by TA Moore
“Don’t suppose you have any shoes?” he joked nervously.
For a second, as the Sannock swung that heavy, horned head around to stare directly at him, Nick thought he’d misstepped. Then a smile cracked slowly across the Sannock’s face, dry and stiff as its muscles and flesh tried to remember how it was done. The Sannock shook his head, the spread of horns tangled through the dry, rattled branches of the hawthorn, and stamped a hoof three times against the ground to make its point.
“I don’t know what you want,” Nick said.
The Sannock ducked his head and bent at the knees to untangle himself from the tree. Once he was loose, he turned his back on Nick and faded into the storm, the bloodless lines of him lost in the snow. After a thoughtful beat, the other Sannock faded away too, the taut expectation that strung the moment gone with them.
Last to leave was the dog and a golem of burned sticks and moss in the shape of a child. Two sets of empty eyes—one full of guttered candles and the other scraped down to green sap—studied him. The golem lifted a small hand—someone had gone to the trouble to craft it knucklebones, neat and stitched together with moss tendons—and pointed into the storm.
You will.
It wasn’t a voice. There weren’t even words, just an understanding that washed over Nick. He stumbled, shuddered, and looked away. When he looked back, they were gone.
In his soul the bird clicked in its throat and filled Nick with the affronted urge to preen. He caught himself as he pulled the coat straight over his shoulders and adjusted the worn cuffs. The buttons, he realized as he grazed his fingers over them, were dry bone. Glimpses of an old, old life flickered through his head, sucked up through the rough surface.
Dirt. A woman’s ass. Dirt. A smile on rich red lips the bones would follow anywhere.
And he had, Nick supposed as he pulled his hand away from the button. Or at least he’d followed them to his end….
The bird didn’t like it. It didn’t like the gift or the smell of the Sannock that lingered in the air or that they wanted something from… one of them. The doctor or the bird. Neither option felt good.
“I thought the dead were what you were for,” Nick said. Despite the greasy feel of the coat—and the idea he refused to dwell on that the layered, scratchy weave might not be from a sheep—he pulled it closed across his chest. He made a sour face at the thought he couldn’t quite shift or the memory of some of the things he’d eaten since the bird brought him back. “I know corpses don’t trouble you.”
The bird was sullen, bleak, and blackly unresponsive, like a stone jammed uncomfortably into him. He started to walk, and his feet hurt. By this point they probably shouldn’t if he was going to die of the cold.
What was it Gregor had told him?
“You feel the cold,” he heard Gregor’s harsh voice for a second, brusque, as though he resented being pushed to explain something so simple. But he’d pulled Nick close to keep him warm, rubbed his back with strong, warm hands. “You just don’t have to mind it.”
It was easier said than done. The bird could do it, but Nick didn’t have the knack. His feet stung with each step, the bones sore as they stiffened and ached. Despite how soft the snow looked, it was rough under his soles, gritty and full of sharp, frozen chunks.
Halfway down the hill, the sharp, feathery anger that shared his head faded away into the dregs of something uncomfortable. Or unhappy.
Some things, Nick’s brain thought without any instruction from him as his hitchhiker gave in, aren’t meant to be dead. They don’t have the knack for it, the staying power to stick to it.
Nick glanced down at the stiff, strange coat that still felt warm against his back. The real version of it, the original, had probably been buried or burned with its owner hundreds of years before. The wolves who’d slaughtered the Sannock for their magic hadn’t left much of them, just butchered meat and blood. If they could make this real….
He stumbled to a halt as his skin crawled. Only the thought of what might take offense in the storm stopped him ripping the coat off his back. He breathed through the revulsion and reminded himself of how cold he’d been without it. His balls still tried to squash themselves back up inside him.
Nick couldn’t blame them. He pushed himself back into motion, but he had to take awkward, high-stepped strides to make progress, his body angled into the wind as it pushed him back and his thighs and ass tight and sore after a few yards.
