The prophets were gathered behind her, around a guttering bonefire. Their hands were thrust into the embers, fingers scorched raw red and swollen with blisters. A handful of soldiers fed the fire with chunks of raw flesh and rolls of salted dog skin that charred and stank as they burned. The rest of the soldiers stood and watched, entranced by the flicker of flames and the black streams of smoke as they rose toward the ceiling.
Gregor glanced around the room as he totted up the scabby hides. Ten prophets. Eleven if Gregor counted the half-dead prophet on the floor, almost strangled by the grip of Jack’s jaws around his throat. There should have been more, even accounting for the ones they’d already killed. Maybe some of them had the good sense to turn coat on Rose and run.
She wasn’t here, nor was the baby. He could smell it. Under the smoke, the honey sweetness of a newborn cut with salt and copper hung in the air, but it was diffuse—a trace the child had left, but no source.
“Where’s the baby?” he asked.
Ailsa laughed raggedly and tossed back a swig of the clear potion. She shuddered and made a bitter face as the taste hit the back of her throat.
“You’re too late,” she said. “Too late for him. Too late for us. It’s time. Kill them.”
Gregor braced himself.
The prophets pulled their hands out of the fire, strings of raw tendons strung around the knuckles, and their bodies crackled and popped as their chests thickened and the wolf crawled up over them. Snarls tore out of their dry vocal cords, and then they tore into the humans around them. Clawed fingers hooked into throats and tore them out and grabbed heads to snap the necks with one quick twist.
And the soldiers lined up for the slaughter, faces open and eager as their blood sizzled on the fire.
The Sannock laughed—a wispy sound that carried on the breath of the wolves’ screams.
“Too late, too late,” they rhymed mockingly. “Everything is too late tonight. Wolves, prophets, and the gods who never came whenwecalled. Too late, we’ll say.”
They surged forward on fast, stolen paws and tore through the prophets and soldiers both. Blood doused the fire, killed the flames, and Gregor and Jack—human and wolf—stood back and watched in silence.
Strange, after everything they’d gone through to get here, but this particular butchery wasn’t for them. That was still to come.
Chapter Twenty-Four—Nick
THE BIRDcould feel Nick’s agitation in the back of its brain—a mix of guilt and anger. It hadn’t told him what the price would be, not until the eye had slipped wet and slippery down their throat.
It had been the Sannocks’ gelt—the blood debt the wolves owed—and not to be bartered down. The bird would admit it hadn’tsavoredthe bite, but its role had been set with the price to be paid… as had this visceral moment, with blood on concrete and the stink of smoke and charred meat in the air.
Nick would have to wait. It was safer. The bird twisted around to strop its beak against its shoulder to clean off the blood. They weren’t done yet.
The Sannock pulled the prophets apart—rags of dry hide pulled away in a shower of scabs and brittle hair and raw flesh peeled away from muscle and bone. They paid for it, but it wasn’t in their pain or their blood. Not this time.
As the prophets fell, fought, or tried to flee, what was left of the soldiers realized this wasn’t the murder they’d agreed to and tried to rally. The man who’d lusted wetly after Nick in the hospital bed, a pair of broken glasses perched on his nose and mangled arm left to dangle by strings of tendon and skin, threw himself between Ailsa and a Sannock wolf.
It ended as such things always did.
The Sannock wolf took him to the ground and ripped his stomach open. It buried its muzzle in his guts, gray fur stained red as ochre, and tore out handfuls of them. The bird blinked, a sliver ofotherflicked over its eyes so it could see, and it watched the thread-thin snakes milked from Loki’s sores spill out of the man along with his stomach. They writhed, translucent and soft, between chunks of half-chewed bread in sticky puddles of bile.
His shredded lungs flapped like ribbons as he tried to inhale to scream, but death took him before he could force the sound out.
The bird boosted itself off its perch and strained its wings to gain some height in the cold, still air. It could feel the press of the ground overhead, the earth’s displeasure at the upending of the way of things. Birds didn’t fly underground, so it was lucky that it was only almost a bird and flew where it liked.
In the past—someplace so far away that the bird could only remember that it remembered them—there had been other things that came for the dead. Battlefields had been glutted, every death a feeding frenzy as they jockeyed for the heady prize.
Not now. Notyet.
Nick shuddered at the correction. The bird ignored him. There was a dead man caught in the air, still tethered to his corpse by a rope of what he’d been and seen and wanted. It wouldn’t last long. The snakes had worked their venom in to soften it and peel off shreds, but long enough.
The crow shot through the dead man. Slivers of him caught in fight-ragged feathers—the taste of coffee, a sunrise, the feel of Nick’s thigh under his hand—and the bird pinched folds of what was left in its beak.
Murder and suicide were what it concerned itself with, and the soldier who’d show his throat to the prophets before the Sannock tore it out was both. What death had wanted to take, the bird spat back into the corpse.
Even the Wild had rules. Even the gods. To walk in mortal skin, you needed a mortal soul. To die, you needed something that knew death… and the Sannock had neither soul nor mortality.
It tasted Nick’s horror for a moment, the flutter of resentment as he realized the Sannock’s game, but it was already done. On the ground, the wolf opened its crimson maw and retched the Sannock, a thing half-formed from memory and mist, into the gore. It squirmed down into the raw meat, pulled the folds of liver and intestine over itself, and opened the corpse’s eyes. Whatever color they’d been before, now they were cobweb gray with silver-steel pupils.
