by TA Moore
“If what she’s doing matters so much,” he said. “Why did you try so hard to get away?”
Nick turned his head and kissed him quickly, tenderly. “You weren’t here,” he said. “Now you are.”
“No,” Gregor repeated through the metallic taste that clung to his tongue. The last time Rose got hold of Nick, she killed him. Gregor didn’t care what happened to the humans in their burrow, but he wouldn’t risk that death would give Nick back again. He rested his forehead against Nick’s and breathed him in. “Stay here. Heal. I’ll deal with them.”
Nick grabbed his arm and lifted it. The cuff slid back to reveal the still-raw welts that wrapped around his wrists, crisscrossed over the bone where they’d twisted the wire.
“You’re hurt,” Nick said, “and the soldiers out there are ready for trouble. If I hand myself over, it would buy us time. And if they were going to kill me, they’d have done it already.”
Gregor took his hand back and flexed his fingers. It still hurt, but the sharp sting of raw meat had faded to tenderness and itchiness.
“No.”
Nick narrowed his eyes. “You can’t just keep saying no.”
“I disagree.” Gregor caught the nape of Nick’s neck and pulled him in to plant a kiss on his forehead. “Stay here. I won’t let Rose take you again. So, turn yourself in? You’ll get us both killed.”
That warning finally sank in. Nick made a reluctant sound of agreement and stepped back, out of the way. He hunched down into his quilted jacket, nose tucked into the collar despite the reek, as Gregor manhandled the door open. The water from the lake had frozen on the door, a thick rime that worked its way into the seams and cracks. Gregor put his shoulder to it and shoved. It creaked—a low, ground-out sound that hooked some atavistic “get off the ice” reaction in the pit of Gregor’s stomach—and held. He stepped away and put his back into the next shove.
The impact made his bruised collarbones ache, but it broke the frozen seal and the door cracked open. Chunks of broken ice dropped onto the ground outside.
“At least take my boots,” Nick said.
“You need them more.”
“I can sit on the boat.”
Gregor kicked a last chunk of ice out the door. “They’d just get in my way.
“Like me,” Nick said. The frustration and self-hatred in his voice was familiar. And the fear. “If I weren’t blind, I could help. I could—”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “And if I still had my wolf, I’d have killed Rose in the Sannocks’ graveyard, and she’d have never touched you again. What you’ve lost is like the cold, Nick, you’ve got to learn not to mind it.”
A hoarse chuckle—and maybe Nick couldn’t hear the bird anymore, but Gregor could in the rough edges of the laugh—made Gregor look over his shoulder. He raised his eyebrows. Nick shrugged at the mute question.
“I can’t imagine you any more dangerous,” Nick admitted. “Even if you were a wolf.”
Gregor couldn’t help but preen at the compliment, even though he knew Nick wouldn’t say the same if he’d ever met him as a wolf.
“You’d have been terrified,” he said with a smirk.
Nick canted his head to the side so he could rub his jaw. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Gran’s stories never painted wolves in a good light—gluttons and killers, the Run-Away Man, all her monsters.”
“I guess we weren’t monster enough for her,” Gregor said as he put his shoulder to the door again. “So she had to make better ones. Stay here. I’m getting sick of having to track you down.”
He kicked the ice out of the way and squeezed through the gap. Frozen water curled up over the edge of the small loch, braced on icy fingers that dug into the gray slurry of churned-up snow. The water was gray, a scum of fresh-fallen snow on the surface that curdled as the wind stirred it up like stew.
“Jack has his wolf,” Nick said. “Had his wolf when Gran took him. It didn’t do him much good.”
Gregor breathed in. It was so cold that the air didn’t feel like something that should be in his lungs, and it eddied from his lips like smoke as he exhaled. Rose had skinned Jack to make monsters, stitched wolf skin and rank ink to curse-putrid flesh. Neither of them—the wolf or his shadow—had been good enough to end Rose.
“I was always better at being a wolf. Jack’s the better man,” he said. “Ironic. Close the door.”