Or a bit more than a few, he realized as he stumbled over the crest of a hill and into a low stone wall. Even if it wasn’t as the crow flew, he should have been back to the wolves’ town. The pitched roofs and matchstick chimneys he’d focused on resolved themselves into a rough-edged green hillock decorated with precariously stacked, narrow towers of slate and granite.
The bird shuddered, a feathery itch against his brain stem, and thought he was lucky that was all he saw. As they walked, it let Nick sneak a glimpse at what it saw—spires of old yellow bones stitched together with cords of dry sinew. A strung fence of unraveled tendons and nerves, brittle from the cold that silvered them, and inside it… something huge, damp, and moldered.
“What is it?” Nick asked as he drew closer. He was vaguely aware he shouldn’t want to approach it, that the smart thing to do was turn and run, but he still climbed up the hill.
The bird didn’t know what it was. It was also lying.
The stink of rotted flesh hung sour and sick in the air, and bile stung the back of Nick’s throat as the bird made him hungry.
Carrion, Nick supposed for a second, another dead thing.
Except corpses, even the wet, restless bones that crawled through the corners of Nick’s world, didn’t steam like an overworked horse in the cold. And corpses smelled of rot or nothing in the cold, not that sugary, yeasty stink of infection and fever.
Nick reached out toward the brittle wires of flesh, but he hesitated, his fingers trembling, and the bird closed its eyes. He was left flat-footed in the snow, hand outstretched to pluck thin air. Whatever had been caged in the center of the stones was gone. In its place was a long, carved stone mounted on top of a low, rocky cairn half-covered with dirt and grass under the snow. Someone had left a bright red coat draped over the stone, the thick wool stiff with ice and welded to the granite. If Nick went inside, he supposed he’d find a sweater as well, or a shed pair of shoes left where they’d fallen in the snow. Then, somewhere in the dark, a cold, naked body curled up in the snow where they’d dropped once delirium couldn’t take them any farther.
The cairn had probably seemed like shelter when the owner of the coat found it. Now it was serving double duty as a tomb.
“Enough,” he said as he turned away from the stones. He squinted into the snow that blew in flurries and tangles around him. The cottages, roofs humped high with snow, had been difficult to pick out from the landscape, but he should have been able to see the big farmhouse, at least. Nothing. He’d gone the wrong way. “Whatever point you wanted to make, it’s made. I need to get back to Gregor.”
He reached for wings, and they were pulled away from him again. There was no reason why, but there didn’t need to be. The wolves might change their skin at will, but Nick needed the bird’s help. It didn’t need his. Today it thought he needed to stay grounded, although it didn’t share why.
Panic scratched at the back of Nick’s throat. His head was full of the clammy memory of the first time he’d met Gregor, the bloody ruin that the prophets had left of him. Nick had felt Gregor’s wet flesh and the pulse of blood between his fingers as he tried to keep the wolf alive. He’d known he was going to fail. That had been hard enough then, before Gregor had a name and before Nick had fallen in love with him.
In the back of his head the bird got distracted—briefly—as it dipped its beak in the memory. It knew, they knew, how Gregor tasted—his mouth, his skin, his cock—but it wanted this bit of the wolf too.
“Salt and copper,” Nick told it shortly. “The same as a cow or
a dog.”
The bird didn’t bother to argue. They both knew Nick was lying. Even before he’d had his feathered hitchhiker, warm blood had unsettled him with the sense of something potent and electric in it. That was why he’d been a pathologist, not a surgeon.
It had been easier to remember he wasn’t crazy when he avoided the crazy things.
Nick raised his hands and exhaled onto them. His breath made the cold skin sting, the web between his fingers pinched with pain, and thunder grumbled overhead.
He hadn’t been an outdoorsman either. The closest thing to the countryside he’d seen before he was twenty had been a scabby local park where the drug dealers—only a few years older than him, and then a few years younger—hogged the swings. If the bird wasn’t going to help, Nick wouldn’t find his way back to the wolves tonight. Not in the dark in a storm.
“He’ll be fine,” he told himself, the words stripped from his lips by the wind. “They don’t lock someone up if they’re going to kill them.”
The bird didn’t agree, but it wasn’t going to take flight either. Not now. Not here.
