Everyone looked sharply at Nick, even Gregor, suspicion cracked through those sharp, green eyes.
Nick swallowed the pain of that like a stone, like the bird’s bones his gran had pushed down his throat. He started to shake his head, but then he remembered the dead Sannock’s coat on his shoulders and the musky stink of the thing on the moors. He could almost taste it, oily and rank on his tongue as he swallowed.
“The Run-Away Man,” he said.
Gregor grimaced and looked away impatiently as he scrubbed his hand over his face. “It’s not the time for fairy tales.” He looked grim, his face tired and pale under the filth and blood. Nick supposed he’d look the same ifhehad a child that his gran somehow got her hands on. She’d never had any kindness in her. Not—Nick remembered the faded affection, cut with fear, on his grandfather’s face as Ewan talked about Rose—for as long as he’d known her.
“The wolves and the Wall were fairy tales too, to me,” Nick said. “So is the Run-Away Man. I saw him out in the storm with a dead thing on the moors. But… why would Gran have anything to do with him? She was afraid of him, as close as she could get to being afraid.”
He could remember the pinch of her fingers—on his ear, just behind his armpit, on the backs of his thighs—as she made him look at the old picture. So he’d always remember what the Run-Away Man looked like and what he was to do if he ever saw him.
Run. Of all the terrible things his gran had conjured in her stories, that was the only one he was to run from.
“That was then. This is the Wolf Winter,” Danny pointed out. He made a wry face around his torn cheek as he said the words. “Maybe her position on him has changed, or he… he might have. Your Run-Away Man might not be what he once was.”
Danny looked thoughtful as he said that, as though something had occurred to him, but he shook his head when Jack raised a questioning eyebrow at him. He was pale, except for the shiny flush of infection on his cheek, and once Jack nodded at him, he slouched back down into his dog. It flopped onto the ground, stretched out so as much of its skin touched the cold floor as possible, and panted.
“Fine. I don’t care who he is, or what he was,” Jack said. “Is Rose there? Is that where we’ll find her?”
The Sannock shrugged. “If you run.” They traded another shorthand conversation in a look. It ended with a nod from a woman, her hair black at the ends and almost translucent at the roots as if she’d run in the wash. “If we help.”
“And the cost?” Gregor asked cynically. “Another eye?”
“Peace,” the Sannock said. “You take your wolves down over your wall, and you forget we breathe and walk again on this world’s dirt.”
It would have been an easy “done” from Nick. He’d learned not to love anywhere he lived as a kid, bounced from placement to placement. Where Gregor went, he’d follow.
He expected it to be harder for the wolves, who’d called this their place for centuries.
“Done,” Jack and Gregor said in unison, their voices overlapping almost perfectly.
They glanced sharply at each other, and Gregor shrugged his surrender before he stepped back to cede authority to his brother. He took Nick’s hand and squeezed it roughly as they waited, cold blood-slick fingers tangled together. It meant something, Nick was too tired to work out what or hold a grudge against that flash of doubt. He leaned against Gregor and slouched down to rest his chin on his shoulder.
“Any wolf that follows me leaves Scotland,” Jack said. “Any wolf that doesn’t, that’s up to you, but my Pack won’t avenge them.”
A snarl echoed from a few of the wolves in shocked protest. A few of the most recovered pulled their skin on, pale and clammy with the effort of it, and found the words to disagree.
“This is our land!”
“The prophecies said we’d go down over the Wall to reclaim the whole island, not that we’d lose our home.”
“We killed them once, we can do it again.”
“Should we even try to stop her?” It was James’s protest, his voice thick and congested, that silenced the others. He braced himself against the wall as he pulled himself to his feet. Scars, faded but not yet gone, laced his leg where Kath had shredded it, and he looked smaller somehow. The Sannock couldn’t touch his bones, but they seemed to have culled some of the bulk from his muscles and the fat from under his skin. “Fenrir rises. Isn’t that what we want? Isn’t that what we’ve spent the last centuries here to wait for? So what if it is early? So what if this sackcloth-and-skin bitch does it for us? Once Fenrir is here, we won’t need a Numitor anymore. We won’t give one green blade of what is ours to these freaks. And what is the life of one child compared to that? How many of us have lost children? How many have had their get sent away if they weren’t strong enough, weren’t good enough? We’ve all sacrificed, except the Old Man’s sons. Let them bleed for the Pack. Then maybe Fenrir will let them run with us.”
As they listened to him speak, a few of the wolves nodded slowly in agreement. Others refused to look at Jack and Gregor, faces turned away and ears flat on those still in their fur.
“Idiots,” Gregor said. He cast a scathing look around the room. “You think that Fenrir will be grateful for this? That he’ll think a change of chains is as good as a rest? Would you?”
“And we should take your word that Rose is evil?” James spat out. “Maybe all she wants is for us to have the Wolf Winter we were promised. More than you seem to want.”
“Go fuck yourself, James,” Gregor said. “If you’re too scared to face down an old woman, just admit it.”
James shoved himself off the wall and took an unsteady step forward, his fists knotted. Before he could go any farther, Danny, back on his paws, shot in front of him. The dog’s thick ruff was matted with blood, and the thready nasal growl that squeezed out of him sounded dangerous. He waited until James spat on the floor and loosened his fists. Then the dog backed up cautiously to take up position next to Gregor.
“I’d say the dog was smarter than you, James, but that wouldn’t be news,” Jack said. He picked a scab of blood out of the corner of his ruined eye and flicked it away. “Do what you want, what you can live with, but since when does a wolf lie to itself? Rose has stolen and murdered our children, maimed our wolves, and defiled our dead. Yet you’ll stand here and say she did it for our own good? The Scottish Pack will live or die with my brother and me, because anyone who stays here because they buy that? They aren’t wolves. They’re just humans with a fur coat.”
“Are we to die for the Pack?” Ellie asked. “Or because a dog wants it? Prove you’re our Numitor, Jack. Take me as your mate—name any wolf as it—and we’ll follow you to Surtr’s door. He’s a dog. Love him if you want, but he’s not pack. Not really.”
