Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  Danny shrugged. “Not my fault you can’t keep pace with me,” he said. “If you don’t want to be at my heels, run faster.”

  “Enough,” Jack snapped as he grabbed the nape of Danny’s neck in hard fingers. “Don’t goad, Danny-dog. Your grief only gets you so much leeway.”

  James wrinkled his lips back from his teeth, far enough to show gum, and opened his mouth to say something. It was going to be awful; Danny could see that in the greasy satisfaction that floated in James’s eyes, and he tensed, ready to respond.

  “The same goes for you, James,” Jack snapped as he jabbed a finger at the big man. “If you can’t bite your fucking tongue, go join the prophets and lick a god’s toes.”

  It looked like James wasn’t going to back down. Danny leaned against the leash of Jack’s hand on his scruff, almost eager for the fight. Before it could break out, Nick interrupted them sharply.

  “You’re not following a dog,” Nick said. He looked more like a crow now, even when he was human. Danny didn’t know if that was new or if exhaustion had just ground Nick down to bird-sharp bones and a beak of a nose. “But you need to chase a bird.”

  He hunched his shoulders, lifted his arms, and shifted to feathers in the middle of the gesture. His clothes dropped to the snow—Danny, his balls tight and resentful from the cold, envied the ease of that—and the crow slapped the air with wide black wings as it took flight. One of the younger wolves crouched, haunches tight under pale fur as he got ready to spring.

  Ellie, ruddy and lean, snapped at the young hunter’s nose to get him to flinch and back down.

  This bird wasn’t prey. Not tonight.

  The crow cawed mockery down at them as the wind caught under its wings and tossed it skyward. Its cruciform shadow spread over the snow like an inkblot as it briefly spun on a wing tip and then flew north.

  Jack tightened his fingers on Danny’s scruff and pulled him over and down. The brush of his mouth, the cold-intense taste of him when he kissed Jack was so familiar it hurt. Danny wanted to wrap Jack around himself, to lose his grief in the hard muscles and warmth of him.

  “Behave,” Jack chided as he stepped back. “It’s not the time.”

  He was right. Danny let all that want fall into the pit, the emptiness it left easier to navigate, and stepped back to give Jack room as he shed his human skin. The wolf shook itself, all tawny fur and heavy muscle, and snorted impatiently at Danny.

  Time to go.

  Maybe this time, Danny thought wearily as he took his glasses off and bent down to set them on top of his jeans, he’d just stay in the dog’s coat. It had terrified him once, the thought of losing himself to the soft-edged, simpler world of his other shape. Right now it felt like it would be… easy. He pulled the dog up out of his bones before the Wild took the choice from him.

  The dog shook itself briskly, nose to tail, to settle its flesh right on its bones. It could feel the ache of grief in its chest—a dull pressure that pushed against the keel of its breastbone—and in the pinch of muscles that clamped its tail and pinned its ears.

  It could taste Danny’s grief on the air, complex with notes of resentment and old, old pain, and the bright, clean red of blood teased at its nose.

  Jack bumped against the dog’s shoulder, hard enough to stagger the lanky dog and jar it out of its misery.

  The pain was in the past. It hurt, but it was already done, like a tail caught in a door or a tooth cracked on bone, and nothing would help it. It wouldn’t change if the dog worried at it.

  Only Gregor was still in his human skin now. The dog could smell the lack on him, the thin edge of a scent that was meant to be layered over musk and fur. But he still smelled like a predator, and the dog grumbled a low-in-the-chest growl at him as Gregor buried his hand in Jack’s ruff.

  “We don’t let her walk away again,” Gregor said quietly. His hatred was yellow and bitter, like something stale left under a rock. “She dies or we do.”

  Jack snarled his agreement with a short roll of noise in his throat and stepped away from Gregor. The sun hadn’t set yet, but the moon had already crawled up into the sky. It hung low and faded against the blanched-out horizon.

  If the goddess was in it, she’d have a long night ahead of her.

  Ahead of them, almost lost in the gray, the bird shrieked impatiently. Jack threw his head back and answered, the hollow, mournful bell of his howl sharp as it pierced the crackle of the fire and the breathing of the wolves.

  The other wolves joined in as they scrambled to their feet and jostled eagerly for position, shoulders and hips pushed together. Only Gregor stayed quiet, his jaw clenched against the sound. The dog felt the urge tug at its stomach, but it died to a creak of a groan before it could get past tongue and teeth.

  It wasn’t in a dog’s nature to hold a grudge, but beat one long enough and it would learn.

  Gregor was right. Rose and the prophets needed to die tonight, and the dog didn’t see any reason to warn her ahead of time.

