You don’t. Not anymore.”
She wrenched the buttons of her dress loose with one hand. Gregor got a flash of lean sides and flat stomach, the inner curve of high breasts, and then the wolf sucked it down. It wasn’t like the change the monster went through, a torture of broken bones and fever-malleable flesh. The wolf knew the template it wanted to use—the prick of its ears and the length its legs were supposed to be—and it stuck to that.
Ellie’s wolf dropped to all fours and shook itself out of the dress. It gave Gregor a curious look out of amber eyes and then trotted away. He watched her go with sour envy in his gut. Maybe the prophet’s poison and maybe just him. Sometimes it was easier to be a wolf, to shed the noise of humanity. Gregor missed it.
A misstep in the snow bumped Jack’s shoulder against him. Gregor reminded himself of their new alliance and didn’t shove him away. “What the prophets don’t know,” Jack murmured, “won’t help them.”
The prophet chained to Jack yanked him away with a growl before Gregor could respond. Jack’s ankles ripped open again and spilled fresh blood, musky and potent in the snow as he stumbled. Something would eat well tonight, Gregor thought as he glanced back and tracked their trail along the blood-splattered snow.
What was in the Wild was real, but it was a memory of a thing. Catch and eat a squirrel and it would satisfy in the teeth and on the tongue, but it wouldn’t linger or satisfy, not like meat in the world, where an hour later you could lick your chops and taste the meaty gravy of the prey. In the Wild anything from the world was a seductive treat, a lure as good as the smell of grease and fried starch from a Lochwinnoch chip shop on a Friday night.
The prophets had grown in confidence if they weren’t worried about what they’d bring to their door. Or…. Gregor waited for the rest of the thought to form, but it didn’t. It felt like he’d missed something, but he couldn’t pin down what.
At least it gave him something to think about as he walked, one step after the other, the weight of a collar around his neck and the itch of pain in his feet. Then, between one step and the next, he caught the tail end of a familiar scent—salt and candy floss, Nick and blood. Even the cold-thinned hint of it caught in Gregor’s throat like a hook and jerked his gaze away from his grim study of the pimple on the back of Lachlan’s neck. He looked around quickly, his eyes drawn first to the white, snow-heavy clouds in search of a cruciform black silhouette and then back down to earth.
A cliff of ancient, black trees loomed along the ridge of a nearby hill, dense as a thicket of brambles, and a herd of elk skirked along the outskirts of it. Snow lay thick over their humped backs, and as the lead male swung his head around to study the wolves as they passed, Gregor saw that he was long dead. Icicles dripped like knives from his antlers, and the skin had sloughed off his head to leave weather-scrubbed planes of bone.
Then he moved again, and instead of an elk, there was a man—most of a man, although he was still skull bones and icy horns wrapped in old rags. The Sannock locked its empty eye sockets on Gregor—a flicker jolt of stolen life battered against Gregor’s mind as if it needed in—and then pointed down the slope with an oddly mortal ugly hand.
Blood splashed on the snow three steps left to stain the ice.
Then Gregor’s foot came down, and the Wild spat him out. It clawed at him as he went, tried to hold on to his bones as it ejected the metal, and he had to struggle to keep himself together. He landed somewhere else. The scent of Nick was ripped out of his nose, and the flat, acid fear in the back of his throat turned hollow in confusion.
The prophet behind him laughed and jabbed a finger into the back of Gregor’s skull. “Finally smart enough to be afraid,” he mocked as he caught the edges of the scent. The moment with the Sannock at the tree line had been quicker than it felt. No one else had noticed. “Too fucking late.”
Gregor spat the bad taste out of his mouth and