“He’s a dog, not a wolf,” Gregor said. “You couldn’t hand him over to the Sannock if you wanted. If he were dead, we’d have seen him already. If Rose has him, we get him back.”
Jack shuddered from nose to tail, but he had to accept it. There was nothing else they could do.
The Prophets had left monsters to guard their last stand—four gaunt things, bones stretched out like greyhounds and stitched together with heavy, raw lumps of muscle that split their thin skin, and one who looked almost human. Her face was a caul of swollen bone, bloodshot eyes sunken deep and full of rheum, but she still stood up straight, and her hands worked well enough for a gun.
Barely.
The first splatter of gunfire just grazed the leading edge of the Sannock wolves. It scored a raw line across a black wolf’s shoulder and took a nick out of his ear. The red wolf next to him was unluckier. They caught a bullet to the leg, and it shattered like a stick. The Sannock didn’t care. It ran on splinters and ragged flesh. In eerie silence.
Jack shuddered at the offense of it but threw himself into the fight.
The gaunt monsters took point and tore into the Sannock wolves as the Pack surrounded them. Thin, bony muzzles, the skin peeled back from the jut of raw gums like a glove, snapped at the press of fur and muscle that eddied around them to snatch wolves up and shake them like rats. Clawed paws, fingers braided together and their nails thick and yellow where they poked from the raw beds, tore through shoulders and slapped unlucky wolves to the ground or into the wall.
It didn’t even slow the Sannock. They didn’t need a moment to shake the ringing from their ears or let the Wild knit their bodies back together. They just picked themselves up and slunk back into the fight with teeth that slowed the monster’s healing when they sank down to bone. Infected flesh withered and dried into creased, stained leather.
Jack dodged between the Sannock and harried the gaunt monsters. He took a chunk from one’s thigh, meat and gristle torn from the bone, and lunged in to tear at the stretched-out point of an ear when the monster went for a wolf. In the middle of the fight, he looked, somehow, more vivid than the other wolves, as though what had taken up residence in them had faded them down. Gregor grimly stuck to his heels and watched his back. The Sannock might be their allies right now, but they’d hated the wolves for as long as there hadbeena Scottish Pack.
One of the monsters swung its head around. It had eyebrows, thin and black, that arched over the distorted orbits of its eyes. Twisted as the things were, sometimes the most grotesque part was the shreds of who they’d been. Gregor dodged as it swung its head like a hammer. His foot slipped on the gore that splattered the floor, and his knee twisted as he went down. The slip saved him, and he only had to absorb part of the impact. He sucked in a breath and let the disgusted rage wash the pain away as he pulled his knee back to kick the monster in the throat.
It squalled and reared back, throat bulged out like a frog’s around the shattered trachea. One of the Sannock leaped for it and hit it in the chest. It staggered backward, and they toppled over, tangled around each other as they scrapped and clawed.
Gregor scrambled to his feet and threw himself back into the fight.
The almost-human monster had backed up to guard the door. She squinted around the bony jut of her own sockets and strafed the room with a volley of bullets, careless of whether they punched through wolves or her own allies. Gregor swore and hit the ground again, his ears ringing. Two wolves caught bullets to the head and dropped like a stone, the mist gone from their eyes. Maybe they could have gotten up again, probably not, but maybe. Instead the monsters tore them apart and spat out the remains.
The Sannock seeped out of the dead, shrugged the corpses off their hollow shoulders like old coats, and drifted back into the fight. They couldn’t deal out the same damage, but they sucked the breath from the monsters’ mouths and pinched their ears with thin, grave-filthy fingers.
Gregor cursed under his breath—he’d rather the Sannock died and the wolves got up—and got his elbows under him. His chest ached from the hard landing on the ground, and it took him a second to catch his breath. He forced the pain down and scrambled up. If the body count of Jack’s deal got too high, then Jack would be useless. To Gregor. To the Pack.
The monster fumbled the gun back up toward her shoulders. Her head was turned toward Jack, his tawny fur easy to pick out from the faded wolves, and the curve of her cheekbones blocked her peripheral vision. Gregor took a breath—his lungs cramped around the chill of it—and darted toward her. He jumped over the Sannock who got in his way and dodged the snake-like strikes of the monsters who saw him pass. Mostly dodged. Blood dripped down his arm from a bloody gash in his shoulder.
One of the monsters loomed up in front of him, dappled gray and liver with raised, wrinkled moles, and screamed at him. One of the disembodied Sannock hung from its throat, fingers worked in deep under the skin, and another had its teeth buried in the thing’s loose breasts. Its attention was on Gregor.
He put his head down and made straight for it. At the last second, he went down on the floor—slick enough to take his feet from under him earlier—and skidded between the thing’s legs. It nearly knocked itself out on the ground as it tried to chase him between its own ankles. One of the Sannock darted in as it was occupied and tore open the taut skin of its neck.
Gregor rolled to his feet on the other side. The muzzle of the gun was pointed directly at him, the monster’s scab-ringed eyes focused on him. Twelve feet of empty ground stretched out between them, and experience told Gregor that he couldn’t cover it in time, not on two legs.
He went for it anyhow, with a staggered lunge across the distance. The Wild that stung under his skin might not be able to find what it needed to turn him, but given something to do, it cooled the ache in his joints and flooded him with the quick, endless adrenaline of the moon hunt, when he could run forever, tireless and fast as the wind.
He covered two-thirds of the ground before the monster could react. It still wasn’t going to be enough. The monster tightened its finger, and Gregor, his hearing sharpened by the Wild until he could hear the pulse of the thing’s blood in its throat, caught the click as something engaged.
The world slowed down. Gregor skinned his lips back in one last frustrated snarl. He could accept death, but it stuck in his throat to fail.
The black bird crashed into the side of the monster’s head. Sharp talons scraped on the skull and worked gouges down into the bone, and the thick, carved beak cracked it open like a nut.
Gregor supposed that was what that awl of a thing was meant to do.
A squawk escaped the monster as she jerked the gun up as it fired. A single bullet sang by Gregor’s ear, and the rest stitched over the ceiling. Splinters of concrete and dust rained down, and the square box creaked around him.
“Nick,” Gregor yelled. “Move.”
Black wings curved and the bird pushed off with a croak and a splatter of blood drops. It was well-timed. The bird was just clear as Gregor slammed into the monster. He grabbed the gun, metal hot against his palms, and slammed it up into the monster’s face. It staggered backward briefly and then swung him around to slam into the door.
It rang like an untuned bell.
The monster dropped the gun and grabbed Gregor’s head. Her fingers wrapped almost all the way around, and it felt like a vise when she squeezed. The sharp tips of her thumbnails dug into Gregor’s eyelids like knives. Her mouth, lips shredded by a lamprey excess of teeth, writhed with the effort of speech.
“Mek yo’ uglee,” she slurred. The scabs around her eyes cracked as she narrowed them. “Mek it stick whatever yo’ do.”