  Jack let the howl trail to silence and took off after the bird’s shadow. He forged his way through the snow, the rest of the Pack on his heels. Gregor loped along next to them, the ground-devouring strides of his long legs able to keep pace with the Pack for now.

  The dog hung back out of habit. Its place had always been at the back of the Pack, bottom of the pecking order, and last to get the pickings from the kill, even if it could outrun most of the wolves in a pinch, over a short distance at least.

  THE BIRD flew, and the wolves followed.

  The dog could tell they were on the right track. Tom and Lachlan couldn’t afford to linger in the Wild. It took babies, and this one didn’t even have a mother’s flesh to keep it anchored. They staggered across the countryside in jolts and starts. Every mile or so, Danny would catch the thin, antiseptic scent of amniotic fluid where it had dripped on the snow. Drops of blood stained the snow like gory breadcrumbs, still wet and running despite what had passed since their murder.

  The core of Danny that the dog hung on to thought bleakly about curses, but it was more likely to be the way the Wild was twisted. Not as much time had passed for the killers.

  Curse or not, it was useful.

  Under it all, the stink of Tom’s guilt and fear hung in the air in thin gray strands that clung like cobwebs to the snow. The weakness of it made the dog’s hackles go up from his ears to the base of his tail, stiff with anger. It was too little, too late. Tom could salt the Highlands from here to John O’Groats, and the dog’s mam wouldn’t be any less dead.

  The spike of emotion hit the dog like a hammer hit a bell. It stumbled briefly over its own feet as dog and Danny jostled for space. The dog caught its balance as one of the other wolves, frost crusted heavily on its fur, turned to snap at him. Jagged white teeth clicked shut just in front of his nose. The dog snarled back. There was a difference between being at the bottom of the pack and being a punching bag. It was a thin, hard-defended line.

  It ended the same way it always did. The aggression rippled outward—a growl, a shoulder block hard enough to jar, fur in the snow—and then faded before it reached the high-ranked wolves. They settled down and found a steady pace again.

  The Wild faded in and out around them, a lungful of eerily clean air—like it had never known the inside of anything’s lungs—and pocks of salt-melt in the snow. Ahead of them the storm brewed like a wall of gray, snow and hail tangled around each other as it hammered the world thin to make way for something older.

  It was a landscape the dog had run through all his life, but in a month, he doubted he could find a landmark he’d recognize.

  Ahead of them, the bird suddenly pitched out of the sky. Dead, the dog assumed at first, but then black wings snapped out and it pulled out of the dive just before it hit a frost-limned thicket of gorse.

  A second later something cracked, a harsh pop and echo of noise, and the bird squawked its objection as it banked hard to the side. A handful of feathers, so black they looked like sh
adows, tore free of its wing and floated to the snow.

  “Nick!” Gregor yelled.

  He split away from the Pack and broke into a dead run across. The wolves tangled themselves up as they tried to decide if that made him something to follow or something to chase.

  The dog had never liked him, but right now it knew they were on the same side. It pushed through the wall of muscle and fur and raced after Gregor with a burst of speed that left the wolves in his wake.

  The noise barked again—a gun, the dog realized as it laid ringing ears flat. Gregor had already dodged to the side, and Danny was always faster than people expected a huge, dark wolfhound to be. Something clipped his ear, a sharp pinch, but he’d had worse.

  He threw himself into the gorse. Sharp branches scraped at him and plucked at his back, but that was what the dense coat of hair was for. There were tufts of hair left caught on the thorns, but Danny ignored it as he wriggled deeper.

  The man sprawled on his stomach in the damp ruins of an old hide, gun propped up on a rock in front of him. An acrid, dry smell leached from his pores and clung to the ragged suit he was wearing.

  “Fucking animals,” the man spat through split, dry lips as he reared back.

  He swung his gun like a club. The barrel of it caught the dog over the head, the metal hot enough to scorch his skin through the thin hair around his ears. It ignored the sting of pain and sank its teeth into the man’s arm, deep enough that fabric and down gave way to meat and blood. The man yelped and let go of his gun. He groped down at his belt with his free hand, but it was cold, and he was clumsy.

  The dog got his feet braced on the ground and dragged the man out of his makeshift hunter’s blind, close enough for Gregor to reach in and grab him by the collar. A blade flashed in the man’s hand as he finally got the knife out of his belt. The hooked tip of it opened Gregor’s arm from wrist to elbow, his blood spice and metal on the air. Then Gregor twisted it out of the man’s hand. Finger bones popped with that distinctive chicken-wing sound, but the man just cursed and spat at Gregor.

