The doghurt, but it ran anyhow. Long legs boosted it through the now-thick snowfall in a brutal gallop that ate up the ground. Each time its paws hit the ground, pain jarred up through its bones to its ears and its blood felt too hot. But it left Lachlan behind, curses tossed after it into the dark.
“Run, then,” Lachlan yelled. He sounded afraid. “It’s too late for the brat! It’s too late for all you fuckers. She won’t stop now, and you’ll all bend the neck.”
Chapter Twenty-Two—Gregor
BLOOD SPLASHEDthe institutionally gray walls as Gregor used the butt of his stolen gun to hammer at the thick-domed skull of a monster’s head until it went limp. The impact jarred up his arm into his shoulder, and there was something viscerally satisfying about it. He had to force himself to stop, sweat itchy on the back of his neck and his mouth dry as he panted raggedly.
The prophet’s handmade wolves smelledwrongin that way that made Gregor want to scrape them out of existence. They healed efficiently enough that they needed to be.
Sprawled out on the floor in a puddle of its own blood and liquids, the half-made monster twitched as its body tried to string itself back together. Gregor put his boot down on the back of its neck and bent down to grab the gray strings of hair it had left. One sharp yank popped the spine and it went limp. The acrid smell of death seeped out of its pores.
He straightened up and tried not to groan. His leg burned with each step and teased his nose with the sour smell of the wound. More than that, he wastired. His muscles ached from the run, from the fight, and his joints felt gritty.
It wasn’t new. This was life without a wolf. Like any other pain, it was something to endure and ignore. But he’d already been hurt and sore when they set the Old Man’s house on fire, already down to the fumes of what he had left. Now he could feel himself slow down, the strength sapped from his muscles as he fought. The moon hung fat and smug in the sky outside, and his gut ached as the Wild soured and clotted where the wolf should be.
His brother’s dog was probably more use in a fight. At least Danny had a lifetime to get used to his limitations. Gregor closed his eyes for long enough to take a deep breath and think about giving up. It would be easy, but the cobweb idea of it shriveled to nothing under the weight of obligation.
And guilt.
He didn’t love the baby the fucking prophets had cut out of Bron. It wasn’t like his daughter—his first dead child—whose heartbeat he’d listened to through her ma’s belly. Gregor had time with her to let his sticky satisfaction at being the first to sire a child turn into something… better. He’d never found it easy. Love. Except with Nick.
Bron’s child had doorstepped him. It felt like a trap, the universe’s pitfall if Gregor let his heart soften. But it was stillhis, and that was why Rose had sent her curs to cut the wee thing out of its ma’s stomach. He owed it to the child and to Bron to take it home.
Gregor spat on the corpse at his feet and limped away from it. His own limitations would have to wait. Today wasn’t the day to accept them. He pushed into a loping run and followed the sound of fighting down.
It was always down.
The bunker was a rabbit warren of sunken concrete boxes connected by a plumber’s nightmare of pipes and junctions. Scents stuck like oil to the cheap paints that plastered the walls, sound bounced off high ceilings and doubled back on itself, and the open doors had let Winter in. The floors were slippery with a thin rime of frost, and the vents rattled and groaned as they were blocked with ice.
Halfway down the tunnel, Jack was thrown out of a door and bounced off a wall. The huge wolf grunted at impact as it landed on the ground, green eyes unfocused as Jack tried to remember how to breathe. Gregor backed up and leaned against the door frame to wait.
His breath was tight in his throat, like it still needed to pant, but he kept it steady.
The monster shouldered through the doorway, clumsy on thick-knuckled paws. A fat round skull swelled out of a puff of dandelion-white hair that clung to the back of its head and to the ends of its stretched-out, flopped-over hound ears. Its skin was furrowed in thick, scaled creases down the back of its neck and into the grotesque hump of his shoulders. The pads of fat and muscle had been ripped open, and strips of tallow-laced raw meat hung from its back as it swaggered forward.
It was one of the ones that Rose had brought with her, hardened as they dragged it up along the coastline. The frantic elasticity of the first change had faded, and its shape had set like a bone. It made it easier to kill—not easy, but easier—and harder to fight.
Jack staggered to his feet. One ear was torn, folded down against his skull, and blood was crusted around his nose. He dropped his head down, sharp shoulder blades hunch-raised and bloody ruff spiked out, and growled thin and high in his nose.
The monster wheezed out something, the sound half-strangled in the loose fat of its throat, and wrinkled liver-dark lips back like a chimp. It didn’t have teeth, but ulcerated gums peeled back from a ridge of serrated chipped bone. Shreds of meat and hair were caught in the gaps and cracks.
It lurched forward, and Gregor raised the stolen gun in both hands and brought it down like a post-hole digger into stony ground. The barrel of the gun wasn’t sharpened, but Jack had already split the calloused hide. All Gregor had to do was punch down through raw meat and hawser-thick spine. The monster shrieked and reared back… or tried to. Its forequarters were so thickly overmuscled that the scrawny back end—a drapery of loose, crepey skin hung from wasted thighs—couldn’t quite lift it.
Gregor braced a foot against the thing’s muscle-larded ribs and wrenched at the gun to twist it in the wound. Vertebrae cracked against the cast metal, and fresh blood welled up dark and red as veins split open.
The monster managed to twist around enough to fix Gregor with a pus-scabbed, milky-blue eye. Its tongue, cut to thin, cured-meat ribbons against the bony ridges on its gums, curled and fluttered.
“… it ’urts,” it said mournfully.
“Good,” Gregor said as he twisted the gun to drive it deeper.
It was a sham of a thing, repulsive despite its best efforts to find the shape of a wolf in a human’s bones. Probably it hadn’t volunteered. It just had the bad luck to survive the prophet’s bite. Gregor didn’t deny that; he just didn’t care. Pity was a hobble in a fight. He didn’t ask for it from anyone and wouldn’t give it away either.
Anger twisted the monster’s face up, deep, chafed wrinkles red and clotted with dry white pus, and it flung itself around it in a furious attempt to get hold of Gregor. He grabbed the exposed, bloody blade of its shoulder for balance, the surface rough against his fingertips, and hung on. His booted feet scraped over the floor as he dodged the stamp of the monster’s thick, clubbed feet.
Around the swollen bulk of its chest, he could see Jack as his brother harried it to keep its attention. Jack took a chunk out of a forearm turned muscle-bound, bowed front leg and latched on to the end of its muzzle.
The monster rattled out a tea-kettle sound of pain and shook its head violently from side to side. It managed to lift Jack off his feet and flail him about until it smacked him down against the concrete. Jack’s paws slid out from under him, and he went down hard. Without him to run interference, the monster turned its attention to Gregor. It twisted around to snap at him, but it couldn’t reach.
