Gregor scowled and stepped away from the dead thing behind him. “From me?” he asked. “They can have anything but you.”
“Not you,” Nick said. He scratched the back of his neck and corrected himself. “Notjustyou.”
“Then what?” Jack asked. He braced one hand on the wall as he pushed himself up. Even with his wolf and the hot pulse of the Wild, he held himself carefully. One leg wasn’t quite ready to bear his weight. “What do they want?”
Nick blinked and his eyes shone with the bird’s bright wickedness. “Permission.”
It was obviously a trap. But—Gregor glanced at Jack and raised an eyebrow—it wasn’t as though there were a lot of options. The monsters could be killed, but if they didn’t find the prophets, then this was just another waypoint to the next atrocity.
“Fuck it,” Jack said. “Tell them to go on. Do it. The Numitor gives his leave.”
The flicker of anger on Nick’s face caught Gregor off guard for a second. Then it recognized it wasn’t Nick’s expression.
“They don’t need words,” Nick said precisely. “They need you to let them back in, the same way you locked them out.”
“That was Da.”
Nick twitched and glanced irritably at something next to him. This time Gregor could almost see it too—a hit of soft, greasy flesh and dry scoops of old injuries where fillets had been carved from it—but he turned away. If he didn’t have to look at the Sannock, he wouldn’t. They’d killed Nick once, tried to kill Gregor, and he couldn’t even blame them for it, since he saw the charnel house his kind had made of the Sannocks’ last hiding place.
The things should still have tried harder at death. Whatever peace Nick had made with them, Gregor didn’t share in it.
“They don’t… understand the difference,” Nick said. “So you’re good enough. They want to be free, but the only way is the same way they left the world. Through a wolf. Any wolf.”
Jack recoiled.
“The Pack would never agree,” he said.
“They don’t need to,” Gregor said. He shrugged when Jack looked at him. “You’re Numitor now. You speak for the Pack. If they don’t like your decisions, maybe they shouldn’t have been so quick to acclaim you.”
Gregor managed to keep his voice steady, but despite everything, the words tasted like bile on his tongue. Acceptance he had—without a wolf he’d never lead the Pack—but that didn’t mean he liked it.
“I can’t do that,” Jack said. He raked his hand through his hair, blood and scraps of skin matted into the curls. “They’d never forgive me. I might be Numitor, but I’d be the first with no wolves at my heels. No.”
Nick tilted his head slightly. “If you want your help, then you will.”
“We don’t,” Jack said. He spat on the bloody corpse of the old monster. “The prophets are here somewhere. We’ve torn down or burned every other lair they had. So we kill their monsters, and if we don’t find the prophets, then we wall them up in here to starve. Seal the Wild to them, the same way they did the Sannock.”
Nick took a deep breath, and it misted around his lips as he exhaled, as though the chill of winter had abruptly deepened.
“Last chance,” he said, voice thick with the crow’s rasp. “They won’t ask again.”
Three times. The old stories had the Sannock obsessed with rituals, with numbers and rules. If they said this was the last chance, it wasn’t something they’d revoke.
“Will Danny forgive you?” Gregor interrupted Jack before he could refuse again. He slipped the emotional knife between Jack’s ribs to find the tender part of his heart and then twisted. “If you let Rose get away again? After she tortured him and killed his ma? When she gutted his little sister like a fish and left her for him to find? If we don’t kill Rose, he will or die trying.”
For once Gregor didn’t take any pleasure in the flash of frustrated anger that twisted Jack’s face. They’d vied their whole lives to be Numitor, to be the one the Pack said was real and not the shadow. If Gregor were Jack, he would have tried to make the same choice.
But Gregor was just a man without a wolf or a child. He didn’t have the right to understand his brother’s hesitation.
Jack glared at him. “Since when do you care about Danny?’ he asked. “Or who I value? If you want the Sannocks’ help, Gregor, why don’t you bend over for them?”
“I would,” Gregor said. That might not be true, but what he said next was. “Except you’re the Numitor. You’re the one they need. Da never cared who loved him, Jack. Not even with us.”
Jack closed his eyes and took a quick, angry breath.
“Do it,” he said. “Whatever you need to do. Take whatever you need to take, but you do lasting harm to one of my people? I’ll find a way to kill you better than those old wolves did.”
For once the cold wind that blasted around them was nothing to do with the Winter. It was stale with old salt and older blood and full of muttered anger and hatred. The intensity of it prickled Gregor’s skin with goose bumps and an instinctive fear of what strange thing lurked in the dark. It was all the stronger for the knowledge that, for most people, Gregor was the thing to be afraid of.
