by TA Moore
“I lied.” She stalked past him. “You don’t matter at all.”
Danny scrambled backward away from her. His shoulder had popped out of the socket when he hit the ground, and there wasn’t time to push it back in. He glanced down at the baby. It looked cold, snow caught in its scant strands of hair, but when he pinched its leg, it screwed up its face and mewled weakly.
“I’m going to try,” he promised it.
The dogs harried Rose as she stalked toward Danny. They snapped at her heels and nipped at her close-stitched hides, but they couldn’t stop her. And the more dogs came after her, the fewer there were to distract Fenrir.
Danny cursed himself for a dog, because Lachlan was right. He’d gotten in over his head, made promises he couldn’t keep, and now he was going to die.
Him and the baby.
Then Bron, just so she could come to find him and kick his ass.
“Give me the fucking baby,” Rose snarled. She kicked Danny in the chest as he tried to get up and pushed him down into the snow. “Fucking Kathleen. Dog or bitch, all her whelps are a pain in my ass. I’m going to change everything, I’m going to rewrite the world, and all quail before murdering one child. I would kill them all, and when I’m a god, people will call it my tithe.”
The bird dropped out of the sky and shed its feathers. Nick stepped forward. “Gran,” he said, his hands held out. “Don’t. Just stop. Maybe everyone is against you because you’re wrong.”
She sneered at him. “If your ma begging me not to kill her, the pup I squeezed between my own legs, didn’t work, do you really think I care about this mongrel?”
Her heel dug into Danny’s chest as she leaned down to pull the baby roughly out of his arms. Nick cursed her and grabbed for feathers again as he took off. He shot skyward as he cawed his anger in a rough, furious voice.
Danny cursed him for a coward as Rose straightened up with the baby in her arms. It clenched its fist and puled its displeasure. She ignored the thin little whimper as she spread her hand over its chest. Fur sprouted between her knuckles and crawled toward her wrist. Her fingernails thickened and darkened, blood at the quick, into claws that she dug into the baby’s chest.
“For your mother’s sake,” she said, as blood dripped onto Danny’s chest. “I won’t make you watch.”
The baby cried harder, shrill and breathy, as Rose squeezed it like a fruit.
Danny dragged in a wheezy breath through the pressure on his chest. There was one thing Rose was right about. He was his mother’s son, and Kath had taught him one thing. If you can hurt them, do it.
He craned his head forward, pain all the way down between his shoulder blades, and sank his teeth into Rose’s shin. His teeth were blunt and human, but that just meant he had to bite down harder.
Rose jumped in surprise and staggered backward. She caught herself, and her mouth twisted in mean satisfaction as she made an abrupt gesture at a prophet.
“Fine,” she said. “If you want to watch, then you’ll watch.”
Torn hides littered the top of the hill. The dogs still snarled and tore at the monsters, but there were fewer of them. Fenrir snapped them up from the ground and shook the spirits out of their skins.
A prophet dragged Danny to his feet and hauled him over to watch as Rose laid the baby out on the old stone altar next to its fetch. She held her hand and someone put a wolf’s fang in it. The tooth was longer than her hand, cracked and yellow, and she pressed the point of it to the baby’s breastbone.
“I hope you burn,” Danny said as he struggled against the hands holding him. “Burn like Surtr’s candle, for years.”
Rose snorted and dragged the fang down. “I’ll bend him over too,” she said. “After this, I’m done being ruled.”
The Sannock blew in with the storm, bloody and light-footed, and the wolves came behind. Jack and Gregor were at the head of the Pack, but just behind them was a sleek, small wolf with sharp ears and rage-bristled fur.
Bron.
Danny sagged as his muscles turned to lead and exhaustion ached in his bones. It didn’t matter. He still wanted to laugh. His sister was alive, and she’d brought the laggard wolves with her. If they told Bron to her face that they should help Rose, after the old bitch had gutted her and stolen her child, Danny would have paid to see that.
Rose wouldn’t get to kill the baby, now. Danny could stop fighting.
