by TA Moore
Gregor took a deep breath, the cold like splinters in his lung, and threw himself forward. He slammed into Fenrir’s shoulder, the full weight of his stocky frame barely enough to make the wolf grunt, grabbed a greasy, knotted hank of fur, and dragged him out of the world and into the Wild. Dragged them both.
Virgin snow crunched underfoot as Fenrir staggered at the sudden shift. He snarled and twisted around to snap at Gregor with sharp, jagged teeth. Gregor punched him on the nose and dragged himself in close enough to sink his teeth into the wound Jack had opened in Fenrir’s neck. The meat was dry, mealy with age, and the jelly of thick blood that coated Gregor’s tongue tasted like rotting apples and nails.
Gregor steeled himself against the urge to retch and swallowed the mouthful he’d torn free. It curdled as it hit his stomach, something so wrong his whole body wanted to puke it out, and Fenrir dragged them back into the World.
Danny was crouched in the snow, blood on his back and his arms, with the dead dogs clustered close around him. They snarled at Lachlan—whose eyes were wild and black with stolen power—as he stalked across the snow. Jack tore at a monster’s throat with desperation as he tried to squirm free of its grip in time to reach his lover.
“Nice try,” Gregor said as he reached up to grab Fenrir’s ear, twist, and yank them back into the Wild.
Again.
Again.
Danny as he spat blood into the snow.
The oddly shaped bundles of branches that memorialized the fallen Sannock in the Wild, lashed together with strips of human sinew and stacked for a fire that might never come.
A glimpse of Nick, one hand cupped over the wound pierced between his ribs, as he dragged a bloody prophet out from under Bron’s feet.
Again.
Again.
The thin, weak mewl of Gregor’s son on the wind, the gray-blue stain of the cold on newborn skin as it squirmed.
The dead hounds at the horned Sannock’s heels as they loped after Lachlan. The damned wolf, gray and choking on blood from his own lungs as he ran, and the wild bay of the new hunters on the wind.
Again.
Again.
It was Fenrir who gave up. His sides, ribs prominent through his staring coat, heaved, and his breath smoked from between his jagged, flesh-picked teeth. A long red tongue hung from his mouth, and his anger pushed at Gregor like the tide.
“You don’t need a body to walk the world. Not you,” Gregor said. He rested his forehead against Fenrir’s. The stink of old meat and sweat wasn’t as sweet as Nick’s scent, but it mingled with it in Gregor’s lungs. “You just want one, lonely old wolf. So take me.”
Fenrir tried to recoil in confusion, but Gregor didn’t let him go. He could taste the infection the prophets had left in his spirit when they cut his wolf out, the rot-hollowed cyst it had left.
Why?
The voice was the howl of the wind between trees, the gargle of blood in a throat as fangs bore down. Gregor stepped back and stared at Fenrir. He could feel the blood in his stomach, the ache in his chest as his heart slowed and struggled.
“Because you won’t fuck off otherwise,” Gregor said. “And you can’t have my son.”
Fenrir stared at him with blind, ruined eyes and waited. If Gregor hadn’t been dying, he might have won that contest.
“Because it’s the last thing I can do for them. The Pack has Jack, Jack will have my son, and my son will have them all to take care of him.”
That only left Nick. Gregor didn’t have a generous enough spirit to hope Nick would forget him or be better off without him. He’d survive, though. After this, Jack would feel guilty enough to take care of him.
But that wasn’t enough for Fenrir. He waited, slabber thick on his jowls as he panted.
Finally, Gregor tipped his head back to look at the ice-blue sky and admitted bitterly, “I miss it,” he said. “I was never made to be human.”
Done.
Gregor set himself and waited. That had been Rose’s mistake. She’d tried to stuff a god into a human skin and then pull the flaps back together, when there was obviously more room the other way around.
He felt Fenrir’s teeth as they tore into him. The pain cracked his bones as the hot red darkness swallowed him down.
Epilogue
“ONLY ONE of them’s real,” Bron said. She braced her arms on her knees and watched with wary eyes as the babies rolled on the floor. “The other’s just something Rose made.”