WARM SPIT hit Gregor’s cheek and dripped down onto his shoulder. It was chased with guttural, ranted curse words as he pinned the woman up against a tree. Her lashes were scarred with the same blisters that puckered Nick’s eyelids, and the ripe smell of her hatred pulsed in the air like a heartbeat.
“They’ll flay you, and I’ll wear your skin for my winter coat,” she ranted, strings of bloody saliva strung between her lips. “I’ll see out the winter in your guts to keep me warm. They’ll make me a god! They’ve told me your secrets, whispered them in my ear at night! One day—”
Useless. Like the others.
Gregor dragged her off the tree and broke her neck. She fell silent midword, her inflamed eyes wide open and blind as snow filmed them. He set her down at the base of the tree, her hands in her lap and her tangled red hair pulled out by the wind, and left her there.
The cold had sharpened as though a frost giant had belched the storm out from the Wild. Gregor could feel the pressure of it in his bones as he looped away from the dead woman. His joints felt swollen and rigid, as if they’d seize up if he stopped moving. Like the people they’d seen on their way north, naked and stiff in the cairns they’d scooped out of snowdrifts.
He didn’t think the cold would kill him, even now. But the idea of being stored like a trout in the icebox until Surtr brought a brief spring and fire to thaw him out didn’t appeal either.
A radio crackled somewhere in the white. Gregor paused, weight balanced on the ball of his feet, and cocked his head to the side as he listened.
The radio blurted out static again, a few words buried in the noise, and then a muffled man’s voice growled an impatient response.
“Not yet,” he snapped. “And after he dragged my ass into the cold, if I see the bastard, I’ll shoot him rather than bring him back.”
The other end of the radio snapped something but was clicked off midword. Something dark, a shadow against the white, arched through the snow and cracked against a tree or a rock—something hard enough to make it crack and splinter.
A second later the muffled voice in the storm growled a frustrated “Fuck it.”
Gregor loped toward the voice. Wolf paws, with broad pads and thick fur, were made to hunt in the snow. Human feet weren’t, but barefoot was better than booted. Gregor could feel the ground underfoot, adapt to the bite of a sharp rock against his sole or the hip-jarred drop of a snow-concealed hole.
The man was a squat block of gray and white against a world of white and gray. His heavy, winter-hued camo gear padded him from the shoulders down and smudged the edges of him into the landscape. It worked well enough, but camouflage only worked until it didn’t. Enough winter-coated rabbits had learned that lesson at Gregor’s fangs over the years.
Something made the hair on the back of the man’s neck stand on end. He started to turn in reaction, heavy rifle half-raised in his hands just as Gregor tucked his shoulder down and tackled him. A startled grunt escaped the man, and as they crashed down into the snow, his finger tightened on the trigger. The gun fired blindly into the storm and hit something that howled. It sounded human… until it didn’t.
Gregor’s ears rang from the retort of the gun, a pulse of blood against the bones of his skull, and he had to struggle to ignore the pain. He threw a quick punch at the man’s black-masked face, but the man jerked his head to the side. Gregor’s knuckles caught the smoked-lens goggles and knocked them up onto guy’s scarred forehead. Brown eyes, whites blotched with blown red blood vessels, squinted up at Gregor.
“Get the fuck off me,” the man spat through his frost-crusted mask.
“You crazy son of a bitch.”
He jabbed the gun up in a quick, harsh blow that caught the side of Gregor’s head. Blood dripped into Gregor’s eyes and he snarled in frustration at himself. Weeks of fights against the prophets’ monsters, just violence and flesh that almost healed around Gregor’s fangs, had made him careless. Even a human could be dangerous.
Not as dangerous as Gregor—still, even now—but still.
The man drove his knee up into Gregor’s groin. The impact was blunted by the thick padding of the snowsuit, but it still hurt, and then the man tried to throw him off. Gregor spat a curse between his teeth and yanked the gun out of the man’s hands. He tossed it away and grabbed the hood pulled tight around the man’s head. Then he punched the screwed-up, half-masked face with a balled fist until his knuckles came away bloody and the man went limp under him.
He was still alive. Gregor could hear his heartbeat hammer against the inside of his chest and smell the sharp, acrid chemicals pumped out with fear and pain. When Gregor slapped his battered face, he groaned and tried to turn away. Conscious too.
