by TA Moore
The smell hadn’t been there before. After a few days in the car, doors pulled shut against the sporadic inspections of the armed escorts, Jack knew what every corner and board smelled like. The faded stink of human sweat, fresh—or it had been yesterday—blood from the man who’d tried to catch a ride on the train and went under the wheels instead.
Nothing like milk.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Nick said. His eyes still looked human, unusually dark but without the obsidian glitter of an animal. There was something sad in the set of his mouth, and there wasn’t anything of his grandmother in that. “An old grudge.”
Jack shook himself. He was a wolf. The strangest thing he’d ever met was himself, but the Wolf Winter had brought more than snow and blood out of the Wild. Maybe the prophets knew what. Nick’s grandmother had certainly known how to open the way across… even if they had stopped anything at the threshold.
It had been an insult originally, the prophets. The wolves only sent the dregs of their kind to parlay prayers, the caitiffs and the degenerates, to show what they thought of the gods. In hindsight that might also have been a mistake. The prophets knew more than they told in the catechism or read in the auguries, and they hadn’t shared all of it with the wolves.
At least—Jack thought grimly of Job’s claim that the Old Man had full knowledge of all this—he hoped they hadn’t told.
“Go to sleep,” Jack ordered roughly, as though there wouldn’t be anything there if Nick didn’t get to see it. “We’ll reach Irvine tomorrow, and there’s no more free ride after that. We walk.”
It was the god who laughed, a caw of scratchy amusement as Nick tilted his head to the side. “You’ll walk.”
It wasn’t the Wild. Jack knew the Wild—the smell and taste of it. Whatever it was that flickered around Nick was something… else. Something that smelled like the charred bones and long dead of the bonefires on the beach.
Whatever it was wiped Nick away and let the bird out. The coat dropped in a heavy puddle to the crate below. An empty sleeve dangled limply over the edge, and a black crow-like bird mantled a thick ruff of feathers. A black eye glittered at him down the pickax length of bone-white beak, old words carved like scrimshaw along the smooth plates, as it turned its head to watch him.
It was only the human gods the wolves had issue with, the ones that had made them and used them and then shat on their long service. The gods of fur and feather—the coursers and feasts of their masters—they were neutral too. In theory. As the first wolf in centuries to come snout to… beak… with one? Jack felt no kinship with it. There was something essentially alien behind that bone-carved beak.
Maybe that was because it was a bird. And at least it didn’t look like the old bitch.
He curled his lip in mute warning he wasn’t roadkill for its breakfast and then went back to his nest of blankets and lover. Jack wrapped himself around Danny, who turned sleepily into him with a yawned “What?” and an arm curled over Jack’s hip.
“Nothing,” Jack said. He tangled his fingers through Danny’s hair, grown out in messy curls after his days being leashed, and brushed a kiss over his forehead. “Don’t worry about it.”
Danny grunted something skeptical but let himself slide back into his dreams. The soft huff of his breath was warm against Jack’s throat, a metronome to count down until dawn. He’d told the bird to get some sleep, but Jack had no intention of taking his own advice. Not until he had to.
Wolves didn’t dream like men did, or—Jack absently stroked Danny’s hair—like dogs, but Jack didn’t want to dream at all. He already knew what the Wild wanted to show him, but he didn’t feel like doing what it wanted right now.
In Durham—with Danny back in his bed and Gregor at his back instead of his heels for once—he’d plotted a hero’s return to the Scottish Pack. Whatever the wolves thought about where Jack put his cock, the Wild had chosen him. Even the Old Man would respect that. Then the old bitch had carved the pride out of him, and the Wild had let her.
Without the Wild’s seal of approval, Jack was just another exile, come to beg for scraps.
Jack laughed a dry choke of noise, as he rolled away from Danny and stared up into the dark at the ceiling. The rattle of wheels over frozen tracks vibrated through his bones and hummed between the plates of his skull. He ran his hand up under his shirt and spread his fingers over hard muscle and healed, naked skin. No, not just another exile. One who had taken the time away to double down on what made him unwelcome. Not only had he refused to fuck one of the women in the Pack, he’d taken a dog as his mate. He didn’t even have proof of his rank anymore.
