by TA Moore
“Don’t!” Jack grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. “It’s Danny.”
Surprise loosened Gregor’s fingers, and the prophet slumped back against the wall. Now that he looked, he could see Danny’s face under the skin of the wolf, the narrow muzzle draped over the frame of an old pair of heavy glasses.
“Finally got to play wolf, huh?” he said roughly.
Jack shoved past him and dragged Danny, stinking hide and all, into a hard, desperate kiss. He slid his hands up under the wet hide to tangle through Danny’s soft curls.
“You smell like shit,” Jack said as he leaned back. He grazed his thumb along Danny’s cheekbone. “Are you okay?”
“Kath was meant to warn you,” Danny said. He pulled the skin off with a shudder and dropped it through the trapdoor into the smoke. “You weren’t meant to get hurt.”
Jack cupped his hand around the back of Danny’s neck with rough affection and pressed their foreheads. “We wanted to find Rose and her prophets,” he shrugged. “We did that.”
“Gross,” Bron said. “If you’re done slobbering on my brother, can we go?”
Danny looked at her and then away. He had played human too long if he was embarrassed by nakedness. A split second later, Danny jerked his head back and looked down.
“Are you pregnant?” he blurted.
Bron rolled her eyes at him. “No, I’ve just not farted for a while,” she said. “Is that what you learn at your fancy human schools, how to state the obvious?”
“I just…. Mam never said,” Danny spluttered.
“Why would she?” Bron asked. “You’ve not met it. Why would you care more about it than your own sister? Gods, you’re dumb.”
“Yeah, well, I bet that baby can’t wait to be born so it doesn’t have to listen to you all day,” Danny shot back. “I just rescued you!”
“Rescued by a dog,” Bron said. “I’ll tell everyone that.”
Jack tightened his hand protectively on Danny’s shoulder. “Danny, come on,” he said. “She’s what she is.”
“Don’t tell him what to do,” Bron snapped. “He’s not your pet.”
She shoved him out of the way, getting a growl from Jack, and threw her arms around Danny. For a minute she must have forgotten that he was the dog, because she squeezed him so tightly he grunted.
“I bet you were scared,” she said. “But I told you it’d work.”
Danny rested his face against her dark curls. “Yeah. You did.” He looked up at Jack. “Now we need to get out of here before the prophets realize we’re alone. Mam’s looking for a fire, but—”
Jack gave Gregor a baffled look for a moment—at least their sibling hatred was straightforward—and then shook his head. “But we’re not,” he said. “Danny, get Bron and the kids out of here. Gregor and I will cut the dogs loose. They might be prophets and monsters, but they’re still just blood and bone. We can end this.”
No. They couldn’t. The dogs would die, and Gregor supposed he might too in his current state, but they could hurt the prophets enough that they’d be easy prey for the wolves.
“Let’s go,” he said as he peeled John from around his neck and passed him and the pup to Danny. Shauna scowled at the dog but allowed Gregor to pass her off to Bron.
No one questioned them as they joined the prophets, ragged furs stitched tightly around their naked bodies, as they fled from the thick, oily smoke that filled the house and into the heart of a storm.
One prophet stumbled over Shauna, gave her a startled look, and opened his mouth to raise the alarm. Gregor grabbed him by his stolen skin, dead fur rough and scratchy against his fingers, and yanked him.
Wolves killed with their fangs and their endurance, long bloody hunts over hills and woods until they’d worn their prey down for the end. But Gregor had grown up a farm boy too. He’d wrung the necks of chickens, snapped a car-struck fox’s neck to put it out of its misery. He broke the prophet’s neck with a sharp twist before the man could shout anything. The prophet wasn’t dead, but he didn’t need to be. Gregor dropped him to the ground and left it to the snow to cover him.
Bron flashed him a quick, sharp smile, scooped up Shauna, and ran after her brother.
The dog was probably more use to her and the baby than he was.
It was harder to dismiss the thought than it had been—even anger wasn’t enough to burn it out—but Gregor pushed it to the back of his mind and followed Jack’s footprints around the side of the house. He’d already broken open the kennel cage and was dragging them out.
