Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “I guess we just have to do it now,” he said. “Call it practice for Rose.”

  Nick taped the makeshift dressing over Bron’s stomach with a last strip of duct tape. He smoothed it down over her hip and then scrambled unsteadily to his feet. He lost his balance and Gregor grabbed him before Nick staggered into the wall.

  “Later,” Gregor promised roughly as he steadied Nick. “And I know.”

  After a brief exchange of looks, Nick accepted the promise with a brief dip of his chin. Then he turned his head to look at Jack.

  “If you’re looking for prophets,” he said, “we know where to find them. Some of them, at least. They’re up in the hills, near the Run-Away Man. Gran likes to keep all her monsters close.”

  DEATH WASN’T complicated when you were a wolf.

  A hole to bury the body and a howl to see the spirit through to the Wild. That was all the dead needed or the living wanted. The Pack had thought the Old Man sentimental when he put a marker on the twins’ ma’s grave.

  Danny wasn’t a wolf.

  He’d lived in the human world, loved humans, and even nearly convinced himself he was one of them. Maybe he’d learned to grieve like them too.

  Someone had washed the blood off Kath’s face and wrapped her loosely in a white sheet that was now smeared with streaks of crimson. It ended at her collarbones and left the raw gash in her throat exposed, enough flesh scooped out to reveal tendons and bone.

  Danny took a corner of the sheet and pulled it up to her chin. His hand, the knuckles split and bleeding, was steady, but he flinched away from touching cold skin.

  “What do you want to do?” Jack asked. “About the body.”

  “Burn her,” Danny said flatly, the words clipped off between his teeth. It sounded too hard for Danny, but Jack bit his tongue on the disagreement. Then Danny relented enough to look at him. “If we lose—”

  “We won’t.”

  “We might,” Danny contradicted him. “And if we do, I won’t have some prophet walking around in my mam’s skin. Burn her. It’s just meat now. She’s gone.”

  Jack crossed his arms. He’d changed into jeans—his own—and dragged on a T-shirt. For once he felt like he might need a jacket. The cold in Kath’s cottage was understandable—the fire in the hearth had gone out—but it felt deeper than that.

  There were still bloodstains on the floor, and the odd hormone-and-saline pickle of amniotic fluid hung in the air.

  “You don’t want to say anything?” he asked. “I’ll listen.”

  Danny shook his head. “Why? You probably knew her better than I did,” he said. “I left. You stayed.”

  “She understood.”

  Danny smiled with a quick, dry quirk of his mouth. “No,” he said. “She didn’t. But I’m who she raised me to be, so I guess that was her own fault. Something else she wouldn’t understand, Jack? Why we’re wasting time with the dead when the bastard who did this is still alive.”

  The anger in his voice was flat and steady, as though it was here for the long haul. It left Jack uneasy, but he could hardly blame Danny for it. He was right to be angry, and this was a waste of time they couldn’t spare.

  It didn’t mean it wasn’t important.

  “You should stay goodbye,” he said.

  “I never did before.”

  Danny headed for the door, but Jack caught him before he got there and pulled Danny into his arms. He cupped the back of Danny’s head, curls springy against his palm, and pulled him down into a rough, hungry kiss. For a second. Danny was stiff in his arms, but then he shuddered and leaned into Jack. A wet, salty sob hitched between their lips—Jack would swallow that secret for him—and Danny wrapped his arms around Jack as though he were scared to let go. The edges of his glasses dug into Jack’s cheekbones and eyebrow, the awkwardness of it familiar enough to be bittersweet.

  Jack broke the kiss and rested his forehead against Danny’s. He could feel Danny’s breath, damp and ragged against his lips. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, and this time Danny pressed his mouth over Jack’s in a hard “shut up” kiss. He touched Jack’s cheek for a moment and then pulled away.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Not now.”

  Jack could have protested that Danny didn’t know what he was going to say, but Danny probably knew better than Jack did.

  “I’m glad it wasn’t you,” he said anyhow. “I’m glad you were in my bed instead of here. Kath would be too.”

