the baby from her loosened grip, and backed away. It didn’t cry, but he soothed it anyhow as he looked around for a way out.
“The dog,” Rose said, her voice slurred. She poked her jaw back into place with her fingers. “I should have expected it. Loyal as a cur and just as dumb.”
Fear stuck in Danny’s throat like nettles, and a bleak, awful fury backed up behind it. It felt like an allergic reaction, a physical response to the scarred old prophet that made Danny feel like he was about to throw up or have a heart attack. He wanted to run away. He wanted to peel her apart like a present in musical chairs, just tear off the stolen layers until all that was left was the bitter old bag whose voice he heard when Nick talked about his childhood.
“You killed my mother.”
Rose’s scarred lips twitched in a sour smile. “She killed me.”
“If my mam had killed you, you’d be dead,” Danny said flatly. One of the prophets grabbed for him, and he dodged away from the swollen hand. He knew the face under the dead wolf, the too-small eyes and too-wide mouth of a girl he’d grown up with. She’d never been particularly nice, but he wondered what she’d done that the Old Man had sent her for a prophet. He growled at her and backed away. “I won’t let you have my sister’s baby.”
Rose leaned forward. Her stomach squelched as it folded around her knee. She tilted her head, and her eyes glittered. It was a look that sourly reminded Danny of Nick. “Are you sure that’s him? Is that the right baby?”
Danny glanced down. It had been too early for the baby to come, and it had spent hours sweltered in Rose’s curse-foul guts. Yellow-gray crud coated the pale, bluish body like grease, and it had a jellyfish translucency to it. Danny could practically see its heartbeat through its skin. The wean wouldn’t win any prizes, but it was a baby.
The other—
He glanced at what the prophet held roughly by the back of the neck. It looked the same, the rough edges of inhumanity rubbed down from instinct. Danny fumbled the baby he did have as he tried to convince himself that Rose hadn’t exchanged babies in the minute it had taken him to reach her.
She hadn’t.
She couldn’t.
It was possible.
Danny glanced down at the little thing in his arms and tried to see something of Bron in it. When he couldn’t—his little sister had always been bonny, no matter what a goblin she could be—he tightened his grip on it anyhow. Whatever it was, it was new and soft and had no idea why anyone wouldn’t love it. It moved weakly against his chest.
Dogs weren’t that bright either, after all, and a puppy didn’t even need to smell like them for them to take it in. It didn’t even need to be the same species.
“Go fuck yourself,” Danny said harshly. It was satisfying to finally get to spit it the words in her face after days spent in Girvan stuffed unwillingly into his fur. His throat ached with the memory of the too-tight collar. “Maybe I can’t stop you, but I’ll kill him myself before I let you touch him.”
“Liar,” Rose mouthed at him. Then she glanced past Danny into the darkness of the storm and raised her voice. “Do you hear him? He’s going to kill your son, my love. You’ll be trapped again, because of some dog that doesn’t know its place.”
The reek washed over Danny. He retched, the sting of bile in his throat better than the greasy glue of sweet infection and old musk that filled his nose and stuck to his teeth. Danny tightened his grip on the baby and turned around. The shadow under the trees got its feet under it and rose, stiff and unsteady, onto its paws. Wolves were always bigger than people imagined, and the Scottish wolves bigger still. Jack and Gregor were dire wolves the size of ponies, so big that humans just didn’t believe their eyes when they saw them.
The wolf that lowered its scabbed muzzle to sniff the air was the size of a Clydesdale. Its eyes were raw pits scabbed with ice and blood, and its lips were stitched with old, white scars.
It made a passable Fenrir, although Danny balked at the idea it was the real one. He didn’t think he could deal with that, but this was just some old