by TA Moore
Doubt flashed through Lach’s face and then he willed it desperately away. “He’s gone!” Lach said harshly. “Now so are you.”
He vaulted over the gate and lunged at them. The rest of the wolves followed, all red gums and white teeth as they snapped and snarled.
The smart thing would have been to let Jack take the brunt. He still had his wolf and he would be the Wolf King of Scotland one day, but no one had ever accused Gregor of being the smart brother. He flung himself into Lach’s path and took him down in a tangle of limbs and snarls.
Chapter Five—Gregor
BLOOD DRIPPED into Gregor’s eyes. It wasn’t his. Lach straddled him, hands twisted in Gregor’s shirt, and bled on him from a broken nose and gashed forehead. He held Gregor down with one arm, elbow straight and shoulder braced, and drove his fist down into Gregor’s face.
His knuckles jarred against Gregor’s cheekbone and sent a jolt of pain through his skull. Red and black smeared through his vision as Lach ground his fist against Gregor’s eye.
“You left,” Lach shouted. The wind had picked up as they fought. All around them Gregor could hear the snap of teeth and snarls of a fight. The storm had blown in from the north too quickly to be natural, the bruise-colored clouds tossed in on the breeze to clot thickly overhead even now. It was like the Wild wanted to come and see the fight for itself. Lach cocked his arm back for a second punch. “You should have stayed gone. The Pack’s mine now. They gave it to me.”
He threw the punch, but Gregor jerked his head to the side and Lach buried his fist in the snow, hammered his knuckles against the frozen ruts of the old hiking path. Even over the wind Gregor heard the stick-brittle snap of broken bones. It wouldn’t last—bones were easy enough to stitch together—but it hurt enough to make Lach yelp and yank his hand back.
“Only for as long as you can keep it,” Gregor snarled through stiff lips. The cold stung at his lips and made his eyes ache. He felt it more now than he had, but this was more than that. The chill was enough to make a wolf shiver and go to ground till it passed. “And you got your ass handed to you by a dog.”
He punched Lach in the throat. Flesh and soft tissue gave way with the brittle sound of crumpled plastic, and Lach’s mouth gaped open as he clawed at his throat. It was one of Danny’s moves, vicious in the way you had to be when you knew you were going to lose. Lach’s face went red as he tried to suck air in through his crushed throat, and Gregor flipped them both over.
Joints took the longest to heal. Sometimes, if the body was running hot to patch itself together in the middle of a fight, they’d get put back together wrong. They’d be stiff and locked, or bend the wrong way, or the muscle anchored too loose so the joint would slip in and out. Someone would have to hold you down afterward, break it with a hammer over and over till it worked again.
Gregor grabbed Lach’s wrist, twisted it hard, and snapped the elbow the wrong way until it crackle-tore like a wing ripped off a chicken carcass.
“Fuck!” Lach groaned through a swollen throat as he writhed in the snow. He hammered a blind blow left-handed into Gregor’s jaw. His teeth snapped shut on the inside of his cheek, and blood filled his mouth. Lach grabbed Gregor’s throat and dragged him down until Gregor couldn’t smell anything but the mutton-and-garlic stink of Lach’s breath. He dug his fingers down into the soft flesh to cut off Gregor’s breath. “We don’t have any dogs in our Pack now. We’ve cleaned house for Fenrir.”
Gregor spat blood into Lach’s face and pulled himself free when the grip on his throat weakened in surprise. He rolled off Lach and scrambled to his feet.
When he fought Rose in the stagnant pond, the Wild dammed off for the Sannock Dead, he hadn’t cared if he died or not. His wolf was gone, his lover dead—at least as far as he knew—and the Wolf Winter fairy tale of his childhood was tainted. Now Nick was alive, and Gregor tried to judge what he’d lost with his wolf as Lach lurched to his feet.
He wasn’t as strong, and he didn’t heal as quickly—the ache of the bruise around his eye would fade in hours rather than minutes—but he knew that already. With all his shortcomings he’d still beaten Rose. But since he made it back out of the wild, he wondered if he’d lost his edge—the brutally sullen anger that seethed under his skin, the killer instincts of the wolf that put his teeth in an elk’s jugular, everything that had given him an advantage over Jack, with his charm and his wise tongue.
