by TA Moore
She was mean, but she wasn’t smart. Gregor grinned at her and then snapped his head around to sink his teeth into her hand. Hot blood filled his mouth, the familiar taste cut through with the bitter sweetness of rot as he bore down. Ailsa squealed and tried to wrench her hand away, but her flesh tore between Gregor’s teeth.
Human teeth weren’t as efficient as a wolf’s, but they could do the job if you put your mind to it. Greg ground his jaw, tearing her skin, and jerked his head viciously from side to side. Bone cracked and tendons stretched, caught between his teeth like gristle. Ailsa punched at his head with her free hand and finally got away from him as the prophets dragged him back. She clutched her bleeding hand to her chest and glared at him.
“When it’s time,” she said, “I want to be the one who kills him.”
He grinned at her, hard and bloody-toothed, and spat her little finger out onto the stones. She whined in her throat and checked her mutilated hand as though she hadn’t realized she was short one.
“You get what you’re given,” the other prophet said. He dragged Gregor over to the trap door and roughly shoved him through. “Like the rest of us.”
Gregor pitched down the stairs headfirst. Instinct made him try to break his fall, but with his hands and feet tethered, that just made it worse. He gritted his teeth, raised his arms to cover his head as best he could, and tried to go limp. Shoulder and hip bashed against the hard, stone edge of the step until he landed in a heap at the bottom, half on top of his brother.
He rolled over onto his back, legs still propped up the stairs, and stared up at the dim square of the trap door.
“Don’t bother,” a familiar woman’s voice said. “Even if you crawl up there, the door won’t budge. I’ve tried. And they have those things stand guard.”
“Their monsters,” Gregor said. “I’ve killed them before.”
Jack grunted as he shoved Gregor off him. “Not easily.”
“We just need practice.”
Gregor got his elbow under him and scrambled awkwardly to his feet. The taste of Ailsa’s blood lingered like sour grease in his mouth, and he glanced around the cellar. It had been a larder once, probably, shelves and cupboards on the walls and hooks strung from the ceiling. The prophets had lined the room with cots, thin bedrolls stained with blood and fluids and the metal frames scratched and warped. It was, he supposed, no easy task to become a prophet. In the corner of the room, huddled on the cleanest sheets, two toddlers and a still-blue-eyed pup stared back at him. Candlelight flashed green in all their eyes.
“I thought they took five?” he said as he looked back at Bron. “Four children and you.”
She scowled and looked off-puttingly like her brother for a second. “Greer got away from them in the Wild,” she said. Her mouth twisted around the words. Gregor’s namesake had been nearly five, one of the oldest of the children taken. He’d been a stocky little brat of a kid, always in trouble. “He ran. I hoped he’d gotten back, but….”
But he hadn’t, Gregor finished the sentence for her. Sometimes children didn’t. The Wild kept lost children, hid them. Even the humans told stories about that, although they blamed it on the Sannock.
“He’s not dead,” he said. “That’s some comfort.”
Bron grimaced. “Is it?” she asked skeptically as she reached down to rub her stomach.
Gregor followed the gesture, and his brain went blank as she spread her bandaged hand on the taut, high bulge of her stomach.
“You’re pregnant,” he said.
“I know,” Bron snapped at him. “I worked that out for myself.”
Jack snorted out a halfhearted laugh. He wiped his bloody face—from a gash on his forehead where he’d caught the stairs wrong—on his sleeve.
“Whose is it?” he asked, and a sudden thought turned the corner of his mouth down. “Not Lachlan’s?”
It was an understandable assumption. Lachlan had sniffed after Bron since she was barely old enough for it not to be creepy, as much to do with her brother as her.
“No,” Gregor said. He warily extended his cuffed hands, not entirely sure what he should do with them. “Mine. Right?”
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, or good enough. Their blood had been up from the moon hunt, and Bron had grinned at him and dragged him into her bed. An itch to scratch and, she admitted, a way to get Lachlan to back off. Lach might have been willing to play rank games with other wolves over Bron, but he wouldn’t risk Gregor’s temper.
