Gregor squeezed his shoulder. “I never forgave you for being born,” he said. “Not the man to ask.”
The sounds of agony bounced through the cold, concrete halls. Jack shuddered and used Gregor to scramble to his feet. He wiped under his eye gingerly with the back of his wrist. It mostly just smeared the goo. Nick grimaced at the mess and guiltily disappeared back under his feathers.
“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s go see what I’ve let loose.”
Chapter Twenty-Three—Gregor
THE BIRDled the way down into long, empty boxes of concrete in short, careful hops that cosseted its injured wing. It had been supplies, from the look of the boxes and packaging, and storage for things that humanity had thought precious.
Gregor stepped over a broken gold frame. Scraps of canvas still hung in the corners, thick with paint, but he couldn’t identify what it had been. Even if it had been whole, he’d have probably drawn a blank. Jack, shifted into his wolfskin, followed. The fur around his eye was dark and spiked with blood.
There were the dead too—monsters torn to shreds, deformed faces oddly human in the surprise of death. Two soldiers in Kevlar, armed with rifles, who were propped against each other as their bodies melted and dripped like colored ice.
The farther down they went, the colder it got. Gregor’s breath steamed, and he could feel the pressure of the cold in his chest with each breath.
“If you’re leading us into a trap,” Gregor grumbled at the bird, “you could have killed us up there and saved us the trek.”
It gave him a reproachful look over its wing, as though Jack’s blood wasn’t still caught in the pits on its beak. One last clumsy flight ended with it perched on top of a stack of broken boxes. It twisted its head around to preen its wing, the beak that had just taken out Jack’s eye oddly delicate as the bird plucked broken feathers.
The wolves slunk around the corner. Gregor felt what it was like to prey, a chill clutch at his heart and the sour pop of adrenaline in his veins. Next to him Jack flattened his ears and his thready, uneasy growl caught in his throat.
Gregor knew every wolf in the Pack that faced them, but he didn’trecognizethem. Milky films covered their eyes from one corner to the other and matted thick winter coats down to their skin. Their shadows, cast in stark relief by the fluorescent lights, writhed and squirmed in a jittery transformation from wolf to… something else. Thin gray horns sprouted on one shadow, branched like a stag, and another stretched out long, spindly limbs—too many of them for a wolf—before they snapped back to four.
The Sannock in Ellie’s skin staggered forward. It wasn’t clumsy, but it tried to crawl when the wolf wanted to walk. Gregor couldfeelit through the Wild, like a taut line hooked through his gut. He wouldn’t have called the faded, dusty emotion that touched him enjoyment, but the Sannock took satisfaction in their discomfort.
It opened its jaws, and Ellie screamed—a wolf’s scream, high and terrible in a way that nothing else was. The Sannock spoke through the noise.
“Once upon a time you couldn’t wait to have us in you,” he singsonged. The voice was clear but somehow sounded like it came from a long way away. “Chewed us off our own bones you were so. Eager.”
“Yeah, well,” Gregor said. “Done is done. You told Nick that you’d help us.”
Ellie’s head ticked to the side to stare at the bird. Her neck popped like knuckles with the force of the movement.
“We did,” it said. “Maybe we lied.”
“Stories say you can’t.”
It somehow managed to shrug like a man with a wolf’s shoulders. It was a disturbing motion. “Stories lie. That’s what they are for. We might have lied to it, but we made a deal with you. Oaths aren’t stories. They’re true. We can help. We will help. After we get the skins we take tonight.”
Jack snarled and took a step forward. Before he could take another, Gregor reached down and hauled him by the scruff.
“Not those skins,” Gregor said. “You get out of the wolves.”
The Sannock tried to spit but was thwarted by Ellie’s muzzle. “We want to live again. To learn todie, so we can go. We tolerate your hides for that, but we’d rather linger in the shade forever than live in your hungry flesh. Even if we could bear the shame, there’s no room.”
“I get my child,” Gregor said. “We get Rose’s throat. Anything else is yours.”
The Sannock smiled. It wasn’t a friendly expression, stretched over a wolf’s muzzle, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“Deal,” it said. “May you live to regret it.”
Gregor shrugged. “Wolves don’t waste time on regret,” he said. “If you double-cross us, we’ll make sure the Sannock have all the time in the shade to dwell on yours.”
The Sannock bobbed its nose in a nod. “Follow.”
It turned and ran. The rest of the Pack fell in behind it, almost as smoothly as when the wolves were in charge of their own paws. There was still something alien about how uniform each step was and the perfectly aligned noses.
Jack pulled away from Gregor and watched them go. Then he whined softly under his breath and looked up at Gregor with a worried expression in his last green eye. Gregor knew what he’d noticed—the one face not in the furry crowd.