It felt like it was still there. The anger was spackled over the scab where his wolf had been tethered, a poultice of old resentments and disagreements to hold the infection in. And once Lach got up, Gregor would do his damnedest to kill him. That should answer all his questions.
Lach swiped blood out of his eyes and rolled onto his side, elbow dug into the snow as it took his weight. Before he could get up to start the fight again, Gregor caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, clumsy in the knee-deep snow, as Jamie lunged at him with bared teeth.
He let the weight of the wolf take him down again. The snow should have broken his fall, but it didn’t make much difference. Slaver dripped from Jamie’s fangs, thick and sticky, and the stink of his breath made Gregor gag. Sharp teeth snapped in front of his nose as he buried his hands in the thick ruff of Jamie’s fur to hold him back. He could feel the bulk of muscle in Jamie’s neck, and the thick cords of it flexed against his fingers as Jamie fought him.
Gregor felt his arms start to give under the strain. He grimaced and, next time Jamie reared his head back, Gregor let go of his neck and shoved his forearm into the red, gaped maw as it plunged down. Pain ran black and irrelevant down his arm and into his spine, and a jolt of adrenaline spat out in response as Jamie tore his arm open.
It would heal. Eventually. Gregor gritted his teeth against the pain of being minced and reached out with his free hand. His fingers grazed over a stick, the wet tangle of a dead plant, and finally closed on one of the heavy chipped-granite rocks that the Pack’s pups stacked up to rile the monster before they took their swim.
Not much changed in the Old Man’s territory.
Gregor wrapped his fingers around the rock, hauled it out from under the snow, and swung it in a short, brutal arc. The edge bashed against Jamie’s ruined ear, and a muffled yelp of surprised pain squeezed through Jamie’s clamped-closed jaws. Gregor hit him again. His aim was better this time. He caught Jamie right on the temple, where the fur was too thin to cushion the blow. Bone cracked with a brittle, muffled snap.
Again.
On the fourth blow, Jamie’s eyes dulled and his grip on Gregor’s arm relaxed, torn flesh caught between his teeth as he staggered back. Gregor couldn’t feel his fingers—his hand felt like it was overstuffed with wet sand—but his arm worked well enough to get him back to his feet. He wiped the slabber off his face and stepped forward to swing the rock again as Jamie lurched forward. The edge of the rock, ragged and thickened with ice, caught Jamie on the narrow point of his snout. Blood spurted from his black nose and his teeth snapped off like sticks.
That would take time to heal.
Jamie cringed and tried to stagger away, head down and haunches tucked under him. The unmistakable submission should have been enough. It would have been for the wolf.
Apparently without his wolf, he was worse.
He glanced around for Nick and caught the flap of a tooth-tattered coat as Nick dodged and feinted ahead of Ellie. Strips of torn coat hung from her teeth as she panted and spun to keep up with the dodges and kicks. Nick could have pulled on his feathers—human clothes were less of a hobble to a crow than a wolf—but the bird in him thought this was more fun. Stupid, but for now he was safe.
Gregor tightened his grip on the rock, his fingers grated raw on the rough surface, and started after the cringing wolf. Before he could deliver the final blow to Jamie’s battered skull, Jack yelled his name. Two wolves had his brother down on his knees, teeth locked in his forearm and thigh. Lach, his eyebrow twisted where the forehead had stitched itself
back together crookedly, fumbled his T-shirt up with a healed stiff arm and pulled a thin, ash-gall-stained knife out of his belt.
The rank blade was worn hard by years of use, the wooden handle dark from years of being gripped by bloody, sweaty fingers. Acid and ink had buffed the shine off the metal. By rights there should have been a legend around it—that the first Numitor had brought it from Rome, that it had been carved from a Pict’s thigh bone before the truce—but it was too obviously just a knife. Practicality was worked into it, but so was the blood of generations of wolves.
Lach grabbed Jack by the hair and yanked his head to the side. He laid the blade against the thick pulse of the carotid artery and pressed. Tanned skin split easily and peeled back from the coarse stain on the knife, the thin strips of see-through skin dry and withered from contact with the oiled surface. Jack jerked away as far he could, weighed down with wolves and Lach’s fist in his hair. It wasn’t far enough.