Danny sat cross-legged on the floor. The Pack’s old home was charred bricks and stones now, his grief burned down into the dirt. They had taken over the empty streets of Lochwinnoch while they licked their wounds and got ready to go down over the Wall.
“Do you think it knows that?” Danny asked. He picked up a blond, green-eyed baby and grinned at it. The baby scowled like Danny had embarrassed him, and tried to grab his glasses. “If they don’t know, how can we?”
Bron snorted at him. “Maybe if someone had kept better track of them, we wouldn’t need to wonder,” she said. “How hard is it to keep two babies apart, Danny?”
He put the baby down and rubbed his jaw. He traced the scar that ran up to his eye, a rope of thick wax that might melt one day. It might not.
“I had a lot on my mind,” he said. Then he chewed his lower lip, sighed, and asked, “If we knew… would you stay, Bron?”
She looked up from the twin blond babies and gave Danny a surprised look. Her eyebrows twitched toward her forehead.
“Fuck off, Danny,” she said. “As long as it thinks it’s real, who am I to burst its bubble? I was never going to stay, although I expected Mam to be the one who’d raise him. There’s a whole world out there, Danny. You got to see it, why wouldn’t I want to?”
Danny shrugged. “You always seemed happy here, I guess. Everyone knew I wanted to leave.”
“I was,” Bron said. She stood up and grabbed his old backpack from the chair. It dangled from her hand as she shrugged at Danny. “You don’t have to be running from something to want to go somewhere else.”
“Did you read that in a fortune cookie?” Danny asked as he unfolded himself from the ground.
“You know I don’t read,” Bron said. “It’s bad for your eyes, and one of us being blind is bad enough.”
They hugged tightly, desperately for a moment. Danny pressed his scarred face to her curls and swallowed hard.
“You know I love you, right?” he said.
Bron tightened her grip on him, dug her fingers into the muscles of his back, and then shoved him away with a snort.
“You’ve spent too much time with humans,” she said. “You’ve gotten soft. Softer. We’re family. I don’t need to love you, just kill anyone who ever hurts you.”
Danny leaned in quickly and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I love you anyhow.”
“Ugh.” Bron wiped her forehead ostentatiously with the back of her hand. Then she threw herself back into a hug and squeezed him tight enough to make him grunt. “Just try not to do anything stupid now I won’t be here to take care of you, okay? I’m leaving you with my kid and the other one. Don’t let me down.”
“I’ll try not to,” Danny said. “Mam would—”
Bron shook her head firmly and stepped back. She held up a hand to silence Danny and stepped back.
“No. Not yet,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and changed the topic. “Are you sure Jack is okay with taking the kids? Him and Gregor—”
She trailed off with a shrug, a lifetime of enmity and one bright, shining moment of sacrifice too complicated to put into words.
“It’s the last thing I do to piss him off,” Jack answered for himself as he prowled in from the kitchen. He was shirtless, an old pair of jeans dragged up over his hips, and had a brace of scrawny pheasants dangling from his fingers. He’d been looking for Greer, the little boy still lost in the Wild, but that didn’t stop him getting lunch too. “And thank him, which would also piss him off. He died to save us from what R
ose or Lachlan would have made of Fenrir. The least I can do is feed his children.”
“One of them is his,” Bron corrected.
Jack shrugged as he dangled the pheasants over the babies. They crowed and groped with pudgy fingers at the brightly colored tail feathers. At the same moment, they shifted to puppies, fat and round and floppy-eared, and hopped on stumpy legs for a mouthful of down.
“They won’t know that,” he said. A grim expression narrowed his eye as he watched them, the other still empty and scarred. There was always a price, and the Wild didn’t indulge regret. “Not until they have to.”
He hung the pheasants from the fire and grabbed the pups by the scruff of their necks to pick them up. One got passed off to Danny, and they headed out into the street to see Bron off. It was still Winter, the Wolf Winter, whatever that meant now they knew the prophets had lied. Snow crunched underfoot and the cold had broken the streets and worked fissures into the walls. A black crackling storm brewed up in the mountains.