  Pain twisted Danny’s face into a hard mask. “I could have done something. I could have—”

  “Died,” Jack finished for him. “Then I’d have killed us all. Instead we’ll kill them and get Bron’s baby back.”

  Danny shuddered. The full-body tremor wasn’t a human expression. If he’d been in the dog’s skin, his hackles would have gone up and his tail down. The same emotion was somehow conveyed without ears or tail to flag what he felt.

  “I can’t believe that,” he said apologetically. “It’s too hard. What if we’re wrong?”

  Jack nodded. “We’ll kill Lachlan,” he said. “And Rose. After that, we’ll see. Say goodbye to Kath, she’ll be worried about you.”

  He clapped Danny on the shoulder and went outside.

  Outside, around a bonfire they’d lit to keep the chill of Winter from even their bones, the wolves were waiting… what were left of them, the ones that hadn’t been murdered or suborned by the prophets. It was maybe two-thirds of the wolves that would have been at Da’s heels, and some of them were dogs.

  One of them—Jack glanced over the Pack until he found Nick’s bony profile under his crest of dark hair—was a bird, and their enemy’s next of kin.

  “You can trust him,” Gregor said from just behind his shoulder.

  Jack didn’t twitch. The two of them might not be at each other’s throats openly anymore, but that didn’t mean Jack didn’t make it a point to know where his brother’s teeth where. To be fair, Gregor would have been insulted otherwise.

  “You would say that,” Jack said. “You love him.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gregor’s smile—a quick, unaffected twitch of joy in the midst of all this. Jack remembered how clean it had felt to just hate his twin.

  “I do,” Gregor said. He still had enough sense to sound bemused by how ridiculous that was. “That doesn’t mean I’m blind to him. I’m not you.”

  Jack snorted. He knew Danny’s faults. They were just less major than being a prophet’s spawn and a Sannock.

  “If it comes down to it, will he put his… beak in her eye?” Jack asked.

  It reassured him when Gregor took the time to think about the answer. “I won’t let it come to that,” Gregor said finally. “Nick doesn’t need to live with killing someone he loved, and I have enough reasons to rip that bitch’s throat out to justify calling dibs on her death.”

  Jack didn’t know if that was a reassuring answer or not, but it was an answer, and it would have to do.

  The wolves still waited. Some had already given in to the itch of the Wild and the moon hunt and pulled their fur on, chest high to the tallest man in the Pack. Their breath steamed between their fangs as they hung their tongues out and panted in anticipation of the run. Others hung on to the human skin that made it easier to nurse a grudge. A wolf understood the necessity behind wiping out a threat to the Pack, but humans were the ones who could enjoy it.

  Jack took a deep breath—the anger of the Pack stung his throat like cinnamon, itchy and red—as he stepped forward.

  “Tonight the full moon will rise, but for the first time in generations, we have fresh prey to hunt. Selene might be faithless and a fool, but the prophets are worse. They dripped lies in our ears and called it the catechism, they took our young like we were stock bred for slaughter, and they fed us poison meat rather than face a fair fight.”

  Tea would be more accurate, but it didn’t have the same resonance.

  The wolves groaned low in their chests, a thick noise that w
asn’t quite a howl. Not yet.

  “No more prophets,” Jack said. “If we kill them tonight, we’ll howl a new catechism that they have no place in.”

  One of the wolves threw her head back, black-striped nose to the sky, and howled. It was a sharp and lonely noise, mournful in the way only wolf-song could be. Others scrambled to their feet or shed human skin for brindled fur and growled their support.

  “What if we don’t kill them?” someone asked. It was the strange dog—Kier, the one Ellie knew. Everyone turned in unison to look at him. He took a step back and then steadied himself to give Jack an almost challenging glare. “What then, Numitor?”

  “Kier,” Ellie said, her voice tight in her throat. She raised her hand and tightened her jaw when he glanced at her, a shorthanded “not now” that Jack recognized. What had she said, last night? “It isn’t easy to love a dog.”

  She’d been wrong. It was. Jack couldn’t imagine how not to love Danny.

