face softened for a second.
“I’ll take care of her,” she promised finally, “whether she likes it or not. Are you sure the Sannock shouldn’t come with us? He’s a doctor. If something happens, if she doesn’t heal….”
Danny pushed himself up. He could have corrected Milly about Nick being Sannock, but him being a god wouldn’t slice the suspicion out of her voice. It shouldn’t either. All the evidence was that Nick was a good man—a moral one, despite his taste in company for his head and his bed—so he’d understand why no one Rose had crossed trusted in that.
“We need him,” he said. “He knows where the prophets are holed up. When Bron wakes up, tell her… tell her I love her.”
That would piss her off.
Danny gave a last, stiff nod to Millie and then headed over to the waiting hunters. Most of them had pulled their skins on already, dire wolves so massive they tricked the eye into scaling them down. A few of them waited on him.
Danny stripped his—Jack’s—sweater off and kicked his unlaced boots off as he walked. Snow crunched between his toes and stabbed cold needles under his toenails and down to his marrow. He shivered as he stopped to push his trousers down and hop out of them.
“That was a good show,” Gregor said. “After all those years you didn’t believe in gods or prophecy.”