What else could the Wild show him to make it worse?
IT WAS barely dawn when the train groaned sullenly to a halt a few miles away from Glengarnock. Ten miles from home. The sun hung low and pale in the sky, as if the cold had sapped its energy to climb any higher, and the brakemen grumbled to themselves as they stumbled off the train. Propane tanks were slung over their shoulders as they shuffled along the tracks with flamethrowers to unseal the wheels. Steam spluttered and poured from under the train as though it were a much older model.
Soldiers in gray-and-white winter gear ignored them as they spread out along the tracks. They kept their guns trained on the white wasteland that spread out from the tracks. Nobody talked much. Their patience for small talk had been worn down to nothing by the time they stopped briefly near Girvan.
They’d had to use them twice yesterday, once to warn off a pack of scruffy dogs who slunk up out of the bushes. They’d probably been pampered pets once—some of them still had grubby, once-glittery collars around their necks and one had the rags of a bandanna—but hunger and grime had replaced domestication. At some point between abandonment and the tracks, they’d slipped into the Wild, and the passage had rubbed the bred-in differences down and brought out something more essentially… dog. They were still tame, though, somewhere down under the gnaw of empty bellies, and the angry voices and crack of bullets made them scatter.
The man who burst out of a house along the tracks—flushed red with fever and duct-taped into a quilt as a makeshift coat—hadn’t been so wise. He’d put his faith in the envelope of cash he tried to shove into the engineer’s hand for passage. When he wouldn’t take no for an answer, the soldiers shot him in the foot and dragged him away from the tracks. They left him in a puddle of red-stained snow, his curses futile as they bounced off the train.
The wolves’ catechism predicted that “no man would have mercy on another” during the Wolf Winter, that men would set to killing each other without the wolves even setting fang to the task. It was hard to say if that was prophecy or just prediction.
“The train’s probably full of supplies,” Danny muttered as he shifted his balance on the frost-covered coupling underfoot. They were squeezed in between two cars, pressed shoulder to shoulder as they waited for their chance to make a break for the houses behind the iced-over fence. “There must be bunkers up here for rich people—politicians, businessmen, the Queen—to ride out the disaster.”
Jack grunted as he shrugged his pack onto his back. He unfolded the strap so it lay comfortably over his shoulder.
“It will be a long wait,” he said. “Three more years of winter, and then the gods will have found their home.”
The mention of the gods made Danny grimace. He started to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and fumbled as he remembered they were gone. The prophets hadn’t planned to let him be human again, so they hadn’t bothered to keep them. Even after the Wild’s intervention and the prophet’s monsters, Danny clung to his skepticism like a miser to his gold.
He always knew wolves were real—the Sannock Dead he’d seen, like moonlight, storm wrack, and rot on the beach by the bonefires—but gods? He wasn’t ready to believe in them yet, not until he saw one with his own eyes.
And without his glasses, Jack thought wryly, they’d have to be quite close.
&nb
sp; “Ma always said don’t borrow money or trouble,” Danny murmured. He leaned against Jack to steal warmth from him, and his breath smoked around his lips. “Add gods to the list. Worry about it when—if—we have to.”
Fair enough, Jack supposed. The gods could wait. Although it did feel strange to hear those words in Danny’s mouth. The future had been all Danny ever thought about when they were teenagers. It was why he’d left to chase the future he’d set his mind on among the humans.
Maybe the future was more appealing when you thought you could do something about it.
Snow crunched under heavy boots on the rails outside. Jack stiffened and pressed himself back against the cold side of the carriage, his shoulders damp as the sheath of ice melted enough to soak into his shirt. Adrenaline scraped under his skin, twitched in his heels, and he exhaled slow mist into the air.