Most people didn’t want to.
It hadn’t meant anything, but it had been the full moon, when the wolves and the Wild were strongest. Two-thirds of the Pack had been born nine months after the moon waxed, he should have wondered. He had other things on his mind, though.
Bron twisted her mouth into a thin smile. “Well, they didn’t drag me down here and chain me up for the pleasure of my company, did they? It’s yours. Congratulations. It’ll be dead like the other one soon enough.”
She looked sorry for that almost immediately as she bit her lower lip, but she didn’t try to take it back. That was Bron for you, sharp as a nail and as unwilling to bend. And hurtful or not, Gregor thought bleakly as he dropped his hands, it wasn’t as though she lied. Even as a wolf, he hadn’t been able to save his daughter, and what could he do for this baby now? He couldn’t defend himself, couldn’t find Nick let alone protect him, and now he might have to let another baby die.
The thought curdled in his chest, cold and rancid. Gregor could feel the slow burn of the prophet’s infection as it leaked from under the picked-at scab on his soul. It was just harder to ignore when he knew the sour self-loathing was right.
“It’s better,” Bron said. “Better than what that raddled auld prophet has planned for him.”
“What?” Jack asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, her hand still pressed protectively to the bump. “I don’t expect it’s a nice party, though. No wonder my brother likes you, you’re both idiots.”
Jack glanced up and then stepped toward Bron. He tilted his head toward her as he mouthed the words almost silently. “Is he here?”
“Do you see him?” Bron sniffed as she glared at Jack. She met his eyes for a second and then flushed uncomfortably as she looked away. She tapped wait on Jack’s shoulder and turned to look at the children still cuddled together in the corner. “Shut up! Stop whining, you little mutts. Everyone’s already dead for all we know.”
The older girl, Shauna, wiped her nose on her sleeve, coughed, and then wailed like a banshee. Her voice, piercing as only a child’s could be, dug down into Gregor and found the one tender spot that flinched to comfort her. The boy didn’t quite have the lung capacity, but the undulating shriek he pumped out was still impressive. Even the pup threw its head back and tried its best to howl gummily toward the ceiling.
“Did you send Danny here?” Bron asked under the cover of the cacophony. She shoved at Jack with one bandaged hand, and he stepped back. Once. “He’s a dog, you dick. You can’t just use him to get what you want. What if one of those things had got him?”
“Where is he?” Jack asked.
She scowled and shoved him again. Jack grabbed her arm and moved her back a step.
“Where is Danny?” he growled.
Gregor moved forward with a soft snarl of warning in his throat, but he didn’t intervene. Bron wasn’t helping, and it wouldn’t hurt her for Jack to put her back on her heels, but Jack wouldn’t hurt her. The children faltered, but Bron hastily gestured for them to keep it up.
“He’s outside,” she said, her eyes focused acceptably on Jack’s chin. “He said he had a plan, but we had to wait for you. All these years, and you can still get him to heel.”
Jack’s fingers tightened on her arm, blood around his wrists as the wires dug in, and Gregor thought he’d misjudged his brother. He tensed, but Jack let go before he had to do anything.
“What’s his plan?” he asked, voice clipped.
“And?” Jack prodded.
Shauna’s voice finally gave out, and she sniffled herself into silence. She wiped her eyes on her grubby sleeve, lower lip wobbly as though her performance had reminded her she had plenty of reason to cry. Bron patted her hands together in a silent clap and then gave her a thumbs-up. It earned her a watery smile from the little girl, who slouched back and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
Gregor wasn’t a tender man. He didn’t think often of his dead child if he could help it. It hurt when he did, so what point was there to it? But the sight of the grubby, frightened little wolves made Gregor think of her. What point was there to a pack that couldn’t keep their own pups safe, alive, and fed?
He let himself be angry. It was easier—a simple emotion that didn’t leave room in him for anything else.
“Whatever it is,” he said harshly, “get on with it.”