“How long did you want to kill your brother, Gregor? How many years did it take?” Lachlan jeered as he dragged the knife back and forward in teasing strokes. “One fight and he’s on his knees. You really think I’m not fit to be Numitor?”
Gregor spat in the snow. “I don’t think you’re fit to be a wolf,” he said. Two big steel-gray wolves circled him on straight, stiff legs, heads down and eyes wary. Gregor shifted his weight and turned as he tried to keep them both in view. They were younger wolves, younger than him. Lachlan’s chosen seemed to be either new or worn, handpicked from the bottom of the barrel either way. “No wolf would have the stink of a prophet’s ass on their breath.”
The jibe had been meant to cut, to confirm Gregor’s suspicion that this—like everything else that had gone wrong since Job dripped his poison in the twin’s ears and sent them south—was the prophets’ doing. He hadn’t expected it to slice down to the pus of an old wound. A sick knot of loathing and glee twisted Lach’s face.
“When the gods come home,” he said roughly, “the prophets will speak well of us.”
He tightened his grip on the knife, ready to lay Jack’s throat open down to the bone. Jack took a deep breath and threw himself backward. His arm ripped free of the wolf’s fangs, flesh and muscle shredded, but he took the one locked on to his thigh with him as he pitched off the edge of the path. The two of them crashed down the slope, through rocks and shrub, toward the shore.
Lach stood for a second, mouth agape like an idiot, and then kicked the confused remaining wolf in the ribs.
“Go,” he yelled. “Get him.”
The wolf apologetically licked bloody jowls and clumsily went over the edge. Lach turned to face Gregor, a rictus smile twisted over his mouth.
“When the gods come home,” he repeated the words like a mantra, “nobody will speak of you.”
The two wolves went for Gregor at the same time—one low and one high, as though it were a hunt and he was prey. Maybe Gregor had fallen, but not that low. He reached for the Wild, the taste of stone on the back of his tongue, and a gust of wind and ice caught the wolf in the air and slammed it into the wall. Something broke, and the wolf huffed out a whimper.
The wolf on the ground was Gregor’s toll. He dove to the side, landed hard on his shoulder, and kicked out with both feet. His heels hammered into the wolf’s shoulder, knocked him off his feet, and Gregor jumped back to his feet before the wolf could recover. He spun toward Lach just in time for the knife to be buried in his shoulder instead of his back.
He’d been carved open on the end of that blade before. It had sliced open every line of ink on his skin and stained it with rowan gall to blister and scar. He’d expected to have the Numitor’s rank scarred onto him with it one day. He thought he knew how rowan burned, but he was wrong.
The knife punched through skin and muscle to grate against his shoulder, and his blood caught fire from the old rowan oils worked onto the blade and carried it through his body. His mouth was dry and stung with blisters, his lungs squeezed tight in alarm behind his ribs, and his muscles spasmed in rock-hard, sting-hot spasms until his bones creaked with the pressure.
Nick screamed. Half human panic and half a crow’s fury. The Wild—or the dour shadow of it—darkened around Lach as he wrenched the knife free and Gregor tasted Nick in the back of his throat. His knees wanted to give way under him, but he forced them to lock and hold him up. The shadow of a girl, draggle-haired and wet, leaned against Lach’s back, and he shuddered. Her breath dripped like water, dank and misty, into his ear as she worked her fish-ragged lips.
Lach hesitated and something fogged over his eyes. His hand trembled as the dead thing cuddled closer, like a lover at a bonfire. Gregor’s blood dripped from the point of the knife as Lach hesitated, but Gregor couldn’t unlock his muscles enough to take advantage of the moment.
A hand—thin and ferociously freckled—grabbed Lach’s wrist and hauled him out of the girl’s embrace. For a second, Gregor saw her, gutted from clavicle to pubis and hollowed out by hungry things. Frayed bits of skin floated in the unseen currents as she screamed, face screwed in horrible, mute rage, and then drained away like suds down a plug hole.
Before Gregor could gather himself to react to the opportunity, rough hands grabbed him and forced him down to his knees.
“Enough,” Kath Fennick snapped as she took the knife out of Lach’s fingers. “Do you speak for the prophets now? We weren’t told to kill them, and I won’t be a murderer if I don’t have to be.”