He stopped, caught on… something.
Rose stepped up behind him and laid a rebuilt hand on his shoulder. The nails still hadn’t grown back on her fingers, and she pressed down with the tender nubs.
“I ruined you,” she said. “Hate me for it if you want, but you hate him more, don’t you? I can help.”
Gregor steeled himself against the terrible lure of her beauty, tried to believe in the ruin he could see out of the corner of his eye. “I already told you,” he said. “I don’t want any wolf from you.”
“Liar,” she purred. The alien bulge of her swollen stomach pressed against him, hot and too soft. He wanted her, a hook in his balls, and he wanted to scrape off the skin she’d touched. “You are a wolf born, Gregor, your da’s true heir. All you are is want. You want your wolf, my grandson, your pack… and I can give them to you. Just give me him.”
“How?” he hadn’t meant to ask.
He could hear the slime of satisfaction in her voice. “You’ll know.”
Something cold pressed against Gregor’s palm and she was gone. He glanced down and then shoved the dented metal flask into his pocket. The dogs were out of the kennel and fell in behind Jack—a pack of sorts. Gregor swallowed the gross taste in his mouth, the temptation, and pushed his heavy legs into a lope.
“You don’t need me for this,” he spat the truth out like a weapon. “I’m going to find Nick. Whatever Rose’s plan is, Nick’s part of it. We can’t let her get him again.”
Jack looked torn. It was probably a lie. They both knew that without his wolf, Gregor wasn’t much use. Or maybe Jack hoped Gregor would get killed and let Jack off that hook.
“If we wipe them out here, her plans are done anyhow,” Jack protested. “Without the prophets….”
“They’re just tools,” Gregor said. “Just like Lachlan, just like the monsters she made back in Girvan. As long as she’s not here, this isn’t over.”
Jack pressed his mouth together in a grim line, but he couldn’t argue.
“Go,” he said as he clapped Gregor on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of Bron till you get back.”
Gregor curled his lip. “I don’t need your permission, Jack,” he said. “You aren’t anything yet. A pack of dogs won’t make you Numitor.”
He reached for the Wild, and it answered. Even through the silt of the Sannock Dead’s rot that streaked through it, it pulled him sideways out of the world.
Chapter Twelve—Nick
“YOU’RE LUCKY you still have your toes.”
The clipped voice didn’t give Nick any clue as how he should take that. Was he lucky that they’d been able to save his toes, or that the owner of the voice hadn’t cut them off? He lay on what felt like an actual bed and stared at the inside of his eyelids as he debated whether to open them and find out.
“Mister, if you don’t want to go back out in the snow,” the voice said harshly, “you better sit up and tell me what you’re doing up here.”
Doctor. The prickly correction stung the tip of Nick’s tongue. He swallowed it before it got away from him. Until he knew where he was, and why, let them make the assumptions.
Nick gave in and opened his eyes. It turned out to be a grim-faced man in a suit—in a tie—flanked by two soldiers, assault rifles cradled across their bodies as they stared at him. Nick was sprawled over the thin mattress of a narrow cot, padded cuffs around his wrists attached to the raised sides. An IV was plugged into hi
s arm, the familiar itch of surgical tape against his skin, and the walls were the yellowed white of a dozen wards he’d been in over the years.
For a second Nick wondered if he’d had the psychotic break he’d spent his life afraid of, if the last weeks had been the hyperrealized work of a brain destined by nature and nurture to slip out of true eventually. It should have been a relief—that none of the monsters were real and his evil gran hadn’t sacrificed him to… something—but all he felt was a terrible hollow loss in his chest.
“Gregor…,” he muttered… or tried. His tongue was so dry it was nearly leather and stuck to the roof of his mouth. His eyes burned too with a hot, sun-scorched itch that his cuffs stopped him rubbing at.
“Is that your name?” the suited man asked. He gestured for one of the soldiers to lower his gun and get some water. Nick reached for the glass as it was held out but was brought up short by the rattle of his cuffs. The soldier had to hold it to his lips for him so he could suck the tepid water down. “Gregory?”