  “Then they’ll have killed us, so what do we care?” Danny said as he stalked out of his childhood home, goodbyes apparently done with. “But I’ll be fucked if they have anything of mine or my kin for a trophy.”

  He stalked over to the bonfire. It cast harsh red shadows across the soft planes of his face as he shoved his way through the gathered wolves. They gave way out of surprise that didn’t have time to mature into affront. Danny shoved his hand into the flames and grabbed a thick, tarry chunk of wood. It shed a trail of sparks as he dragged it out, enough to singe the fur or clothes of anyone who crowded him, and the end of it flared hot and angry as the cold tried to dim it.

  “If the gods want this to be the Prophets’ Winter?” Danny yelled as he turned around. The wind picked up, prickly with ice and annoyance, and tried to steal the words out of Danny’s mouth. He hunched his shoulders against the shove of it but held his ground. “Then fuck it, I’d rather let Surtr eat the world down to the bones than the prophets enjoy one bite of it.”

  He drew the torch back and threw it toward his house with a raw, wordless shout. It tumbled end over end, off-balance and not well suited to being a spear. Jack dodged back in case it landed on him and bumped into Gregor as he did the same.

  The torch arched neatly through the door that Danny had left ajar. It hit the wooden floor and the little stone cottage ignited with a hungry whoosh of flame, as though it were built of dry tinder and oil instead of brick.

  There was stunned silence for a minute, and then Hector shook it off as he took a quick step forward.

  “Get buckets—”

  “Leave it,” Jack interrupted harshly. He glanced at Danny and then turned back to the Pack. He could feel the rightness settle into his bones, finally as certain of something as he’d been of the Wild’s favor back in Durham. One way or another, the Pack was done here. “All of it. Take children, the injured, the old—anyone who can’t put on fur to fight—and anything you want to keep. They’ll go to Lochwinnoch and then south, with or without the rest of us. This? Let it burn.”

  Chapter Twenty-One—Danny

  OLD STONE groaned like a living thing as it burned, and slate tiles snapped like bones as the flames reached them. Flames wriggled eager, bright fingers through dried-out mortar and tapped at glass windows that warped as they melted in slow motion.

  The walls would still be standing when the fire finally guttered out—centuries took more than one disaster to wipe away—but no one would mistake this for safe shelter again.

  In the middle of the conflagration, the Old Man’s farmhouse squatted resentfully, ice still caked on the roof and walls as though the winter had retreated there for its last stand.

  Danny watched it burn from the edge of the lake, flames reflected dim and strange in the dark water, and tried to feel… something. It seemed like he should. He’d never belonged here, but he’d spent more time not fitting in here than he had anywhere else. There was also the fact that his mam’s ashes were mixed in with the sparks and smoke that rose, black as an eel, against the storm-white sky.

  If there was anything, he didn’t have time to feel it. There was a hollow, black pit in his gut that opened when he walked into the slaughterhouse that had been his mam’s kitchen, and it ate everything—grief, anger, satisfaction. It flashed through him and then dropped like a stone, just like his heart had done as the door creaked open until it caught on Bron’s arm.

  He’d known something was wrong. It had dragged him out of the warm, Jack-musky nest of blankets and out into the cold—an itch in his hackles, a ghost of a scent that woke a snarl in the back of his throat, and gut instinct.

  Not this.

  It was like something popped as he crossed the threshold, a thin film that had blocked the hot salted-penny stink of blood that washed over Danny. He saw his mam first, sprawled on the ground with empty eyes and a ripped-open throat. She hadn’t died easily. There was blood on her fingers, bruises on her knuckles. Bron lay curled on her side nearby, in a puddle of wet red blood that spread slow and treacly over the tiles.

  The kitchen should have smelled like beeswax and family, his mother and his sister. Instead it just smelled like meat. Danny’s knees hit the floor before he realized he was on his way down, and his throat felt raw as an awful, hurt whine clawed out of him.

  Then Bron’s heart tried to beat—a ragged creak of noise—and all that pain just slid into the hole.

  It wouldn’t last.

