by TA Moore
It staggered away from Gregor and ducked to paw blindly at its head. The thick bone spurs that jutted from the backs of its wrists raked down Nick’s wings and hooked in. It dragged Nick off its face and pinned him down to the floor. Nick shrieked and squirmed, blood flicked from the ends of his wings as he flapped, and the monster snarled down at him.
Gregor pushed himself off the wall and jumped onto the monster’s back. He scrambled up the sweaty mound of it until he could grab a handful of the wiry mane that bristled around the back of the deformed skull. It cut into his fingers and stung like a nettle. The gun jutted out of the thing’s back, canted to one side, but Gregor ignored it. He shoved his hand down into the raw wound. It was hot and wet, and the meat moved against Gregor’s skin as it tried to heal around him.
He closed his fingers around the monster’s spine. The vertebrae were thick as his fist and rough with chips and cracks where he’d battered it with the gun. Between them the spinal cord ran like a twisted root with a firm core under a pustule-caked, spongy layer.
Gregor grabbed it and yanked. It resisted for a moment and then split apart in his fingers. The reek that spilled out as the cord snapped made Gregor retch in disgust. If he thought the monsters couldn’t smell any worse, he’d been wrong.
The monster moaned in pain and confusion as its legs went from under it. The huge, bloody bulk of it rolled over onto its side, and its eyes bulged as it choked to death on its own lungs. Before it could, Jack, balanced on three legs, took its throat out.
Nick scrambled back to his feet, flicked his wings to settle his fingers, and preened himself angrily. One wing hung awkwardly and stuck out at odd angles, the feathers broken.
It would heal.
“I didn’t need help,” Gregor said. The bird gave him a skeptical look out of one black, shiny eye and then swiveled its head to look at him out of the other, as though the view might be different. “And if I did, it took you long enough.”
Nick shed his feathers and stood up. He looked unharmed, but the smell of his blood was ripe and sweet. Gregor took his shoulders and turned him around. Bloody red lines raked down his back from his bony shoulders to the curve of his ass.
“I’ll heal,” Nick said. He twisted his head around to check out the damage. “Even before the bird, I’d have healed.”
He shouldn’t have to, but Gregor was glad he would. The prophets had left enough scars on Nick. They didn’t get to claim any more of him.
Gregor tightened his fingers. “Just be careful,” he said. “I like all your bits the way they are.”
The bird glanced at him through Nick’s eyes, black and wicked. “Even me?”
He didn’t fall in love with the carrion god. He fell in love with a sharp-nosed man with restless, gentle hands and a stubborn streak. But without the bird, Nick would have been laid in a cold grave under the Scottish stones.
“I put up with you,” he said. Both of them grinned at that.
He stepped back and wiped his hands on his jeans. It didn’t make him sleep any better, but at least it didn’t feel like his stink so much.
“Did you find her?” Gregor asked. He watched Nick’s expression settle into unhappy lines. The old tension worried with sharp fingers at the scars on Gregor’s spirit. Under his skin the Wild slid uneasily in search of something to do. Nick had enough reasons to hate his grandmother, but reasons weren’t always enough?
Nick shook his head. “No sign of her,” he said. “The Pack hasn’t cleared the whole compound yet, but… it feels too easy for Gran.”
Every time Gregor breathed in, his chest ached in a dozen delicate fractures. His hands were red and chafed from contact with the sour innards of the monster. He wouldn’t have said “easy,” but he knew what Nick meant.
For all her flaws, Rose was a mean old Scottish wolf with a traitor’s mind. If she didn’t have anyone to torment, she’d make her own life difficult for practice.
“What about prophets?” Jack asked, his voice tight with the effort it took to pull his human skin back on. He crouched next to the dead monster, his forearm braced over his bare knee and his hair slicked to his scalp with blood. “I’ve seen monsters and madmen, but not one flayed hide.”
Nick started to shake his head. He stopped midmotion, and his eyes flickered past Gregor’s shoulder. The hair on the back of Gregor’s neck prickled, but he knew that if he turned around, there’d be nothing there.