He could change. The idea sunk into his brain, and he couldn’t deny its appeal. Wolves had kept themselves from humanity for centuries. The last time they’d trusted a man with their true nature had been when they still served Rome, and he’d exiled them over the Wall for it. What difference would it make now, though? The age of men was almost over, his da’s authority was fractured or gone, and Jack had already been banished once.
The temptation swelled inside him and then washed away as the soldier stepped into view. A balaclava was pulled down over his head, the gray fabric crusted with ice around mouth and nose where his breath had frozen, and heavy, black-lensed goggles hid his eyes. He carried the black semiautomatic rifle with the butt tucked into his armpit, gloved finger flat against the trigger. The smell of gun oil and sour anger washed off him like BO as he paused in front of Jack to scan the scrub on the other side of the fence for any signs of life.
As a young wolf, Jack had been charged by a stag he’d brought to bay. It had smashed his ribs and broken his jaw when it trampled him. His ribs popped as they broke, a hollow sound as his side caved in, and he hadn’t known whose fear he could smell—his or the stag’s. It tumbled him ears over tail on the hard stone, and by the time it finally made a break for the tree line, he’d not known where his feet were to get them under him. Da had stood back and watched so Jack would learn the lesson. Just because something was prey didn’t mean it was weak.
A bullet wouldn’t kill Jack, but it had taxed his wolf to keep him alive under the old bitch’s knife. Then he’d dragged it into the icy Irish sea—fur frozen in spikes—to drag a half-dead dog back to shore. With the prophets to defang and a showdown with his da on the table, it wasn’t the time to test the limits of his recovery. He’d still heal, but it would take longer than usual.
Danny folded his arm over his mouth to hide the evidence of his breath and pressed back into the narrow threshold of the door.
The soldier stood for a moment, then rasped a rough “All clear” into his radio and trudged back up toward the front of the train. Jack listened for a moment as the crunch of snow and huff of tired breathing retreated, then he reached over and tapped Danny’s elbow.
“Now?” Danny mouthed as he shifted his weight forward.
Jack shook his head and leaned in to steal a kiss from cold lips. He buried his fingers in the matted curls at the back of Danny’s neck and pulled the long, lean body into his. For a second, he could taste the disapproval on Danny’s mouth, and then it softened into something else. They hadn’t been apart since Girvan. The back of Jack’s neck crawled every time Danny was out of his sight for more than a minute. They hadn’t fucked either, too cold or too tired or too bloated with nightmares.
His cock had been the one thing the old bitch hadn’t cut off, for all her threats, but it felt like she had somehow. Jack had never lain down with Danny and not gotten hard.
The tug of tempted heat in his balls was welcome testimony that everything down there was intact. Badly timed as gunfire cracked suddenly in the background, but welcome.
Although, a small voice in the back of his head murmured greasily, in some ways it would have been… simpler.
Jack told himself he didn’t know what that meant, and he ignored it. He roughly shoved Danny away and flashed him a hard, sharp-edged smile.
“Now,” he said.
Chapter Two—Jack
DANNY, MOUTH tender and cheeks flushed from the kiss, the cold, or both, stared at him in confusion for a moment. He’d catch up. He always did. Jack spun on the balls of his feet and jumped off the train. The snow around it had been pressed down under the soldier’s feet, compacted into a hard, slick-frozen crust of ice. Jack’s boots slid when they hit it and nearly went out from under him. He spared a second’s remorse for his decision not to shift—a wolf’s feet were made for the snow—and caught his balance.
“Hey!” someone yelled. Surprise and alarm cracked in their voice, no authority. One of the brakemen, then, not the soldiers. “What the hell…! There was someone on the train! Fuck. Fuck me. Lieutenant!”
Jack bolted for the fence, and some instinct made him glance to the right. They’d made no agreement about when to break for the fence before they split up, but it didn’t matter. They still made the break from the train at the same time, almost in step as they ran through the snow.
Except Gregor was alone, and Danny was at Jack’s heels.
Or the other way around. Long legs and a coursing dog’s turn of speed, even in human form, sent Danny past Jack at a sprint. Snow kicked up from his feet in grubby arcs of white and off-white. It sprayed into Jack’s face, wet and musty with an aftertaste of smoke and oil from the trains.
