Prologue
FOR THE first time in generations, the Numitor came down from his high perch, crossed the dark waters of the loch, and walked into town. He arrived on four feet, drenched and with ice heavy in his thick ruff, but shrugged his skin back on and padded naked through the empty streets.
A courtesy he remembered, although to whom had slipped away from him.
Wolves wore the years lightly enough. The Numitor might be old, his hair run to gray and most who’d loved him in the ground, but he was strong and straight. Every full moon he led the hunt, and only a few of his wolves could keep pace with him. But if age couldn’t claim her tithe from his flesh and bones, she’d take her due from his memory.
She’d give him fifty years, a hundred even, but after that, she had first pick. It had seemed like nothing at first—a first kiss whose face was worn down to the scruff of ginger stubble and the idea of love, a brawl he could remember every detail of except it floated unmoored in the “when,” a promise he’d made to someone important enough it was ingrained in his bones even when the idea of them was a ghost—but what was gone was gone forever.
Now, when he looked back over his long, bloody life, it was like an old house someone had started to shut up for the night. Some rooms were lost, bricked off, and others were only lit by a few fairy lights of sweet memories. And every time one of his old friends died or some touchstone wore to nothing under the passage of years, another light went out.
Frost crusted on the thick fur that layered his body even as a human and pinched his toes and the tips of his ears as he walked through the abandoned brick boxes of Lochwinnoch. Most people had left early, locked their doors and drawn their curtains behind them. For a few days after the town was all but abandoned, it still lit up at night, clockwork precise as the old lamplighters, until the wind tore up the electricity pylons. Some villagers had left it until the last moment—the priest, old farmers in their crofts—as though they thought the old gray stones of this place somehow belonged to them.
The Numitor had sent the Wild to the wolves to show them their error. Broken doors and slaughtered herds, supplies that rotted overnight or sprouted like they’d been planted and seen the year through to harvest.
He’d no desire to kill them. The people of Lochwinnoch had been tolerable enough over the decades, insular and incurious about their neighbors and the sullen, wild children who came over the lake to have figures and letters drummed into their heads no matter how much they snarled about it.
They were wolves, but they were men too. A wolf had its fangs and its speed, but a man had the brain between his ears and what he put into it. The Numitor had no room in his space for a fool who wouldn’t keep both honed.
Tolerable or not, there was no place for them here but in the ground. The Wolf Age had begun, and there was no place for men but as prey.
Most of them had realized that on their own. They’d left their houses open to the elements, once-scrubbed hallways full of snow and the things they held precious left to crack and ruin in the cold. Better the things than the people. For now, anyhow.
As for the ones who’d stayed, the Numitor had come to deal with them himself. Some things you didn’t delegate.
The old gray walls of the church were limned with ice. It dripped down from the snow-tipped spire and clotted around the windows and the high peak of the door. The Numitor’s skin stuck to the black iron gate, the metal hinges frost-cracked and broken, as he pushed it open and walked up to the door.
It was unlocked. Not that it would have stopped him if it weren’t.
Candles burned on every surface—thick yellow wax dripped in long trails down the altar and walls, and cast unsteady, gray shadows over the walls and windows.
The priest was still there, seated in black robes and a heavy parka on one of the old oak benches. A black fisherman’s hat was pulled down low over his ears, and white tufts of hair stuck out under it. The head was in his lap, loosely cradled in his arms. It