Gunfire rattled from farther down in the bunker, and a woman screamed and spat out profanities mixed in the howl of rage. Wolves snarled and yelped, the sounds distorted as they bounced off the thick walls and high ceilings. The need to move—or sit down and die—twisted at Gregor’s guts.
“We don’t have time to gossip with shades,” he said. “Where’s my child?”
The reminder made Nick’s jaw tense as he refocused on Gregor. He swallowed and ignored the jab to his sore spot.
“They want to tell you something,” Nick said. “They want something from you.”
Gregor scowled and stepped away from the dead thing behind him. “From me?” he asked. “They can have anything but you.”
“Not you,” Nick said. He scratched the back of his neck and corrected himself. “Not just you.”
“Then what?” Jack asked. He braced one hand on the wall as he pushed himself up. Even with his wolf and the hot pulse of the Wild, he held himself carefully. One leg wasn’t quite ready to bear his weight. “What do they want?”
Nick blinked and his eyes shone with the bird’s bright wickedness. “Permission.”
It was obviously a trap. But—Gregor glanced at Jack and raised an eyebrow—it wasn’t as though there were a lot of options. The monsters could be killed, but if they didn’t find the prophets, then this was just another waypoint to the next atrocity.
“Fuck it,” Jack said. “Tell them to go on. Do it. The Numitor gives his leave.”
The flicker of anger on Nick’s face caught Gregor off guard for a second. Then it recognized it wasn’t Nick’s expression.
“They don’t need words,” Nick said precisely. “They need you to let them back in, the same way you locked them out.”
“That was Da.”
Nick twitched and glanced irritably at something next to him. This time Gregor could almost see it too—a hit of soft, greasy flesh and dry scoops of old injuries where fillets had been carved from it—but he turned away. If he didn’t have to look at the Sannock, he wouldn’t. They’d killed Nick once, tried to kill Gregor, and he couldn’t even blame them for it, since he saw the charnel house his kind had made of the Sannocks’ last hiding place.
The things should still have tried harder at death. Whatever peace Nick had made with them, Gregor didn’t share in it.
“They don’t… understand the difference,” Nick said. “So you’re good enough. They want to be free, but the only way is the same way they left the world. Through a wolf. Any wolf.”
Jack recoiled.
“The Pack would never agree,” he said.
“They don’t need to,” Gregor said. He shrugged when Jack looked at him. “You’re Numitor now. You speak for the Pack. If they don’t like your decisions, maybe they shouldn’t have been so quick to acclaim you.”
Gregor managed to keep his voice steady, but despite everything, the words tasted like bile on his tongue. Acceptance he had—without a wolf he’d never lead the Pack—but that didn’t mean he liked it.
“I can’t do that,” Jack said. He raked his hand through his hair, blood and scraps of skin matted into the curls. “They’d never forgive me. I might be Numitor, but I’d be the first with no wolves at my heels. No.”
Nick tilted his head slightly. “If you want your help, then you will.”
“We don’t,” Jack said. He spat on the bloody corpse of the old monster. “The prophets are here somewhere. We’ve torn down or burned every other lair they had. So we kill their monsters, and if we don’t find the prophets, then we wall them up in here to st
arve. Seal the Wild to them, the same way they did the Sannock.”
Nick took a deep breath, and it misted around his lips as he exhaled, as though the chill of winter had abruptly deepened.
“Last chance,” he said, voice thick with the crow’s rasp. “They won’t ask again.”
Three times. The old stories had the Sannock obsessed with rituals, with numbers and rules. If they said this was the last chance, it wasn’t something they’d revoke.
“Will Danny forgive you?” Gregor interrupted Jack before he could refuse again. He slipped the emotional knife between Jack’s ribs to find the tender part of his heart and then twisted. “If you let Rose get away again? After she tortured him and killed his ma? When she gutted his little sister like a fish and left her for him to find? If we don’t kill Rose, he will or die trying.”
For once Gregor didn’t take any pleasure in the flash of frustrated anger that twisted Jack’s face. They’d vied their whole lives to be Numitor, to be the one the Pack said was real and not the shadow. If Gregor were Jack, he would have tried to make the same choice.