“Stop!” a man barked behind them. “Stop right there and put your hands up.”
Danny hunched his shoulders up and head down, as if that would help. They’d go for the center of mass, the biggest, steadiest spot on a moving target.
Gunfire stuttered across the ground in front of him. The bullets churned up the snow and threw up chunks of hard, gray concrete.
“Fuck,” Danny spat as he zagged away from the line cut through the snow in front of him. The cultured vowels he’d picked up down south had slipped and let the Scottish out. “I thought I’d at least get home before someone tried to kill me.”
Jack barked out a laugh. The air was cold as ice water as it hit his lungs.
“If you don’t stop…,” the man barked. Jack glanced around and saw the soldiers running awkwardly toward him. Heavy boots and thick thermal gear kept them warm enough to function but made them lumber through the knee-deep snow. The man at the front jerked his gun up to his shoulder as he stopped. “We will fire.”
Nick swooped on him from above. The huge, black bird dropped out of the sky and onto the soldier’s head. He dug his claws into the balaclava and jabbed down with that thick, bone-cracker beak. The Wild—or something like it—caught between the blue-black feathers of his wings as he flapped to keep his balance.
The soldier yelled in surprise and swatted at his head with one hand. The gun swung loose from the other as he tried to drag the bird off his head.
Despite his distrust of Nick and what went on behind those bird-black eyes, Jack laughed. Ahead of him, Danny reached the fence. He jumped up, grabbed the top of it to haul himself up, and kicked with his heavy boots at the frozen metal struts. Chunks of ice and snow dislodged as he scrambled up. A gunshot zipped past Jack’s ear and hit the metal post inches from Danny’s knee. The post rattled with the impact, and the sheath of ice cracked from top to bottom.
The sharp stink of fear punched through the cold air. Danny gasped out a curse and jumped off the fence. He landed clumsily on the other side, on his hands and knees in the snow, and then scrambled back to his feet.
Jack turned to flash a growl at the soldiers, a flash of white human teeth and a throaty roll of something not human at all in his throat. The Wild was weak here, buried deep under the worked-iron-and-rail skin of the world, but for a second, it flickered green and sharp in his nose. Somewhere, not quite here, he caught the stiff creak of long-frozen trees and the distant thread of
a wolf’s howl in the wind.
One of the men shuddered and stepped back. His gun sagged between slack fingers and he looked around nervously, as though it would help to have something solid to blame the chill at the back of his neck on. The other soldier, balaclava gone and tracks of blood over his forehead, didn’t have the same vestigial awareness of… something. He set his jaw, tight under a few weeks of salt-and-pepper stubble, and tightened his finger on the trigger.
The magazine exploded off the gun in a spray of broken bits and unfired bullets that flew over the snow-packed station. Splinters of metal tore up the soldier’s sleeves and shredded his face with small, razor burn cuts. Drops of blood welled and dripped down his face.
“Son of a bitch,” the man yelled in shock as he flung the deconstructed gun away from him, trigger guard twisted and the innards of the rifle exposed. “What the hell is going on here?”
Jack laughed. He turned and ran at the fence. One smooth leap got his hands on the top of it, and he swung himself up and over. He landed in a crouch on the snow and then toppled head over ass as the crust gave way under him and spilled him down the bank in a miniature avalanche.
The Wild giveth, and Winter taketh, he supposed as he sat up and shook chunks of ice and grass out of his hair.
“Show-off,” Danny accused as he offered a hand.
Jack grabbed it even though he could have gotten to his feet on his own. He kept a grip on cold fingers as he dragged Danny away from the tracks and along the high-walled gardens that backed onto it. Halfhearted gunfire chased them, stuttered across the ground and bounced off the trees behind the same way they’d chased off the dogs. Even though he knew it was stupid, Jack found himself vaguely offended. He was a wolf, and definitely more of a threat than a feral mongrel who used to feed from a dish and wore boots when it went for a walk.