Chapter Twenty-Eight—Gregor
DEAD DOGS didn’t know their place. They snapped at Gregor’s heels and jostled his shoulder for position in the fight. He growled and shoved through them. The bird shot overhead, close enough that Gregor felt wings skim his hair, and dive-bombed his bloody, scarred grandmother. It raked at her face and dragged talons over her skull, strings of coarse gray hair caught in the sharp, black hooks. She ducked twice and then grabbed Nick out of the air by a wing.
“You had your chance,” she said as she drove the bloody tooth into the bird’s throat. Feathers fluffed around the white spike as the bird strangled on its own voice. “I had a grandson.”
She tossed the bird aside. It landed in a lump of ruffled, unruly feathers and flapped spasmodically as it tried to catch itself. All it managed to do was shovel snow over itself.
Gregor tasted his own heart, but he couldn’t leave the fight yet. His son lay on the stone, bloody and blue, and for the first time, Gregor realized what it was like to love two things at once.
It hurt. He wasn’t a fan.
Bron snarled as she raced by him, her ears pinned flat to her skull and teeth bared. She’d caught up with him in the snow, with what was left of the Pack shamed and silent at her heels. Only Ellie and James had refused to come to their senses, lost somewhere out there in the Wild or the Winter.
They’d live or they’d die. Gregor flicked a thin bone knife he’d taken from one of the fallen Sannock and opened a prophet from groin to collarbone. The wolf peeled back to expose slack, fish-belly skin, and Bron knocked the man down to rip his guts out through the hole. Two of the half-seen dogs piled in, teeth set in his ankles and wrists as they held him down.
Gregor leaped over them and raced for the altar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tawny blur of his brother as he arrowed across the hill toward Fenrir. Frustration scraped at the inside of Gregor’s skin at the unfairness of it, but he ignored the pulse of bile and spite in his gut. He couldn’t fight Fenrir, not for long enough to be useful, and they weren’t here for his pride.
He ducked around a monster, not quite quick enough to avoid a blow that numbed his already torn shoulder, and left the dogs to distract it behind him. Rose sneered at him and wiped the bloody fang on her breast before she lifted it, ready to bring it down onto the baby’s chest. Bron screamed, a human sound in a wolf’s throat, as Rose tightened her grip. Behind her, Danny sagged down so the prophet had to hold him up, and he swung up both legs to kick Rose in the back. She lurched forward, stomach split open against the carved edge of the altar, and screeched with absolute, unreasonable fury.
That was Danny-dog for you, Gregor thought with a flash of almost affection. He might not be a wolf, but he had never known when to quit. Gregor fully expected that, if it came to it, Danny would spit in Odin’s only eye just to make a point.
Rose clutched her stomach closed with one hand as she pushed herself up off the stone. She swung around and grabbed Danny’s face with her free hand. The raw meat that Lachlan had left of his face earlier split open as she squeezed.
“Your mother should have drowned you, the Old Man should have killed you, and Job should have torn out your throat,” she snarled as she lifted him up. “But I am surrounded by incompetents and have to do everything myself.”
Her hand tightened, knuckles white through leathery skin, and Danny’s eyes bulged at the pain. He moaned, but the sound was muffled against her palm.
Gregor vaulted up onto the altar. Two babies lay on it, identical except for the blood, and he hesitated for a breath in surprise.
The smell of heather and blood was the first thing he’d smelled and the glimmer of the moon above the first thing he’d seen. That he should have been alone and that he wasn’t—that was the first thing he’d known. The first irritant awareness of “the other” that would stay inside him, like grit that never made a pearl, for the rest of his life.
For the first time, Gregor wondered what his father had thought when he’d seen them, whether they’d been a curse or a blessing. He’d loved them well enough, but they were doomed to be at odds.
These two would be lucky enough to live that long, he supposed. He shelved the next question for later—how he felt—as he reached around and slit Rose’s throat in one sure, practiced slash. He twisted the blade as it reached her ear and dragged it down, to be sure he got the big vein.
Blood gouted out of the wound and dripped from her stomach. Gregor pulled the knife back and punched it neatly into the base of her neck. He felt the blade snick through bone and the thick, grainy length of her spinal column. He yanked it back out and a pink, greasy-looking liquid seeped out and ran down her back.