  Danny knew that. He’d dealt with enough bereaved students back in Durham—mostly dead pets, sometimes a grandparent, and the occasional visit from grave-faced cops with bad news about closer relatives—to know that. The hollow was to help him cope right now. Once this was over, it would collapse in on itself and he’d have to sink or swim with what he had left.

  Not yet, though.

  Danny dragged his eyes away from the fire and slogged through the snow to where the kids and the old wolves waited. Bron was laid out on a makeshift stretcher, strapped down with sheets twisted into ropes and with blankets piled on top of her. Despite the layers, she trembled hard enough to make her teeth chatter. Her eyes moved restlessly under her bruised lids, and soft whimpers scraped at the back of her throat.

  His scrappy, pain-in-the-ass little sister. She’d never needed him for anything, and if they made it out of this, she’d deny she ever had. Danny bent over and kissed her forehead under the stringy tangle of her curls. Her skin was hot and dry under his lips, slick with metal-bitter salt.

  “I’ll give them a kick in the throat before I kill them, just for you,” he promised. Then he looked up at Millie. “If we don’t come back, head down the coast to Girvan. We left people there that have no love for the prophets.”

  Millie scowled. Her arm was still broken, but she had a terrier’s heart. It would take more than being on three legs to truly cow her.

  “We’re part of the Pack too,” she said. “If you’re going to fight, we should fight with you. It’s the Wolf Winter. It’s Ragnarok. There aren’t any noncombatants anymore.”

  Danny tucked the blankets in more securely around Bron’s shoulders. Her bones felt so thin under his fingers, and she seemed so small. It frightened him a little how delicate she was without her horrible personality to buoy her up.

  “We’ll fight now,” he said. “And if we lose, you fight later. Bron will make sure of that. Once she’s back on her feet, she’ll drag you all up into the Highlands by the scruffs.”

  Millie didn’t quite laugh, but her face softened for a second.

  “I’ll take care of her,” she promised finally, “whether she likes it or not. Are you sure the Sannock shouldn’t come with us? He’s a doctor. If something happens, if she doesn’t heal….”

  Danny pushed himself up. He could have corrected Milly about Nick being Sannock, but him being a god wouldn’t slice the suspicion out of her voice. It shouldn’t either. All the evidence was that Nick was a good man—a moral one, despite his taste in company for his head and his bed—so he’d understand why no one R
ose had crossed trusted in that.

  “We need him,” he said. “He knows where the prophets are holed up. When Bron wakes up, tell her… tell her I love her.”

  That would piss her off.

  Danny gave a last, stiff nod to Millie and then headed over to the waiting hunters. Most of them had pulled their skins on already, dire wolves so massive they tricked the eye into scaling them down. A few of them waited on him.

  Danny stripped his—Jack’s—sweater off and kicked his unlaced boots off as he walked. Snow crunched between his toes and stabbed cold needles under his toenails and down to his marrow. He shivered as he stopped to push his trousers down and hop out of them.

  “That was a good show,” Gregor said. “After all those years you didn’t believe in gods or prophecy.”

  “I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” Danny said. “Except I didn’t want to see Rose look at me from my mam’s wolf. After that, it was all Jack.”

  “You don’t think you called Surtr down?” Gregor asked. He pointed with his chin toward the fire. “That he’s not there, wallowing in the embers? Do you think the Winter and the Wild would let it burn otherwise?”

  “It’s a fire,” Danny said. “That’s what it does.”

  Except…. Danny’s fingers still smelled of the potion he’d doused the kitchen in. He knew why the fire had caught there, ignited as the flames hit the sharp, lighter-than-air stink of ethanol. The rest of the houses shouldn’t have burned so easily, but they had.

  He scrubbed both hands through his hair to drag it back from his face, his fingers unblistered despite the fact he’d reached into the fire.

  “They went north when they left,” he said. The reminder of what had happened steadied him, and the pit in his chest dropped to his heels like an anchor. “I saw the tracks before I was dragged away.”

  James, who’d also hung on to his human skin, crossed his arms. “So we follow a dog on the hunt now?” he asked.