But Gregor was just a man without a wolf or a child. He didn’t have the right to understand his brother’s hesitation.
Jack glared at him. “Since when do you care about Danny?’ he asked. “Or who I value? If you want the Sannocks’ help, Gregor, why don’t you bend over for them?”
“I would,” Gregor said. That might not be true, but what he said next was. “Except you’re the Numitor. You’re the one they need. Da never cared who loved him, Jack. Not even with us.”
Jack closed his eyes and took a quick, angry breath.
“Do it,” he said. “Whatever you need to do. Take whatever you need to take, but you do lasting harm to one of my people? I’ll find a way to kill you better than those old wolves did.”
For once the cold wind that blasted around them was nothing to do with the Winter. It was stale with old salt and older blood and full of muttered anger and hatred. The intensity of it prickled Gregor’s skin with goose bumps and an instinctive fear of what strange thing lurked in the dark. It was all the stronger for the knowledge that, for most people, Gregor was the thing to be afraid of.
The Sannock had their own reasons behind this aid, and it wasn’t forgiveness or kindness.
“There’s going to be a price,” the bird said. It hunched Nick’s shoulders and clicked his teeth. “We… regret… that.”
Jack grimaced and glanced at Gregor. Whatever he wanted, he seemed to think he’d gotten it. He took a deep breath, clenched his fists at his sides, and ducked his chin in a grim nod.
“Get on with it.”
Nick shifted into his feathers, a black bird that looked even bigger in the confines of the tunnel than it did in the world outside. Its wings hammered the air and drops of blood splattered over the walls from broken feathers as the Sannock wind swirled around it. The stirred-up mist of blood and ice chill outlined a spindle-long leg here and a tattered wing there, the planes of almost human faces and things that hadn’t even tried.
It turned Gregor’s stomach with a sour, inbuilt bile. He started to look away but caught a glimpse of Jack’s grim face before he could. If Jack could look—had to look—then so would Gregor.
The bird cawed angrily at the Sannock and snapped at them when they got too close. The pinch of its beak ripped shreds of them loose, but they didn’t draw back. With a final, frustrated croak, the bird jabbed its head forward. The pitted white awl of its beak stabbed into Jack’s eye with surgical precision.
Jack yelped and staggered back, his hand clapped to his face although it was too late to do any good. Blood and clearish goop dripped between his fingers and ran down over his knuckles.
It took a moment before Gregor could move. He didn’t know if it was shock or some sort of Sannock magic that froze him in place. Once he could move, he scrambled to Jack’s side and grabbed his arm.
“Let me see,” he said.
“Fuck off,” Jack hissed through clenched teeth as he tried to double over around the pain.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Gregor pulled Jack’s hand down and grimaced at the gory hole where a green eye should be. It was a small favor, but the bird had been precise. The eye was split and ruined, but Jack’s eyelid was intact, and it drooped over the socket when he blinked.
“I guess we don’t look the same anymore,” Jack said. His grin was bitter and crooked, with only one side of his mouth twisted up. “Finally.”
“It’ll grow back,” Gregor pointed out. “Eventually.”
Jack hissed and pressed his hand back to his face. His fingers dug into his brow bone. “It hurts. Why does it hurt so much?”
“More,” the bird croaked ominously from where it had landed on the dead monster. Gregor gave it a bleak look, and it fluffed its feathers at him before it stropped its beak clean on the thing’s ruff. “Soon.”
Gregor jerked Jack’s hand out of the way a second time. In the empty pit of his brother’s eye, ice spread like hoarfrost and the socket filled with a thin, gray sea fog that clotted like cobwebs. It smelled like Sannock.
Behind his back they shrieked with alien glee, and then the cold weight of them washed over Gregor. He felt—teeth rip through his flesh and crack his bones, heard a child scream like its world was over, and a red-haired woman with wolf’s eyes stirred his cock even as she put a knife to it—and then just a bone-deep despair that made his legs weak.