Nick waited for the bird to cackle. It was mute. His head felt empty.
“No, I was…. Nick, my name’s Nick.” He lifted his arm as far as the shackles would allow. “Why am I in these? What did I do?”
“James Malloy,” the suit introduced himself instead of answering. “Do you remember how you got here?”
Nick thought about it and then shook his head. He remembered the Run-Away Man, childhood monster given flesh and bones, and that he’d done what Gran had always told him. Run.
Smart as budgie.
A slideshow of memories flickered through his head, out-of-sequence and oddly framed. Snow and fear, pain in his feet, the panic in his head that the bird picked up from him like an attack. A road. That image flicked sharp and clear into Nick’s mind—the snowed-crusted lorry wedged under a bridge and the trail of cars abandoned behind it. Belongings—important enough to pack in the car but not carry on your back—piled up at the side of the road.
Then he was here. Nick squinted and tried to peek through the bird’s eyes to see the Wild, but there was nothing there. His head was quiet, and the world was as solid as he’d spent years and pills determined to believe it was.
“I don’t remember,” he said carefully. “I was on the road, looking for a sign to follow into town—”
“I thought everyone up here had evacuated?” Malloy said pointedly.
“Not everyone,” Nick said. “Some people, the crofts have been in their family for generations or everything they own is in their sheep herd. And some people don’t like to be told what to do.”
“And you are?”
“A doctor. I didn’t want to leave my patients, and then I couldn’t leave,” Nick said, because it seemed to make sense. He rattled his cuffs again. “What did I do?”
Malloy considered that answer for a moment, his eyes narrowed, and then nodded toward the guards. They backed off to the door, and Malloy pulled a chair over to the edge of the bed to sit down. He crossed long legs.
“We found you in the snow outsides, naked and raving,” he said. “You mustn’t have been out there that long, though, because you seem… intact.”
The glance at Nick’s groin under the threadbare white sheet was obvious enough to make Nick’s ears hot. He shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t remember anything,” he said. “Where am I?”
The odd, lewd distraction in Malloy’s face snapped off as he pulled his “give nothing away” mask back on.
“Somewhere you shouldn’t be,” he said as he stood up. “But another doctor might be useful. We’ll discuss it. Get some rest, Nicholas. You’ll need it.”
There it was again, the flash of furtive lust that made Nick squirm uncomfortably. He wasn’t a prude—a loner but not a prude. People had found Nick attractive before, but they hadn’t looked at him like that. Malloy eyed Nick like he didn’t care if the interest was mutual, like maybe it would be better if it wasn’t.
“Could you?” He held his arm up.
A small smile folded Malloy’s mouth, and he licked the corner of his lips. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
Nick accepted that with a nod and lay back against the thin pillows. He let his eyes flutter closed and evened his breath out into the slow patterns of steady sleep despite the itch that intensified. Malloy didn’t move for a second, and then his hand touched Nick’s thigh, warm through the sheet. It took an effort of will not to twitch as his skin crawled and his balls tightened, but Nick managed it.
The hand slid higher, and then one of the guards shifted with a creak of leather and stiff canvas and cleared their throat. Malloy snatched his hand away.
“He seems harmless,” Malloy said, a thread of tension in his voice. “And he could be useful.”
One of the two soldiers spat. “We should have killed the bastard,” he said flatly. “He’s not supposed to be here, and we’re meant to let him eat our food? Breathe our air? Ewan should have left him in the snow. It would have been kinder. At least Big-Nose wouldn’t have seen it coming.”
“He can earn his keep,” Malloy said, his voice starchy.
Someone laughed crudely.
“Enough,” Malloy snapped. “We have other things to do. Tell Ewan that he found Nicholas here, so he can keep an eye on him.”
There was a grunt in answer. Nick listened as the door opened, feet scuffed over the floor, and it closed again. He waited for a moment and listened to the room. After a few years of working in a morgue, you learned what a room where no one else was breathing sounded like.