Rose choked on her own blood, her voice garbled as it drowned in her throat. She went down on her knees and then pitched over onto her side. Her eyes, wild and white-rimmed, rolled as she tried to scrape back control. She clenched her jaw, the muscles bunched and rock hard under her skin, as she tried to move. All that happened was her little finger scraped the snow.
“No,” she slurred out with a mouthful of blood. “No. I’m… a god.”
Gregor jumped smoothly down off the altar and knelt next to her. He gently smoothed her hair back from her face. His fingers crazed over the scars, thick as cord and rougher, where she’d stitched herself back together. Whatever enchantment had been in the skin she’d stolen from the Sannock reached into his gut and squeezed it frantically with lust/love/want/need.
Everything wanted to live, even spells and skin.
Gregor let the itch of distraction sink down into the pit of his brain and set the point of the knife against her temple. The prophet shoved Danny aside and took a step forward. Then he changed his mind and fled into the darkness and the snow instead.
“This is for Nick,” Gregor said as he braced her head on the other side with his free hand. “This is for his ma, your daughter. Maybe she’ll rest now.”
He slid the knife through into her brain and watched the fever fade from her eyes.
Dead she was still—unreasonably—compelling. The sort of corpse that got itself laid out in a glass coffin for passersby to grieve the loss, even though a small, cold part of Gregor could see she was all scars, wrinkles, and overstretched grafts.
Beautiful or ugly, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t Nick.
Gregor left the knife in Rose’s brain—just in case—as he got up.
“You okay?” he asked Danny. When he got a nod, he waved his hand at the altar. “Take care of them. Please?”
Danny grimaced. “I haven’t done great so far,” he said bitterly as he levered himself up onto his knees. “If I were a wolf—”
“You’re alive. They’re alive,” Gregor said flatly. “Dog or wolf, that’s good enough for me.”
He left Danny to mind the babies and looked around the fight for the black ball of the bird where it had fallen. Feathers were scattered in a wide circle in the snow. The bird lay in the middle of them, too black to be real and afloat on a red puddle of its own blood and ice.
The wolves had driven Fenrir back into a thin copse of frozen trees and had him at bay. His hide hung in dry, matted strips from his bones and blood coated his muzzle. They didn’t need another wolf, and they definitely didn’t need Gregor. He pushed through the scrapping prophets and dogs to get to the bird and scoop it up out of the slush. The head dangled, slack as an eel, and its wings draped over his hands. He could feel its warmth against his fingers and the slow stutter of its heart. It was still bleeding, slick and hot as it filled his palms. The feathers were so soft as he folded the bird’s wings in and lifted it up to his chest.
“You don’t get to die,” Gregor told it roughly. “Not again. We won, Nick. It’s all down but—”
“Gregor!” Danny yelled. “Watch out!”
The blow hit his back hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Gregor tried to force a breath into his lungs, but they wouldn’t expand. He could feel them, slack and unresponsive behind his ribs. Then he felt snow, cold and wet, against his knees and realized his legs had gone from under him.
There was something cold and hard in his gut. He could feel his body shift around it. When he looked down, a frost-sheathed branch, shreds of skin caught on jagged spurs of ice, thrust out of his stomach. He touched it gingerly with his fingertips and jostled pain out of the wound to bleed through his body.
“That’s for Rose,” Lachlan’s familiar voice scraped in his ear, rough fingers twisted into Gregor’s hair. He dragged the makeshift weapon out slowly. “That’s for every time you ignored me, every time your fucking brother picked that dog first. Now fuck off and die at last.”
Lachlan shoved Gregor down into the snow and stalked past him toward Fenrir. He held his arms out like the statue of Jesus that Gregor vaguely remembered from assembly in the primary school Da had dragged him to.
“Take me!” Lachlan yelled. He dragged the broken branch, smeared with Gregor’s blood, over his stomach to roughly carve it open. “Fenrir! Eat my wolf, wear my skin. Make me a god!”