“What about the bird?” Bron asked. “Gregor’s mate. Maybe he should have a say in what happens to them?”
She tapped one of the pups on the nose. It wriggled and bit her finger with needle-sharp teeth.
“No,” Jack said flatly.
“No one’s seen Nick, or the bird, since the fight,” Danny said more diplomatically. “Without Gregor, maybe there was just nothing here for him. He’s not a wolf or a dog. The only reason he came up here with us was to be with Gregor.”
“He’s not missed.” Jack ignored Danny’s scowl. “If he comes back, he’s welcome for Gregor’s sake. But we don’t need any more reminders of Rose around here.”
At the mention of her, he absently touched the scarred edge of his eye.
Bron shrugged. “He helped get my kid back,” she said. “Whatever else he was, I’ll always be grateful for that.”
She stared at the two puppies and then shook her head.
“My kids,” she corrected herself. “What the hell. People will be impressed I threw twins, as long as they don’t ask too many questions.”
She didn’t hug Danny again, but she gripped his hand tightly.
“Be careful,” he told her.
“Be happy,” she said. Then she gave Jack a sharp, fierce grin. “Maybe I’ll find Greer before you do. Be a hero.”
Jack tilted his head back to aim his eye toward the horizon.
“I hope you do,” he said. “I saw him a few days ago, but he’s lost himself to the Wild. I don’t think he knew me.”
Bron hitched the bag up on her shoulder and headed out of town. She didn’t have a coat with her, but wolves didn’t care about the cold.
FENRIR RESTED his chin on his paws and let the window out of the Wild seal itself.
His chest ached with a knot of new human emotions that refused to wait their turn. Relief, a bright, pure pop of love, grief, fear—they demanded to be felt all at once and immediately. He stood up and stretched to give himself something to do, snow matted in the hair under his armpits and stomach.
The broken, dead thing that had crawled off the altar was gone. A wolf didn’t think about what he’d been, or what he could be. It was the human who provided that anchor—the perspective to consider change. Now his fur was thick and ruddy, warmed by the pale, distant sun, and his bones fit under his skin again. Last time he’d looked in the stream before he took a drink, his eyes were bright green, the color of new grass.
He didn’t remember what color they’d been before he was chained to wait for Winter. It was possible he never knew.
Fenrir shook himself and pulled the old, consuming hunger up from the pit of his gut. It made him ache too, but it was familiar, and it drowned out everything else. He’d hunt. He’d glut himself. He’d—
A sharp pain in his tail made him jump and spin around in a tight circle. He wrinkled his lips back from his teeth and let a warning growl trickle out of him, but there was nothing there. His ears flattened, and he looked around suspiciously.
The pinch made him jump again and spin around like a dog chasing its tail. Anger wasn’t new. Fenrir had basted in anger during his long wait, but the sting of offended pride was new.
He grumbled at the empty snow and waited, his head half turned to watch the stretch of rocky hill out of the corner of his eye. There had been a pup he’d seen in the snow, lanky legs and more ears than it knew what to do with. It had scavenged his kill, and he’d turned a blind eye for… some reason the wolf couldn’t pinpoint. Maybe that had been a mistake. A shadow flickered in the edge of his vision, and he spun around as the cheeky bastard pinched his tail. He snarled and snapped at the interloper.
The bird hopped backward, and then it was a man who danced away from Fenrir’s teeth. A long black coat swirled around his legs as he skipped to the side. The man was tall and bony, with a crest of dark hair and a face that had more angles than seemed necessary. He had a wide, mischievous smile, and he was beautiful—so beautiful it hurt—and here.
“Nick,” Fenrir said as he pulled his skin out from under the wolf. He hadn’t done it before, but it was easy now he needed to do it. The human he’d been—was, part of—glared at the man in the dark coat. “You asshole. We didn’t know what happened to you.”