Nick tried to put the memory of bloody, frozen strips of skin out of his head as he stepped past the narrow towers. His feet found gravel under the snow, the curve of an old path, and slicked his feet as he edged toward the cairn.
Something howled. Or… didn’t, Nick realized as he spun to find the source of the noise. The back of his neck prickled in reaction to the almost-sound, and his heart pumped harder as adrenaline made him shudder. He licked dry lips and reached up mindlessly for his gran’s pendant, the twist of iron that had hid the truth from him for so long. He’d left it back in Girvan, but sometimes he missed being able to lie to himself.
A dog with no… dog in it—just the skin draped over something that remembered the shape it was meant to have—leaped between the stone towers and raced toward him. Snow flew up from under its paws, but it left no tracks behind it.
It howled a throaty bell of alarm as it headed for him. Nick stumbled to the side, out of the way, but it never reached him.
Something else—someone else, because it looked like a man even if it ran on all fours—burst out of the cairn and caught up with the skin dog before it got more than a few yards. A big hand scruffed the black skin, flayed hide pulled up in clumsy, fatty folds, and ripped it off the dog underneath. With nothing to animate it, the skin went limp in the man’s fist, blown backward in the wind while the dog faded away. Nick could still hear its aggrieved bark in his head, echoed as though it came from somewhere very far away.
The man sniffed the skin for a second and then tossed it away as he lost interest. He was massive, built like a bull with thick shoulders and layers of muscle under a dense fuzz of gray bristles. Salt-and-pepper hair hung around his face, tangled around chunks of ice and snow. Under the coat of fur, Nick could see thin red patches on the man’s hands and on his cramped legs, where the skin had frozen, peeled, and healed over torn muscles.
Nick stumbled back a step. The crunch of his foot against the ice brought the man’s head swinging around. Under the unruly bangs, his eyes were bright mindless yellow, and slaver dripped in wet, sticky strands from the corners of his mouth. The man peeled his lips back from broken shards of teeth, shreds of meat and hide caught between them, and growled.
That wasn’t what made Nick take another step backward, a whimper caught in his closed throat. It was the face.
The Run-Away Man.
His gran had told him a lot of scary stories when he was a child, and the Run-Away Man was the star of a lot of them. The stories had all ended the same way, as his gran pinched his arm or thigh and demanded, “And what do you do when you see the Run-Away Man?”
Nick licked cracked lips as he took another step back. Panic tasted like a split lip, blood on the back of his tongue, and filled his hand with the blind, unthinking terror of his dreams. It even infected the bird, cold and insidious as it spilled over the graft that joined them. It filled his head with the batter of frantic wings and angry knock-sharp caws.
The man prowled forward, still on all fours as though he’d forgotten how to walk, and that low, dangerous growl dribbled out of his slack mouth along with his spit. There was something there that Nick needed to see, he could feel it, but there was no room for it in the panic-static that filled his brain.
There was only one thing to do when you saw the Run-Away Man, only one answer that Gran had wanted to hear.
Nick spun on his heel and fled, full of black, winged panic and his throat so tight he could hardly breathe. He tripped over a stone and went down, sliced his hands and knees up as he fell, and scrambled to his feet as a hand grabbed at the tails of his loaned coat. The Run-Away Man yanked him back for a moment, and then the fabric tore like tissue between coarse fingers. Nick staggered, caught himself, and fled between the towers and into the storm. He didn’t question how he—barefoot and breathless and lost—stayed ahead of the man behind him or where his blind flight would take him.
He ran away.
Chapter Seven—Jack
THERE WAS coffee, two thermoses of it and an extra cup to share. Jack thought of Danny, his knee tucked between Jack’s thighs and his nose cold where it pressed into the hollow of Jack’s shoulder. Dogs weren’t as immune to weather as wolves were. They felt it more. He supposed no one wanted the dogs—six of them, all chained to fresh, shiny loops sunk into the walls, some of whom Jack didn’t know—to freeze to death down here before… whatever this was.