He raked his stomach again, deep enough to make him grunt. Fenrir looked toward him, ears pricked with interest. Jack snarled and went for his throat and tore at the loose flap of skin. His teeth ripped deeply, but it didn’t make much impact on Fenrir. The great wolf shook himself and slapped the heavy, tawny wolf away as though he were a terrier. He doggedly plowed through the wolves, ignoring their teeth and attempts to drag him down.
“I have been loyal,” Lachlan said as he dropped the branch. “I did everything she asked. I deserve this. You owe me my reward.”
Gregor hunched over the bird and rested his forehead against the thick breast feathers. His lungs still didn’t want to work properly so he couldn’t take a deep breath, but he inhaled what he could of the familiar dusty sweet scent. Nick had always smelled like that, even before the bird.
“I didn’t see him,” Danny apologized in his ear, a hand under his elbow. “Can you get up?”
“Probably,” Gregor said. He straightened up and scowled at Danny. “I told you to stay with the babies.”
Danny nodded. “Then Lachlan stabbed you in the back. They’re safe. Bron has them.”
Gregor glanced over at the altar. The small, black wolf glared at him with amber eyes as she stood over the two infants, her ears flat and head so low it was even with her shoulders. He gave her a slight inclination of his head and grabbed Danny’s shoulder to lean on it.
“I asked you,” he said as he stooped down to lay the bird on the chest of one of the dead monsters. “You will, won’t you? They might as well be yours. Bron’s your sister. Me and Jack are basically the same person. What difference is there?”
Danny grimaced. “They’re not mine?” he said. “No matter how many problems it would solve for your pack.”
“Your pack too,” Gregor said. “Jack said. Come on, then.”
Fenrir had reached Lachlan, who trembled and bled in front of him. Wolves hung off the dark, neglected hide like ticks as they bit and tore to try and bring him down. Jack picked himself from where he’d landed and loped back in to tear at Fenrir’s back leg. The huge wolf ignored them all as he lowered his head and exhaled into Lachlan’s face.
Piss ran down Lachlan’s leg and stained the snow as he inhaled. His skin flushed over his muscles as though he were about to cook from the inside, and he trembled as power filled him.
“You keep Lachlan busy,” Gregor said.
Danny snorted. “I’ve never won a fight with him.”
“You still always got what you wanted,” Gregor said. “And what y
ou want is to keep him busy. Can you do it?”
“I guess I have to,” Danny said grimly. “What are you going to do, Gregor?”
Gregor grinned. It felt tight and awful on his mouth. “Whatever the fuck I have to.”
He gave Danny a shove toward Lachlan and broke into a jog toward Fenrir. His stomach ached with each step. It wouldn’t have killed him—even now—but his body already had a bullet hole in his chest to stitch back together and tendons to stitch in his shoulder so he could use it.
There wasn’t much left.
“Tell Nick this doesn’t get him off the hook,” he said, just in case one of the dead had an ear out. “He doesn’t get to die yet.”
Danny tackled Lachlan hard and sent them both flying into the snow. They landed against the roots of a tree, and Danny hammered his fist down into Lachlan’s dazed face. His knuckles split as he broke Lachlan’s nose and resplit his lips, the aim as much damage as possible before Lachlan recovered. Or Danny collapsed from exhaustion.
A monster, face half-covered with lichen that worked long fingers into its ears and up its nose, staggered into Gregor’s path. He ducked under the clumsy swipe of its maul-like paw, and a dog—the skin of a great black hound draped over bones of snow and wind—slammed into the monster with a whistling, windy snarl and sank its teeth into its jowls.
A wolf went flying as Fenrir shook them off. He pinned Jack to the ground with one huge paw and snarled into his bloody, one-eyed face.
Gregor reached for the Wild. He had a full hunt’s worth of it curdled under his skin, and letting it out made his bones rattle with it and his skull ache. The back of his face burned with the pressure as it ripped him apart in search of his wolf.
Maybe, he thought dully, this was for the best. He didn’t know how the prophets lived with this every full moon as the Wild chewed their scars open and rubbed their faces in what it couldn’t find.
This once he could bear it. He glanced around, hopeful for a last glimpse of Nick or a black wing against the sky. Nothing. Gregor supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. The world had spent years not giving him what he wanted. Why change now?
