“I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” Danny said. “Except I didn’t want to see Rose look at me from my mam’s wolf. After that, it was all Jack.”
“You don’t think you called Surtr down?” Gregor asked. He pointed with his chin toward the fire. “That he’s not there, wallowing in the embers? Do you think the Winter and the Wild would let it burn otherwise?”
“It’s a fire,” Danny said. “That’s what it does.”
Except…. Danny’s fingers still smelled of the potion he’d doused the kitchen in. He knew why the fire had caught there, ignited as the flames hit the sharp, lighter-than-air stink of ethanol. The rest of the houses shouldn’t have burned so easily, but they had.
He scrubbed both hands through his hair to drag it back from his face, his fingers unblistered despite the fact he’d reached into the fire.
“They went north when they left,” he said. The reminder of what had happened steadied him, and the pit in his chest dropped to his heels like an anchor. “I saw the tracks before I was dragged away.”
James, who’d also hung on to his human skin, crossed his arms. “So we follow a dog on the hunt now?” he asked.
Danny shrugged. “Not my fault you can’t keep pace with me,” he said. “If you don’t want to be at my heels, run faster.”
“Enough,” Jack snapped as he grabbed the nape of Danny’s neck in hard fingers. “Don’t goad, Danny-dog. Your grief only gets you so much leeway.”
James wrinkled his lips back from his teeth, far enough to show gum, and opened his mouth to say something. It was going to be awful; Danny could see that in the greasy satisfaction that floated in James’s eyes, and he tensed, ready to respond.
“The same goes for you, James,” Jack snapped as he jabbed a finger at the big man. “If you can’t bite your fucking tongue, go join the prophets and lick a god’s toes.”
It looked like James wasn’t going to back down. Danny leaned against the leash of Jack’s hand on his scruff, almost eager for the fight. Before it could break out, Nick interrupted them sharply.
“You’re not following a dog,” Nick said. He looked more like a crow now, even when he was human. Danny didn’t know if that was new or if exhaustion had just ground Nick down to bird-sharp bones and a beak of a nose. “But you need to chase a bird.”
He hunched his shoulders, lifted his arms, and shifted to feathers in the middle of the gesture. His clothes dropped to the snow—Danny, his balls tight and resentful from the cold, envied the ease of that—and the crow slapped the air with wide black wings as it took flight. One of the younger wolves crouched, haunches tight under pale fur as he got ready to spring.
Ellie, ruddy and lean, snapped at the young hunter’s nose to get him to flinch and back down.
This bird wasn’t prey. Not tonight.
The crow cawed mockery down at them as the wind caught under its wings and tossed it skyward. Its cruciform shadow spread over the snow like an inkblot as it briefly spun on a wing tip and then flew north.
Jack tightened his fingers on Danny’s scruff and pulled him over and down. The brush of his mouth, the cold-intense taste of him when he kissed Jack was so familiar it hurt. Danny wanted to wrap Jack around himself, to lose his grief in the hard muscles and warmth of him.
“Behave,” Jack chided as he stepped back. “It’s not the time.”
He was right. Danny let all that want fall into the pit, the emptiness it left easier to navigate, and stepped back to give Jack room as he shed his human skin. The wolf shook itself, all tawny fur and heavy muscle, and snorted impatiently at Danny.
Time to go.
Maybe this time, Danny thought wearily as he took his glasses off and bent down to set them on top of his jeans, he’d just stay in the dog’s coat. It had terrified him once, the thought of losing himself to the soft-edged, simpler world of his other shape. Right now it felt like it would be… easy. He pulled the dog up out of his bones before the Wild took the choice from him.
The dog shook itself briskly, nose to tail, to settle its fleshrighton its bones. It could feel the ache of grief in its chest—a dull pressure that pushed against the keel of its breastbone—and in the pinch of muscles that clamped its tail and pinned its ears.
It could taste Danny’s grief on the air, complex with notes of resentment and old, old pain, and the bright, clean red of blood teased at its nose.
Jack bumped against the dog’s shoulder, hard enough to stagger the lanky dog and jar it out of its misery.
The pain was in the past. It hurt, but it was already done, like a tail caught in a door or a tooth cracked on bone, and nothing would help it. It wouldn’t change if the dog worried at it.
Only Gregor was still in his human skin now. The dog could smell thelackon him, the thin edge of a scent that was meant to be layered over musk and fur. But he still smelled like a predator, and the dog grumbled a low-in-the-chest growl at him as Gregor buried his hand in Jack’s ruff.
“We don’t let her walk away again,” Gregor said quietly. His hatred was yellow and bitter, like something stale left under a rock. “She dies or we do.”
Jack snarled his agreement with a short roll of noise in his throat and stepped away from Gregor. The sun hadn’t set yet, but the moon had already crawled up into the sky. It hung low and faded against the blanched-out horizon.
If the goddess was in it, she’d have a long night ahead of her.