Once Nick was satisfied he was alone, he lifted his head and opened his eyes.
The room was silent. There was nothing pressed to the sliver of reflection in the metal-covered cupboards, no dry, dead eye that watched him through the crack under the door. When he rattled at the inside of his brain, nothing shed feathers or croaked laughter at him.
None of it had been real—to the monsters, not the Wild, and not even Gregor and his awkwardly sweet mouth. Or that’s what they wanted him to think.
Nick snorted to himself as he braced his feet against the mattress and pushed himself as far up the bed as he could with the cuffs limiting his movement. He sounded paranoid, Nick knew that, but his world had never been this normal….
Maybe he’d believe the Wild and the horror he’d not quite survived back in Girvan was the result of a break with reality, that the stress of that endless rote delivery of cold sad corpses had made his brain fold back into his memories of Gran’s old stories to make sense of it.
Nick could even doubt Gregor, although that one hurt like a knife in his gut. The idea that someone could love him when even his gran had struggled with it had always been hard to buy.
The monsters and the dead things had always been there, though. Dry, dead eyes that watched him through the crack in a cupboard door or things that scraped bone-fingers against the mirror in a dark room. Nick had learned to turn a blind eye to them, afraid that no matter how many times he told himself he wasn’t crazy, the evidence was right there. But when he looked, they were always there.
Even, Nick glanced from the cannula plugged into his arm to the IV stand, medication hadn’t ever shifted them before. The straps on the cuffs were too short to let him reach the needle, but he squirmed over onto one hip and caught the thin plastic tube between his teeth. A yank of his head ripped it out of his arm with a quick, dry flash of pain that should have been worse.
He left the IV to drip onto the floor and his arm to drip bright red blood on the sheets as he reached down over the side of the bed. The metal rim of the bed was cold under his fingers as he followed it along until he found where the strap was fastened.
Medical restraints weren’t prison shackles.
Nick caught his tongue between his lips as he twisted his hand around so he could pull at the buckle. The tendons in his wrist pulled tight as he fumbled at the rough leather, his little finger curled in a cramp, but he stuck to it. He finally worked his thumb into the
loop and pulled it out. A tug unraveled the stiff leather from around the bed frame. It dangled limply from the cuff still around Nick’s wrist, and he twisted over onto his side to do the other hand.
They weren’t actually that hard to get out of if you weren’t panicked.
Once his hands weren’t leashed to the bed, Nick pulled the heavy, padded cuffs off and rubbed his eyes. Then he threw the sheet back. He was naked, all pale skin and the old scar on his stomach, but all his bits were still there. Someone had bandaged his feet in fat, overstuffed socks of gauze and surgical tape, but when he wiggled his toes, it didn’t hurt.
If he’d somehow made it from Girvan to here without the bird inside him, he wouldn’t have toes or fingers.
He scrambled out of the cot, goose bumps pimpled over his skin at the chill, and hunted through the cupboards and drawers—pills and rolls of bandages, a scalpel left in a tray, shreds of gray flesh still stuck to it. He grimaced at it but set it aside for later. He didn’t know where he was exactly, or why anyone else was there, but he knew doctors. Every last one of them would have a spare set of scrubs stashed somewhere to change into after you were bled on, barfed on, or both.
Bottom drawer beside the single cot. The gray tracksuit bottoms were a bit short on him, the cuffs just above his bony ankles, but they’d do. He zipped the hoodie on over his bare chest and left the bandages on as he shoved his feet into the grubby white sneakers. It meant they almost fit.
Now what?
It wasn’t a hard question. Or it shouldn’t have been. It doubled Nick over, his hands braced against the edge of the counter, as he tried to convince his lungs to let in the air he’d sucked up. His brain felt pinched, and behind the scar on his chest, he could feel his heart batter against his breastbone.
The old go-to mantra bounced around his head—Gran was crazy, I’m not—but it didn’t help the way it used to. He reached up and dragged his fingers over his collarbone, but there was nothing there. The old nail pendant had been left behind in Girvan, and it had never been meant to help him. Not really.