Bron glanced nervously at the ceiling, waited for a second, and then crouched down to pull a pair of wire cutters out of her boot. She fumbled them in her bandaged hand as Jack thrust his out expectantly. Blood dripped from his torn wrists as Bron pinched the wire in the cutting hinge of the tool. She caught her tongue between her teeth as she snipped through the strands, first on his wrists and then his feet. The collar took longest, the hasp of the padlock too thick for the cutters, but she was able to wear through the steel enough for Jack to twist the lock till it snapped.
As he freed himself, Bron turned to Gregor. Dark curls hung over her face as she did, and this close, Gregor could smell the faint milk-and-honey smell of pregnancy on her skin.
“I’ll kill him myself,” he said quietly, “before I let her take him.”
Her prickly mask slipped, and she gave Gregor a grateful look. Then she tucked her chin and went back to work on his cuffs. “Danny will try and stop you,” she said quietly. “He’s soft, stupid dog. Don’t let him.”
“I’m not the brother that loves him,” Gregor reminded her.
She snorted. “Wolves don’t love dogs,” she said. “They use them. Danny was fine where he was. He liked humans. He liked coffee. Now he’s here.”
Gregor shrugged. He hardly cared about his brother’s soft spot for the dog, but he supposed that someone could say the same about him and Nick. That idea put his hackles up. “Everyone’s here now, Bron,” he said. “The end of the world isn’t just in the north.”
She cut sharply through the last wire and left him to do the rest himself. He sucked in air through his teeth and pulled the wire from between the bones of his wrist. It didn’t hurt like the knife in his shoulder had, but the hot sting of it as it sliced through raw flesh caught the same nerves that nails on blackboards put on edge. Done, he crouched down to do his feet. They were bruised and puffy-looking, the skin so swollen that it folded around the wire in fat pleats.
He had to dig down into the raw meat, almost down to the bone, to get to the strands.
“What now?” he asked as he discarded the bloody slinky and dragged the cuffs of his jeans down to cover the raw-meat mess of his ankles. He tossed the cutters to Jack in a mute request for help with the collar. Their truce still held, apparently, since Jack cut him loose without comment. Gregor scratched the back of his neck once he was loose and looked expectantly at Bron. “You whistle?”
Bron shook her head and produced a battered lighter from her pocket. She tightened her fingers around it like a talisman. Her wolf glittered ferociously in her eyes, wild and dangerous from being caged.
“We burn their fucking hospital down.”
OR AT least smoke them out. Gregor balanced on his brother’s shoulders as he stuffed wads of petrol-greasy cotton into the cracked plaster tubes that went up inside the walls. The fumes rose like rainbows, sweet enough to make his mouth water as he packed the fabric tightly.
“Danny said there’s speaking tubes that go all through the building,” Bron said under the cover of the kids’ renewed wails. She unraveled the bandage from her hand—the missing finger healed into a smooth stump—and clambered up the stairs to wedge it around the edges of the trapdoor. On the top of it, something shifted and gargled out a suspicious growl. She snatched her fingers back an inch and then shook the chill off and finished the job. “It should get everywhere. He’ll see it.”
“How’d he know?” Gregor asked.
“The house isn’t exactly well-secured,” Bron pointed out as she flicked the lighter. “He was able to look around. That’s why he slaughtered the sheep. You saw the one outside, and he dragged another one all through the house.”
She ran the flickering flame of the lighter along the dry linen. It smoldered sullenly, unwilling to step on winter’s toes, but eventually it caught. Bron tossed the lighter to Jack, who snatched it out of the air. The gas-soaked rags flickered, spat, and caught much more willingly. It singed Gregor’s fingers as he fed it more fuel, one of Surtr’s littlest demons hungry for flesh. It writhed through the flames and then, with a leered wink, crawled into the pipes.
Gregor wiped the Wild out of his eyes and stepped back. He licked his blistered fingers and wrinkled his nose as the smoke backed, thick and black, into the basement.
“I hope your brother thought of this,” he said with a cough.
“At least he thought of something,” Bron said. She stripped her dress off and stood, pale and freckled in the fire light, as she ripped it to shreds to feed the flames. Her voice pitched up as she screamed, “Help! Help! There’s a fire! Help us.”
