was a kid. I’d bet on him to reach the other shore before I would you.”
Jack yanked his arm away. “He shouldn’t have to.”
“Then he should have better choice in men.” Gregor smirked as Jack snarled at him. The hot pulse of the emotional poison faded into the background as he let himself enjoy the old simple pleasure of a dig at Jack. “Fine. Nick, is there anything in the loch?”
He glanced over at his mate as he asked the question and felt the odd tickle of pointless warmth in his chest. Nick’s bony face, all nose and personality, also pleased Gregor, but he hardly looked attractive right then. His nose was pinched with cold and his lips were chapped raw, his skin blotched red from the wind. Still Gregor had to bite a smile off his lips, like he’d just seen Fenrir himself cross the snow, as he looked at him.
Idiot, he condemned himself.
Nick cupped his hands in front of his mouth to blow into them and then hopped up to walk to the edge of the loch. He toed his boots onto the ice as he peered down into the murky depths. After a second, he flinched backward and Gregor caught him, hand braced against one lean shoulder. He glanced down into the loch and caught a dark glimpse of bone and the weed-patched memory of skin pushed up against—through—the ice.
“Still there,” Nick said after he swallowed. He gingerly shifted his foot back a step. “There’s not much of it left, not even hunger. It doesn’t want to live again. It just wants an empty lake. Mine. mine.”
His voice slipped away from him as he said that, the words wet and slippery in his throat. Gregor growled and tightened his grip of Nick’s shoulder.
Nick was his. Without Gregor’s wolf, Nick was all he had, and he already had to share him with a bird. A wet eel that couldn’t even terrorize children didn’t get to claim any more of him.
He dug his fingers down into Nick’s shoulder and willed the sharp, doctor’s wits back into vague black eyes. After a moment Nick blinked and rubbed his hand over his face.
“Can you make it leave Danny alone?” Jack asked, as though he had the right to ask Nick for anything after days spent filled with pointed mistrust.
Nick shook his head. “It’s not slain, just dead,” he said. “But the dead can’t hurt the living, not yet.”
Jack looked bleak. “Not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” Nick said as he turned up his collar and tucked his chin down into it. “Just true. The old loch monster isn’t what you have to worry about.”
“What is?” Jack asked.
Nick inhaled as though he needed to say the answer. If he did, it slipped away before he could spit it out. “I don’t know,” he admitted reluctantly. His scent, that distinct dusty sweetness, was cut through with the darker, fresh-carrion smell of his god. “Something older. Something worse. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming.”
“But not tonight,” Gregor said. He put his arm around Nick and tucked him into his side. “Let the dog prove its worth, Jack. Danny did well enough in Durham all those years, and you never gave him a second thought.”
They both knew that was cruel, not true. It still worked.
Jack curled his lip in a snarl and, after one last look for a dog’s head amid the ice and waves, he turned away from the loch.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “We take the long way. Give Da time to bake a cake to welcome us home.”
Gregor laughed, a low chuff with no humor in it. “Or gather the Pack to drive us back out.”
“One or the other,” Jack agreed with a shrug.
“YOU GREW up here?” Nick asked as they rounded the far end of the loch and started up the hill, away from the shore and into the Pack’s territory.
Wolves hunted where they pleased, of course, but this was where they slept. Old crofters’ cottages, some still thatched while others had been roofed with uneven shale slates, were scattered haphazardly across the property. Some were tucked into the shadow of Da’s old stone box of a cottage, while others had been dragged stone by stone up past the boundary line of what man believed the Old Man owned and into the thin spaces where the Wild was easy to touch.
Usually there was a dirt track to follow, worn through the grass by heavy-footed hikers and runners who lapped the loch in