Gregor rolled off the man and scrambled to his feet. He wiped his bloody face on the back of his wrist and bent down to grab the guy by the collar.
“You and me need to talk,” he said.
THE MAN—the tag sewn onto the front of his jacket said BOYD—leaned back against the tree, shivering as the wind battered him with icy snow. The dense grove of trees was some protection, but not much. They creaked in the wind with a deep groan like frozen dark water. Blood hung in the air, metallic and salty-appetizing, and Gregor could feel the Wild’s expectation close in around him. The Wild was built of things that had happened before, and a bloody warrior in an isolated clearing was made for sacrifice.
He ignored it. This once he found himself disinclined to serve the Wild any more than he already had. It was a glutton, but it should have had its fill today.
If Gregor killed the man, it would be for Nick, nothing else.
The Wild still waited. Blood was blood, and Gregor knew it wouldn’t care why he shed it. But he did.
“Not going to tie me up?” Boyd asked thickly.
“Why bother?” Gregor asked. He picked up a handful of snow to scrub his face clean. Cold and impossibly clean, it stung in the gouge over his eyebrow. He rubbed the pink melt over his fingers, worked it into the creases between his knuckles to scrape out the blood. “I don’t need to keep you long.”
Boyd laughed, a choke with no humor in it, and reached up to peel the bloody, half-frozen mask away from his face. His skin was pale, blotched with chilblain-raw blisters, and bruises stood out like paint against his skin. He’d been handsome in a blunt way before his nose was broken, canted to the left as his eyes puffed up around it.
“You’re not a professional,” Boyd assessed. He was breathless, his words choppy as he spat them out on smoky lungfuls of cold air and shivered as the cold soaked through his suit. “Otherwise you’d know to try and… put me at ease. Make me think… I can trust you.”
Gregor brushed his hands together and thought about that. “I don’t care if you trust me,” he said after a second. “If you answer me, that’ll be useful. If not….”
He tilted his head to the side to listen to the storm. The sound of occasional gunfire could be heard over the wind as anger and blindness made the other soldiers twitchy.
“You aren’t out here alone,” Gregor finished as he turned back to Boyd.
Boyd licked chapped lips. “That’s not—” He stopped, and some shred of wit clawed through the murk the prophets’ brew had filled his head with. “Who do you work for? What do you want?”
“Stupid questions,” Gregor said. “Look around you. Does this look like the world you made? A world where your alliances mattered?”
“It’s just a storm.”
Gregor shrugged. It wasn’t his job to teach some stranger the catechism of the wolves. Ignorance might be a kinder state to die in.
“There’s an old woman at your burrow,” he said. That was where the Wild had spat him out, above the ground the soldiers had filled with tunnels and concrete. It offended him somewhat that they’d come into his country to build their bolt-hole and no wolf had noticed. This was outside of the scent-marked borders of the Pack’s land—distances in the Wild were still off, folded in on themselves around the dead tissue of the Sannocks’ grave—but they should have noticed. Maybe the prophets hadn’t wanted them to. “You want to fuck her.”
Boyd flushed, two swipes of red hectic on his cheeks—guilt and disgust stitched together with confusion.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he forced out through his teeth as they chattered. “I’m not going to tell you anything. Go to hell.”
“Her brother’s claim predates any she might make,” Gregor said. “The old woman. Or you’re useless to me. Like the others.”
Boyd pulled a face, his expression exaggerated as stiff muscles moved clumsily, and he ducked his chin down into the padded collar of his jacket.
“She’s not there,” he said. His eyes flickered nervously toward the blind white gaps between the trees instead of to Gregor and his sharp grin. “Not officially. But nobody says anything, they just act like she’s always been there. Or that she’s still not there, like half the time they can’t see her. Only the doctor talks to her.”
Gregor crouched down next to Boyd. He ignored the flicker of calculation in Boyd’s brown eyes and tapped a finger against his scarred forehead. It was a still-tender scar, the skin still thin and damp where it stretched over the bone, but it should have been raw meat and pus still.
“A bird did that,” he said. “A raven the size of an eagle.”
