The Sannock had their own reasons behind this aid, and it wasn’t forgiveness or kindness.
“There’s going to be a price,” the bird said. It hunched Nick’s shoulders and clicked his teeth. “We… regret… that.”
Jack grimaced and glanced at Gregor. Whatever he wanted, he seemed to think he’d gotten it. He took a deep breath, clenched his fists at his sides, and ducked his chin in a grim nod.
“Get on with it.”
Nick shifted into his feathers, a black bird that looked even bigger in the confines of the tunnel than it did in the world outside. Its wings hammered the air and drops of blood splattered over the walls from broken feathers as the Sannock wind swirled around it. The stirred-up mist of blood and ice chill outlined a spindle-long leg here and a tattered wing there, the planes of almost human faces and things that hadn’t even tried.
It turned Gregor’s stomach with a sour, inbuilt bile. He started to look away but caught a glimpse of Jack’s grim face before he could. If Jack could look—had to look—then so would Gregor.
The bird cawed angrily at the Sannock and snapped at them when they got too close. The pinch of its beak ripped shreds of them loose, but they didn’t draw back. With a final, frustrated croak, the bird jabbed its head forward. The pitted white awl of its beak stabbed into Jack’s eye with surgical precision.
Jack yelped and staggered back, his hand clapped to his face although it was too late to do any good. Blood and clearish goop dripped between his fingers and ran down over his knuckles.
It took a moment before Gregor could move. He didn’t know if it was shock or some sort of Sannock magic that froze him in place. Once he could move, he scrambled to Jack’s side and grabbed his arm.
“Let me see,” he said.
“Fuck off,” Jack hissed through clenched teeth as he tried to double over around the pain.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Gregor pulled Jack’s hand down and grimaced at the gory hole where a green eye should be. It was a small favor, but the bird had been precise. The eye was split and ruined, but Jack’s eyelid was intact, and it drooped over the socket when he blinked.
“I guess we don’t look the same anymore,” Jack said. His grin was bitter and crooked, with only one side of his mouth twisted up. “Finally.”
“It’ll grow back,” Gregor pointed out. “Eventually.”
Jack hissed and pressed his hand back to his face. His fingers dug into his brow bone. “It hurts. Why does it hurt so much?”
“More,” the bird croaked ominously from where it had landed on the dead monster. Gregor gave it a bleak look, and it fluffed its feathers at him before it stropped its beak clean on the thing’s ruff. “Soon.”
Gregor jerked Jack’s hand out of the way a second time. In the empty pit of his brother’s eye, ice spread like hoarfrost and the socket filled with a thin, gray sea fog that clotted like cobwebs. It smelled like Sannock.
Behind his back they shrieked with alien glee, and then the cold weight of them washed over Gregor. He felt—teeth rip through his flesh and crack his bones, heard a child scream like its world was over, and a red-haired woman with wolf’s eyes stirred his cock even as she put a knife to it—and then just a bone-deep despair that made his legs weak.
In his arms Jack screamed and convulsed, bent back until it seemed impossible his spine could hold. The wind pushed at his face and pried his eyes open so they could all fit. Behind him the bird screamed at them, furious and loud, and Gregor hung on to his brother.
In seconds the Sannock were done and their bleak, old grudge spread through the Wild. Gregor gagged on it, his mouth suddenly glutted with rancid meat, but it couldn’t touch him any more than the Wild could. There was no wolf left for them to get their teeth into, just a tender scar over a raw pocket of sour resentment. The Sannock filled him to bursting, until he could feel the ache as they crowded the sockets of his teeth. But they couldn’t get hold of him.
They spilled back out of him, into the Wild, and wolves screamed.
Jack was limp in Gregor’s arms. It felt strange. He laid Jack down on the ground and pressed a hand to his shoulder in… gratitude? Apology? He didn’t know.
“Did you have to?” he asked without looking around. He heard the rustle of the bird’s wings as it shrugged and then Nick’s answer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They thought so. The Sannock and the bird.”
Gregor grunted. “They’d know, I suppose.”
“The bird wasn’t surprised,” Nick said. “I think it always knew it would come to this.”
“It’s a god, Nick,” Gregor said. He slapped Jack’s face, one side and then the other. “It might love you, but you can’t trust it.”
Jack’s chest hitched as he sucked in a ragged breath of cold air. He pulled away from Gregor and propped himself on his elbow as he puked up thin bile and sticky shreds of goo.
“Would you have ever forgiven me?” he asked as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve when he was done. “For that?”
