Tom squirmed on the snow as he tried to push himself back on ruined elbows. He wouldn’t have gotten far, but Lachlan bent down to grab his ankle and drag him back. Tom’s leg stretched in a way that a human leg wasn’t meant to, and he screamed.
Tears dripped down his face. His blind eye was flushed pink with broken blood vessels.
“I did everything she asked,” he said. A sob retched out of him. “I helped you kill Kath. I held Bron down. They’d never done owt to me. They’d been kind, but I did forher.”
“Youhatedthem for being kind,” Lachlan spat. “And she appreciates your service, but now we need one thing from you.”
“Why?” Tom begged, his voice breaking.
“You were the only dog stupid enough to think you’d ever matter,” Lachlan said. He booted Tom in the side with a slippery crunch of already damaged bone. The impact rolled Tom onto his side. “And she needs one more skin.”
As Tom flopped back onto his side, he saw the dog midslink down the hill. His face twisted with self-hatred, but he still opened his mouth.
“Take him, then.” He waved his blistered hand in the dog’s direction. “Let me go. I won’t tell her.”
Once a traitor.
The dog bolted down the hill. Long straps of muscle in its back legs and hips burned with the quick flare of exertion. Snow slipped and stones slid underfoot, but the dog had already shifted his footing before it could lose balance.
It had never won a fight with Lachlan. Lachlan had neverenjoyedhis win, but that had never gotten the dog back on its feet faster. It didn’t matter. The past was gone, and the future hadn’t happened to it yet. All that mattered was the wind in the dog’s ears as it lunged, and the howl that escaped Lachlan as the not-quite-wolf-sized hound slammed into him.
The dog tore at Lachlan’s throat, the wolf’s blood sickly sweet as it spilled, until its teeth hooked around his collarbone. Then it shook itself like a terrier with an oversized rat.
Bone snapped, and Lachlan howled again. He managed to grab hold of the dog’s scruff and toss him toward a nearby rock. The dog hit the stone, felt the shock pop of its ribs as they gave, and then nothing as it slid to the ground.
Its legs didn’t want to work. Pain radiated from between its shoulder blades up into its skull.
“Fine,” Lachlan snarled. His T-shirt hung in rags where the dog had torn it. Something was wrong until the shreds of cotton, but the dog couldn’t tell what. “Have it your way. I’ve wanted to cut the fucking pride out of you for years.”
He reached behind him and pulled a knife out of his waistband. Blood was scabbed along the worn blade, clotted around the handle. The dog could still smell the ash wood that stained the old ritual blade under that. It had been in Kath’s kitchen. Danny had seen it.
The dog tried to move again. This time its legs cooperated, or tried to, although they were still numb and clumsy. Pain stitched down its spine to its toes as it scrambled to its feet. Blood—its own? Lachlan’s?—splattered from its mouth as it panted.
“I’d rather you were human for this,” Lachlan said. “I’d make you beg for all the times you shamed me.”
It had been a lot of times. The dog shook its head despite the pain and crouched down. Lachlan was predictable. He always went for the kick to the ribs before he went for the throat.
Blood-smeared teeth flashed in a tight grin as Lachlan lunged forward and slashed the knife across the dog’s face. It caught under its lip and ripped up to its ear in an uneven gash. The edge might have caught the dog’s eye too on the way through, but it was hard to tell as a welter of blood filled its vision on that side.
It burned with an itch that stitched back from the injury, into its skull. The last time it hurt like this, it had stuck its head into a nettle patch. The dog yelped at the pain and latched on to Lachlan’s wrist before he could slice at it again. Its fangs slid between the bones, sawed at the tight hawsers of tendons, and the knife slid from suddenly boneless fingers and dropped into kicked-up, turned-over snow.
Lachlan swore and punched the dog in the side of the head, hard enough that it couldn’t see at all for a second. It hung on, jaws locked and growl strangled by its grip, and Lachlan hit it again. He wrenched backward, and the dog let go. Lachlan sprawled back on his ass in the snow and over Tom’s legs as the dog screamed and Danny pushed himself to his feet.
He sucked in a ragged breath of cold air and regretted it. The cold pinched at the raw cut on his face sent jabs of pain through exposed teeth. It would heal, Danny reminded himself as he reached up to push the flap of skin back into place with the back of his wrist… eventually.
The dog felt too big under his skin as the Wild crested with the moon on the horizon. Danny could feel his bones creak with the need to change, the first dim warning of the pain that resistance could bring.
He’d done that once—his first month at university, hunched in the corner of his room as his bones turned to hot milk and he felt hair grow on theinsideof his skin while he tried to stay human. But this time he hoped the Wild would be more tolerant. It had helped him once against the prophets.
“Where’s the baby?” Danny asked.
Lachlan propped himself on his elbow. The T-shirt hung by the seam on his shoulder, and Danny could see what had looked wrong about Lachlan’s torso. It had been flayed, strips of ginger, freckled flesh peeled off and the holes patched with…. Jack. The scraped-thin rashers of skin were marked with tattooed lines and deep worked dots that Danny remembered from when they were fresh and still sweated ink.
Danny recoiled in unexpected disgust, and Lachlan flushed as he dragged the rags of his shirt back up to cover the patchwork mess he’d been made into.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Lachlan spat as he scrambled to his feet. “She gave me his rank, his strength. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have taken that deal if she’d told you she could make you into a wolf.”
“You were already a wolf,” Danny said.
