recover. He spun toward Lach just in time for the knife to be buried in his shoulder instead of his back.
He’d been carved open on the end of that blade before. It had sliced open every line of ink on his skin and stained it with rowan gall to blister and scar. He’d expected to have the Numitor’s rank scarred onto him with it one day. He thought he knew how rowan burned, but he was wrong.
The knife punched through skin and muscle to grate against his shoulder, and his blood caught fire from the old rowan oils worked onto the blade and carried it through his body. His mouth was dry and stung with blisters, his lungs squeezed tight in alarm behind his ribs, and his muscles spasmed in rock-hard, sting-hot spasms until his bones creaked with the pressure.
Nick screamed. Half human panic and half a crow’s fury. The Wild—or the dour shadow of it—darkened around Lach as he wrenched the knife free and Gregor tasted Nick in the back of his throat. His knees wanted to give way under him, but he forced them to lock and hold him up. The shadow of a girl, draggle-haired and wet, leaned against Lach’s back, and he shuddered. Her breath dripped like water, dank and misty, into his ear as she worked her fish-ragged lips.
Lach hesitated and something fogged over his eyes. His hand trembled as the dead thing cuddled closer, like a lover at a bonfire. Gregor’s blood dripped from the point of the knife as Lach hesitated, but Gregor couldn’t unlock his muscles enough to take advantage of the moment.
A hand—thin and ferociously freckled—grabbed Lach’s wrist and hauled him out of the girl’s embrace. For a second, Gregor saw her, gutted from clavicle to pubis and hollowed out by hungry things. Frayed bits of skin floated in the unseen currents as she screamed, face screwed in horrible, mute rage, and then drained away like suds down a plug hole.
Before Gregor could gather himself to react to the opportunity, rough hands grabbed him and forced him down to his knees.
“Enough,” Kath Fennick snapped as she took the knife out of Lach’s fingers. “Do you speak for the prophets now? We weren’t told to kill them, and I won’t be a murderer if I don’t have to be.”
No one in Lochwinnoch had ever looked at Danny and not realized he was Kath’s son. They shared the same face—sharper on her, kinder on him—as though Lisa hadn’t bothered to involve a man at all. People used to joke that was why Danny had come out tame, inescapably a dog no matter how Kath tried to make him fierce, but then Kath birthed her daughter. Still her face but so much a wolf that she howled before she spoke.
When Lach claimed to be Numitor, Gregor had assumed that Kath and the other wolves with more rank had scattered… or died. Instead, here she was, under Lach’s thumb. Da wasn’t dead—it was impossible, every wolf on the island would have felt that, even whatever hungry wolves still subsisted in Rome would have felt the balance of the world shift—but if Kath bent the neck to this, Da was gone.
The wolves scrambled up over the edge of the path, naked and barefoot in the snow with Jack dragging between them. Blood painted his face from forehead to jaw, and his arm had started to stitch the shredded meat back together with tender, pink stripes of new skin. Under the blood and clumps of muddy slush, his expression was drawn and bleak with anger as he was manhandled. As his muscles unlocked—agony soothed into agony he could work with—Gregor traded a grim look with his brother.
Lach wiped his forehead, greasy with cold sweat, and looked over his shoulder. When he saw nothing, he looked briefly relieved and then snorted as he turned back to Kath.
“It’s the Wolf Winter. We’re going to murder the world,” he said. Contempt curled the corner of his mouth. “Or do you plan to stay in Scotland and mind the hearth, bitch?”
There was a flash of tension as everyone waited for Kath’s reaction. Her spare, elegant face didn’t show anything as she tucked the knife into her belt. The loose folds of her dress flapped around her in the wind as she moved.
“You don’t murder a sheep or a cow,” she said. “Man will be our prey once Fenrir comes, and I’ll put my teeth in any throat he points me at.