“Here,” Millie Dance said, her voice scratched and raw as she thrust a cup out toward him. Her hand shook slightly as she held it, and the coffee spilled over the chipped rim to redden her chill-white knuckles. She ran the corner shop and post office in Lochwinnoch, with a brisk trade in Irn-Bru and gossip for the Old Man. It was a good life for a dog, and she had gotten used to playing human. Jack had never seen her without makeup and a sensible heel, never mind in a tattered dressing gown with blood matted in her hair. “Even a wolf would rather be—”
One of the other dogs—Hector Bates, a dour farmhand who’d been lying to local farmers about who ate their sheep for twenty years—backhanded the cup out of Millie’s hand. It hit the dirt floor with a thud. Coffee spilled out to steam against the cold earth and rolled until Gregor put his foot out to stop it.
“Let ’em parch,” he snapped, his shoulders hunched, and chapped lips lifted back from nicotine-yellow teeth as he glared at Jack. “We don’t owe them anything. For centuries we’ve groveled for them, done their dirty deeds for them, and now they don’t even have the fucking decency to put us down with dignity? You want to wag your tail for a pat on the head, Millie, that’s on you. I’m done showing my throat.”
Gregor laughed harshly and bent down to pick up the cup.
“Are we keeping you from your sheep?” Gregor mocked as he wiped the cup on his jeans. There was never a bad situation he couldn’t make worse with his mouth, even when his fingers were wet with blood from the injury on his shoulder that wouldn’t heal. “Scared they’ll tup some strange ram while you’re not there to watch?”
Hector lunged at Gregor and jerked to a stop at the end of his chain. The metal collar cut into the weathered slack of his throat and made him gag. Millie pulled him away by the back of his shirt.
“I’ll do as I fucking please,” she snarled at him as she shoved him against the curved wall. The old, shaped stones were limned with ice, thick glazed over the mortar and granite. She jammed her forearm up under Hector’s chin, above the collar. “Give what I want, to whom I want. You’re just another dog, Hector. Don’t try and show your fangs to me.”
Jack grabbed her shoulders, all wiry muscle under the greasy felt of her robe, and pulled her off the other dog. He didn’t get any thanks from Hector for the save. He slouched sullenly against the wall.
“Enough,” he said as he put his body between the two of them. He could feel Millie’s growl through her collarbone—a dangerous, back-of-the-throat, almost
whine that wasn’t a warning anymore. “Fighting among ourselves isn’t going to get us out of here.”
It wasn’t Millie who backed down. Hector was the one who turned away with a hunched shoulder and silence, and one of the strange dogs barked out a harsh, unhappy laugh.
“At least if we kill ourselves, they won’t get the chance,” the man—his voice burred with a lowland accent and the remnants of an expensive suit hanging in filthy rags from his body—interrupted. He tugged nervously at his collar, fingers curled around the rough round of metal, and his voice dropped as though the dread had real weight to catch in his throat. “You’ve not seen them—”
He broke off as a chunk of ice caught him on the temple. It split his eyebrow open and blood dripped down into his eye.
“Shut the fuck up!” Tom, a half-blind dog kept in the Pack on Da’s charity, snarled where he huddled against the wall. He groped over the ground with clumsy, half-frozen hands for another projectile. “Monsters and murderers. You’re full of shit. That’s all it is. The prophets said they have a place for—”
“I know what I saw,” the stranger shot back. “I know what I saw them do. Our place is on the end of their knives.”
Tom grabbed a stone and cocked his arm back. Before he could throw it, Gregor stepped into the path of it and growled.
“You heard him.”
The unexpected show of support from his brother caught Jack off-balance. He gave the back of Gregor’s head a hard look and wondered if he could trust this. Probably not, he knew that, but for now it worked. Tom clumsily dropped the rock and lifted his chin in submissive acknowledgment of the reproof.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Ain’t my place, but he isn’t even pack. What’s he know about our prophets?”
“Same thing you do, that we all do,” Jack said. The question of where he stood with his brother could wait for later. The last thing Jack needed right then was to borrow more trouble. “That they’re scum, the dregs and perverts that no pack wants, and no wolf with half a brain lends an ear to them?”