No one in Lochwinnoch had ever looked at Danny and not realized he was Kath’s son. They shared the same face—sharper on her, kinder on him—as though Lisa hadn’t bothered to involve a man at all. People used to joke that was why Danny had come out tame, inescapably a dog no matter how Kath tried to make him fierce, but then Kath birthed her daughter. Still her face but so much a wolf that she howled before she spoke.
When Lach claimed to be Numitor, Gregor had assumed that Kath and the other wolves with more rank had scattered… or died. Instead, here she was, under Lach’s thumb. Da wasn’t dead—it was impossible, every wolf on the island would have felt that, even whatever hungry wolves still subsisted in Rome would have felt the balance of the world shift—but if Kath bent the neck to this, Da was gone.
The wolves scrambled up over the edge of the path, naked and barefoot in the snow with Jack dragging between them. Blood painted his face from forehead to jaw, and his arm had started to stitch the shredded meat back together with tender, pink stripes of new skin. Under the blood and clumps of muddy slush, his expression was drawn and bleak with anger as he was manhandled. As his muscles unlocked—agony soothed into agony he could work with—Gregor traded a grim look with his brother.
Lach wiped his forehead, greasy with cold sweat, and looked over his shoulder. When he saw nothing, he looked briefly relieved and then snorted as he turned back to Kath.
“It’s the Wolf Winter. We’re going to murder the world,” he said. Contempt curled the corner of his mouth. “Or do you plan to stay in Scotland and mind the hearth, bitch?”
There was a flash of tension as everyone waited for Kath’s reaction. Her spare, elegant face didn’t show anything as she tucked the knife into her belt. The loose folds of her dress flapped around her in the wind as she moved.
“You don’t murder a sheep or a cow,” she said. “Man will be our prey once Fenrir comes, and I’ll put my teeth in any throat he points me at. Wolves aren’t meat for the slaughter, Lach. Even cowards and traitors.”
Gregor growled at the insult, the sound thin as it squeezed through his still-tight throat. The “bitch” had been ignored, but the low snarl got him a scathing look from Kath before she dismissed him.
“If the prophets want them dead, let them do it themselves. They’ve enough blood on them that a few more pints won’t make a difference,” she said.
Lach scowled at her. “You’re not my mam,” he pointed out. “I don’t need anyone to mind my conscience. I’m the Numitor now. I tell you what’s right.”
Kath made no attempt to hide the mockery in her thin smile. “Will you tell the prophets that?” she asked. “If they want them alive?”
The reminder of his leash made Lach blanch and backhand Kath across the face. The ridge of his knuckles split her lip against her teeth. Blood dripped down her chin, and she wiped it away on the back of her hand. She couldn’t hide the contempt on her face, but Lach had used up his courage for the night.
“Fine, then,” he spat as he turned his back. “Take them. Kennel them with the dogs. The prophets will be here tomorrow. I’ll tell them of your loyalty.”
Kath spat blood onto the snow. “Wolves don’t need words, even prophets,” she said. “They’ll see my loyalty, not hear it.”
She turned her back and stalked away. The wolves who had Gregor pulled him up onto his feet and marched him after Kath. After an uncertain look at the back of Kath’s head, Lach’s wolves dragged Jack along with them.
“Where’s Danny?” Jack asked Kath in a harsh voice.
The question made Gregor flinch guiltily and look around for Nick. He hadn’t forgotten about his mate, but it had been a long time since he’d cared about anyone outside his own skin. Back at the fence, Ellie showed a wet, torn coat to Lach, one hand shoved through a hole as though that would explain why a sort-of-human had gotten away from her. Lach raised his hand again but stayed it as she hunched her shoulders and curled her lip in a sneer. Another she-wolf—old enough to show silver in her muzzle and ears, so either Fern or Elsie, but without a wolf’s nose Gregor couldn’t tell which—growled and flattened her ears at him.
The Old Man could have beaten a wolf raw on the steps of his house and no one would have shown a tooth to him, not even the wolf on the ground. But then they all knew the Old Man never would. Da had always thought cruelty was inefficient.
It was good to know that Lach might call himself Numitor, but even the wolves that guarded his back didn’t trust him entirely. Even better to know, as a crow cawed angrily from somewhere in the storm, that the bird had kept Nick safe.