Gregor’s fingers were still scratched with white scars from his last encounter with a fire. As it caught and spat, cracks spread up the way as it rose through the pipes like a chimney, he couldn’t move. In the shadows of his mind, the flayed, scorched hides of the Sannock billowed and tore and the smoke caught in his throat as he got ready to die.
Then Jack shoved a handful of rags into his hand, and he forced himself back to work. Jack stripped down, naked as Bron, and fed the fires, since clothes would only slow him down. Damp, bloody denim made the smoke thick and ripe with the charred smell of skin.
It didn’t take long for the smoke to reach the upper levels. Over the children’s wails and the crackle of flames, Gregor caught the sound of curses and scuffling as the prophets upstairs tried to work out what was going on.
“Where’s your brother, Bron?” Gregor asked. The kids had backed away against the wall, hands over their faces. “Or are we just the turkey in the oven, stoking the flames?”
She ignored him.
“Trust him,” Jack said. “I do.”
“You trust me,” Gregor pointed out sourly. “So, your judgment is poor.”
Jack made a face, half amused and half acknowledgment, and shrugged. “What other choice do you have?”
“Move that thing,” someone snapped overhead, harsh and thickly Lowland. “Don’t just stand there like idiots. What do you think she’ll do if she comes back and finds we let her wolves burn?”
The monster tried to hold its ground. Gregor could hear its claws scrape against the wood and the snap of its teeth, but in the end, it gave in to the prophets. As it was dragged outside, someone rattled the padlock against its hasp.
“I was going to get them out,” Ailsa said, her voice nasal and self-serving. “Just before you said that, I decided to—”
She hauled the door up.
Bron and Jack were already in their fur. They shot for the slice of light the minute they saw it. Bron had always been fast on her feet, and she wasn’t pregnant enough for it to slow her down as a wolf. She went up the stairs like a missile and slammed into Ailsa’s chest. She bowled the mean-faced prophet backward onto the floor and sank her teeth into her upraised arm. Dead skin and hot flesh ripped and tore under her teeth.
Only a second behind her, Jack went for Ailsa’s legs a
nd ripped chunks of them as she tried to get back onto her feet.
That left Gregor to grab the children, like the toothless old wolf only good to scavenge bones and watch the pups play. He grabbed the pup by the scruff with one hand, slung John up onto his shoulder, and dragged Shauna along by the arm as they scrambled up the stairs.
Ailsa had finally remembered the stolen wolf she’d stitched to her back. Her body twisted as the fur sank down into it and the poor, dead wolf crawled out. One eye was split open, eyelid peeled back and the gray-pink of old liver, and Gregor got a glimpse of Ailsa’s desperate, bloodshot eyeball underneath. She grabbed at Shauna with a hand that was short a finger.
She tore Shauna’s pajamas with her claws as Gregor pulled the little girl out of her reach. She shrieked and clung to him with bony little hands. Gregor stamped down on Ailsa’s hand, heel ground down into the heart of it, and jumped over to get to the far side of the hall.
He staggered and caught himself, the wood hot under his feet as Bron sunk her teeth into Ailsa’s throat and ripped it out. She let the meat drop from her mouth and let Ailsa splutter, jaws big and broken, her blood out. A wild blow of Ailsa’s arm threw Bron off, and she thumped against a wall hard enough to make Gregor wince. She writhed away from Jack and staggered away on bloody, half-ruined legs, Ailsa’s voice a raw gargle as she tried to raise the alarm.
Gregor started to lose his grip on Shauna as she squirmed and grabbed at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a prophet in a dirty brown hide grab for her. Gregor snarled, dropped Shauna, and pushed her behind him with his knee as he shoved the prophet into the wall. The reek of dead, badly preserved skin slid into his nose and down his throat. He dug his fingers into the other man’s throat until he gagged, and Gregor could feel the brittle strands of cartilage creak under his fingers. On his shoulder, John hiccupped with quiet panic and tightened his arms around Gregor’s throat in unconscious mimicry.