“And I knew what happened to you?” Nick asked, eyebrows raised. “They all think you’re dead.”
Fenrir scratched the back of his neck. He wanted… he wanted. The memory of Nick under him, salt-sweat flesh and sweet kisses caught in his gut like a stone. He’d never had that. The body the prophet had forced him into had fucked her, but it hadn’t felt like the memory did. It hadn’t mattered, every breath, every featherlight touch of clever fingers hadn’t been something to store away and remember.
Yet….
“I am,” he said. A glance down at himself showed long, tawny limbs and lean hips that were simultaneously new and familiar. His body and one he’d never worked before. “He is.”
“Me too.”
Nick jumped down off the rock and walked into Fenrir’s arms. He cupped Fenrir’s face in both hands, his touch gentle like the lean jaw and stubble was something precious, and leaned close enough to not quite kiss him.
“I found you,” he said. “And I won’t leave again.”
Whatever shred of good intentions Fenrir had scraped together blew away like mist. He dragged Nick closer, until their bodies pressed together, and kissed him with desperate, hopeless hunger. He’d known he missed Nick—it had felt like an essential trait of the man he’d been—but it was only now he realized how deep that crack had run.
It felt like… everything.
He broke the kiss and rested his forehead against Nick’s.
“I love the way you act like that’s a choice,” he growled as he pushed Nick down into the snow. The zippers and buttons of his clothes briefly confused him, but then his fingers remembered how they worked. Nick laughed under him and kissed his throat, his shoulder, and scraped sharp teeth over his collarbone in a bite. “You won’t leave me again.”
More from TA Moore
A Wolf Winter Novel
The world ends not with a bang, but with a downpour. Tornadoes spin through the heart of London, New York cooks in a heat wave that melts tarmac, and Russia freezes under an ever-thickening layer of permafrost. People rally at first—organizing aid drops and evacuating populations—but the weather is only getting worse.
In Durham, mild-mannered academic Danny Fennick has battened down to sit out the storm. He grew up in the Scottish Highlands, so he’s seen harsh winters before. Besides, he has an advantage. He’s a werewolf. Or, to be precise, a weredog. Less impressive, but still useful.
Except the other werewolves don’t believe this is any ordinary winter, and they’re coming down over the Wall to mark their new territory. Including Danny’s ex, Jack—the Crown Prince Pup of the Numitor’s pack—and the prince’s brother, who wants to kill him.
A wolf winter isn’t white. It’s red as blood.
A Wolf Winter Novel
When the Winter arrives, the Wolves will come down over the walls and eat little boys in their beds.
Doctor Nicholas Blake might still be afraid of the dark, but the monsters his grandmother tormented him with as a child aren’t real.
Or so he thought…until the sea freezes, the country grinds to a halt under the snow, and he finds a half-dead man bleeding out while a dead woman watches. Now his nightmares impinge on his waking life, and the only one who knows what’s going on is his unexpected patient.
For Gregor it’s simple. The treacherous prophets mutilated him and stole his brother Jack, and he’s going to kill them for it. Without his wolf, it might be difficult, but he’ll be damned if anyone else gets to kill Jack—even if he has to enlist the help of his distractingly attractive, but very human, doctor.
Except maybe the prophets want something worse than death, and maybe Nick is less human than Gregor believes. As the dead gather and the old stories come true, the two men will need each other if they’re going to rescue Jack and stop the prophets’ plan to loose something more terrible than the wolf winter.
A Blood and Bone Novel
Agent Luke Bennett proved that humans could rise just as high in the ranks as their vampire colleagues—until a kidnapper held him captive for a year and turned him without his consent.
Now he’s Took: a reluctant monster afraid to bite anyone, broke, and about to be discharged from his elite BITERs unit.
When an old colleague suggests he consult on a BITERs case, Took has little to lose. The case is open and shut… but nothing is ever that easy. As he digs deeper, he discovers a lot more than one cold case is at stake, and if he wants to solve this one, he’ll need the help of the BITERs team. Even if that brings his old commander, Madoc, back into his life.