Boyd coughed out a nervous laugh and reached up to touch the same spot Gregor had. He touched his hairline with gloved fingers and grimaced as the seams scraped the half-healed spot. “Size of a fucking Labrador. I swear—” He stopped abruptly, and his eyes shifted back to Gregor, a quick check that went from his shoulders to the wolf-coarse tangle of his hair. “You. Was that you there, with the bird and the dark-haired man?”
“I’m with the bird, my brother was with the dog.”
“I didn’t see a dog.”
“You just said you did.”
Boyd rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and let it drop. “The woman. Who is she? Why is she there?”
He leaned forward, his body tense as he focused on the answers. Apparently, he’d misjudged his role. Gregor braced his hand against the man’s chest and shoved him back against the tree with a thump.
“I ask. You answer,” he said.
Boyd exhaled, the moisture from his breath frozen into the stubble of his beard. “I don’t have any answers,” he said. “You’re right. None of this—fuck it’s cold—none of this is how it should be. Okay? The fucking weather. The fact we got here… and nobody is here. Nobody that’s meant to be. And everyone’s… they’re not right. And it’s so damn cold. It’s so cold, and I’ve been cold places. Not like this. Even when I dream, it’s cold.”
“I don’t care.”
Boyd fumbled his jacket open, the raw rip of Velcro surprisingly loud over the wind, and reached in to pull out a flask wrapped in the same camouflage print as his uniform. Glove-clumsy fingers popped the cap off, and he lifted it to his lips.
“I’m not right,” he said. “Should have told you to fuck off. Should have let you kill me. But—”
Gregor slapped the flask out of his hand. The bottle flew through the air and bounced off a tree. Green-tinted amber liquid ran down the bark of the tree and puddled on the snow. Boyd howled in furious loss and elbowed Gregor out of the way as he lunged after the flask. He scrambled over the ground on his hands and knees in a desperate bid to save something.
The liquor had soaked into the snow. Boyd scraped up chunks of frost with both hands and shoved them into his mouth to chew at the ice. He sucked at his gloved fingers where the cloth had stained.
Gre
gor grabbed the back of Boyd’s collar and dragged him away from the mess. It went against his nature to save someone from their own weakness, but Boyd was only useful because he hadn’t drunk as much of the liquor as the others. Or it hadn’t had enough time to work on him yet, at least. Nick thought that, with time, the prophets’ converts would recover, whatever the liquor burned out would regrow, but he wanted to believe that. Gregor wasn’t so sure.
The soul didn’t heal, or at least not well. The scabbed-over hollow that Rose had left in Gregor when she cut the wolf out of him was evidence of that.
For now, Boyd was reasonable enough to talk, and Gregor wanted to keep him that way. He shoved him back against the tree, and it shed snow and chunks of ice around them.
“That stuff isn’t good for you,” he said. Curiosity prickled, and he paused long enough to ask, “Haven’t you noticed?”
Boyd sucked the frost off his lips. “It’s medicine,” he said, a slice of something blank in his eyes. “Doctor Ewan gave it to us. He said it’s like quinine… or something… it works on the blood. It helps with the cold.”
“The doctor,” Gregor interrupted. Ewan was the ginger prophet’s name, the one that had no stolen skin and carried on Rose’s work out in the world. Nick’s grandfather. “This Ewan, he’s the one who talks to the old woman?”
“She’s so beautiful,” Boyd said, horror in his voice. “All raw meat and blisters, but I want her. I don’t even know why she’s there. It was meant to be—I don’t know—politicians. Scientists. People who get to put the world back together. And us. To keep them safe.”
“Guard dogs,” Gregor said with contempt. Even before Rose put her rotten teeth to them, they were trained to come to heel. And kill. “What is she to the doctor?”
Boyd impatiently tossed his head back. It cracked against the tree hard enough to make Gregor twitch at the noise.
“What is it to you?” Boyd snapped. He leaned forward, his chest braced against Gregor’s arm, and got into his face. His breath stank, the oily, sharp reek of the drink caught on his tongue, and he stared into Gregor’s eyes. Too close, too direct. It made the back of Gregor’s itch with the urge to rise to match the aggression. “I don’t know you. You could be part of this.”