In his arms Jack screamed and convulsed, bent back until it seemed impossible his spine could hold. The wind pushed at his face and pried his eyes open so they could all fit. Behind him the bird screamed at them, furious and loud, and Gregor hung on to his brother.
In seconds the Sannock were done and their bleak, old grudge spread through the Wild. Gregor gagged on it, his mouth suddenly glutted with rancid meat, but it couldn’t touch him any more than the Wild could. There was no wolf left for them to get their teeth into, just a tender scar over a raw pocket of sour resentment. The Sannock filled him to bursting, until he could feel the ache as they crowded the sockets of his teeth. But they couldn’t get hold of him.
They spilled back out of him, into the Wild, and wolves screamed.
Jack was limp in Gregor’s arms. It felt strange. He laid Jack down on the ground and pressed a hand to his shoulder in… gratitude? Apology? He didn’t know.
“Did you have to?” he asked without looking around. He heard the rustle of the bird’s wings as it shrugged and then Nick’s answer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They thought so. The Sannock and the bird.”
Gregor grunted. “They’d know, I suppose.”
“The bird wasn’t surprised,” Nick said. “I think it always knew it would come to this.”
“It’s a god, Nick,” Gregor said. He slapped Jack’s face, one side and then the other. “It might love you, but you can’t trust it.”
Jack’s chest hitched as he sucked in a ragged breath of cold air. He pulled away from Gregor and propped himself on his elbow as he puked up thin bile and sticky shreds of goo.
“Would you have ever forgiven me?” he asked as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve when he was done. “For that?”
Gregor squeezed his shoulder. “I never forgave you for being born,” he said. “Not the man to ask.”
The sounds of agony bounced through the cold, concrete halls. Jack shuddered and used Gregor to scramble to his feet. He wiped under his eye gingerly with the back of his wrist. It mostly just smeared the goo. Nick grimaced at the mess and guiltily disappeared back under his feathers.
“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s go see what I’ve let loose.”
Chapter Twenty-Three—Gregor
THE BIRD led the way down into long, empty boxes of concrete in short, careful hops that cosseted its injured wing. It had been supplies, from the look of the boxes and packaging, and storage for things that humanity had thought precious.
Gregor stepped over a broken gold fram
e. Scraps of canvas still hung in the corners, thick with paint, but he couldn’t identify what it had been. Even if it had been whole, he’d have probably drawn a blank. Jack, shifted into his wolfskin, followed. The fur around his eye was dark and spiked with blood.
There were the dead too—monsters torn to shreds, deformed faces oddly human in the surprise of death. Two soldiers in Kevlar, armed with rifles, who were propped against each other as their bodies melted and dripped like colored ice.
The farther down they went, the colder it got. Gregor’s breath steamed, and he could feel the pressure of the cold in his chest with each breath.
“If you’re leading us into a trap,” Gregor grumbled at the bird, “you could have killed us up there and saved us the trek.”
It gave him a reproachful look over its wing, as though Jack’s blood wasn’t still caught in the pits on its beak. One last clumsy flight ended with it perched on top of a stack of broken boxes. It twisted its head around to preen its wing, the beak that had just taken out Jack’s eye oddly delicate as the bird plucked broken feathers.
The wolves slunk around the corner. Gregor felt what it was like to prey, a chill clutch at his heart and the sour pop of adrenaline in his veins. Next to him Jack flattened his ears and his thready, uneasy growl caught in his throat.
Gregor knew every wolf in the Pack that faced them, but he didn’t recognize them. Milky films covered their eyes from one corner to the other and matted thick winter coats down to their skin. Their shadows, cast in stark relief by the fluorescent lights, writhed and squirmed in a jittery transformation from wolf to… something else. Thin gray horns sprouted on one shadow, branched like a stag, and another stretched out long, spindly limbs—too many of them for a wolf—before they snapped back to four.
The Sannock in Ellie’s skin staggered forward. It wasn’t clumsy, but it tried to crawl when the wolf wanted to walk. Gregor could feel it through the Wild, like a taut line hooked through his gut. He wouldn’t have called the faded, dusty emotion that touched him enjoyment, but the Sannock took satisfaction in their discomfort.