their expensive trainers. Sometimes Gregor had kept pace with them in the trees, arrogant in how easily he could have caught them if he wanted.
Of course, he still could. His wolf was gone, but he was still more than most. It wouldn’t be effortless.
“That’s why it’s called home,” Gregor said. He hesitated for a second as he heard the words and fumbled for something to soften them. It wasn’t easy. Harsh words came easier to him, and if it kept people at arm’s length, that didn’t concern him. It was only Nick he wanted to keep close, but his tongue couldn’t seem to learn that lesson. “Or did you think I just walked out of the Wild a man?”
It was meant to be a joke, but it came out like a sneer. Gregor scowled to himself and swallowed the spiny ball of an apology. He wanted to be kinder to Nick, to say the right things and be gentle sometimes. If he couldn’t, he’d rather no one knew he’d tried.
Nick laughed raggedly and stopped to push his hair out of his face. He pulled absently at the knots matted around his ears. “I just learned that my crazy grandmother wasn’t crazy, just an evil wolf prophet who wanted to sacrifice me to a bird,” he said. Despite everything the old bitch had done, there was still something like grief in Nick’s voice. “So, I’m trying not to make any assumptions.”
“We were both born and raised here,” Jack said impatiently as he dropped back into pace with them. “We’re wolves, not Sannock or something from a story. We can walk the Wild, but we don’t belong there. This is our world as much as it is yours—as it is man’s. It’s just that they wouldn’t share.”
“Now neither will we,” Gregor finished for Jack, the old lines of the catechism one of the few nearly as satisfying to say as to howl.
Nick looked around at the spare white lines of the frozen countryside and hunched his shoulders. “I was born and raised in Glasgow. The first time I left the city, I was eighteen and going to look at universities. The idea anyone grew up here?” He waved his hand at the wide, empty space between the loch and the horizon. “That’s stranger than the Wild and the Sannock combined.”
The only city Gregor had ever been in was Durham and then only when it was frozen to a near standstill under that first lash of winter. It hadn’t troubled him—the streets and houses were a different sort of hunting ground to the moors and buried dens he was used it—but it was no place to live. The tarmac had been rough under his feet, and everything smelled-sounded-tasted of humans and human things, as though they thought they could keep the Wild at bay if they drowned it out. It was somewhere to pass through, not somewhere to stay.
Was that how Nick felt up here? The thought unsettled Gregor for a moment, but he shrugged it away. It was the end of the world, the winter of blood and fang, and where Nick wanted to live could wait until they knew they were going to live.
They’d have to decide one day, though. “Maybe the city is why your gran is crazy,” he said.
Nick absently rubbed his chest through his coat. It was the scar on his stomach, sliced under his breastbone. Gregor had one that very nearly matched, although his was still raised and new even after the rest of his injuries had patched themselves together.
“Whatever she is, that’s who she was before Glasgow,” he said. “If anything, I suppose, it started here.”
Gregor went to disagree but then held his tongue as he realized they both had a point. Maybe Rose had already been ruined when she started on the long trek to Glasgow, but the seed hadn’t been planted here, on Da’s land. He’d only allowed Job to stay in the shack behind the house, and the rest came and went as need. They certainly hadn’t been made here… that was somewhere else.
“It’ll end here too,” Jack said bluntly.
Nick sighed but didn’t argue. He looked mostly tired and cold as the wind sapped whatever protection the bird had given him.
There was a wall and a gate. A Beware of Dogs sign had lived there longer than Gregor had, the red letters updated every spring when hikers appeared. Some of the wolves had curled their lip at it in protest, but it was