  Not quite a man, the dog saw, not anymore. His bones were loose under his skin, halfway through a decision of where to set, and his eyes were full of dry, brittle temper, like the townsfolk Rose had turned to her purpose, the parts of them that cared scarred over from the poison she fed them.

  Gregor shook the man like a terrier with a rat and then roughly frisked him. He came up with another gun—it was tossed away into the snow—and a cheap flask that the man grabbed for with his broken hand.

  “One of Rose’s cult,” Gregor said with disgust. He dropped the man to the ground and emptied the liquid onto the snow. It bubbled and stained the white flakes with a greasy, iridescent film. “Drunk on god piss.”

  The man laughed and bared bloody teeth. “You’re fucking monsters,” he said. “Animals. Beasts.”

  Gregor shrugged. “We know.”

  He coldcocked the man and tossed him aside to be sniffed at by the rest of the Pack. Then he reached into the thicket for the gun. The dog laid his ringing ears back and doubted that could end well. Gregor slung the weapon over his shoulder and turned to search the sky. The bird dropped out of it, battered by the wind, and landed awkwardly in the snow. A flap, a hop, and its feathers peeled away like shadows as Nick stood up. The pale, dark-haired man wrapped his arms around himself, although he didn’t shiver. It was habit—an old scar stitched over his stomach, an untidy cord of knotted tissue.

  “Down there,” he said as he pointed with his chin. “It’s open.”

  “A trap?”

  Nick frowned and cocked his head to the side. His eyes flickered as though he could see more than wolves and snow. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re getting ready for something.”

  There was a pause as Jack and Gregor traded a look with matched green eyes. Then Jack flicked his ear, and Gregor nodded. They led the way down the hill, and the wolves followed. The dog sniffed the man, not sure what he thought he’d smell, and then jogged after the last wolf’s tail to catch up.

  Ice-crusted nets were hung over the rocks that disguised the entrance to the bunker, heavy and layered to disguise the deeply set metal door. Even half open, the stink of confined human and the agitation of hot, infected meat thick in the air, it was hard to see. The wolves milled around outside, wary and nervous, but then slunk in on slow, wary paws.

  The dog didn’t follow. Something in the air got its attention. It lifted its nose, snorted out snow, and tasted the air. It was nothing, but the ghost of it made the hackles on the dog’s neck itch. A nervous growl tickled the dog’s throat, and the big wolf that smelled of grief rounded on him with a snarl meant to quell him.

  The dog scrambled back, ears flat, but once the wolf’s attention was back on Jack, it scrambled to its feet.

  It had hunted on its own for years, in narrow streets that smelled of a hundred things on a good night. Maybe it wasn’t a wolf, but it could pick out a fox’s spoor through curried goat, old piss, and the rainbow dizziness of spilled petrol. Sometimes it knew to trust its nose even if it didn’t know why.

  Jack was busy with his brother and the bird. The other wolves would wait on them. The dog shuffled slowly backward, snow matted in shaggy fur until it was out of the line of sight. Then it scrambled to its feet and cast about until instinct tugged it forward.

  It was off the track they’d followed. The dog glanced back, and it had already lost sight of the rest of the Pack. It didn’t matter. Sound carried farther, and it didn’t take long to howl.

  The ripe green stink of decomposition shimmered around the base of a tree, and the faded scent prints of humans hung like grease stains in the air.

  Somewhere in the back of its mind, the dog felt Danny worry, but the humans weren’t the dog’s problem. They hadn’t hurt it.

  Not yet.

  The dog twitched its ear to shed that thought and plowed through the nonrelevant scents. It could almost catch the cobweb smell it was after—a damp, sharp smell like rusted metal. Like….

  The connection clicked into place, and the dog stopped dead in its tracks. It stood frozen ankle-deep in the snow, and a growl rumbled up from its stomach to the back of its throat.

  Lachlan.

  When it was younger, the dog had good reason to be aware of Lachlan’s stink. It made it easier to stay out of his way, especially when he smelled of blood and the sticky satisfaction of someone else’s pain.

  A quiver trembled through the dog’s haunches as it tried to decide what to do. Chase the trail now it had the scent hooked in its nose, or go back and try to convince the wolves to go with it?

  Safer to go back. Wolves hunted in a pack for a reason. The dog took a step back but hesitated. They might not believe him. He was a dog. Even a Sannock was more tied to the Wild than him. The dog didn’t really understand why that mattered—a nose was a nose—but it did.

  Jack might be able to convince them, but… would he?

  That wasn’t the dog’s thought, but it knew that the human side of it understood that sort of thing better. So it forged forward through the snow after the smell of shed blood and Lachlan. The wind picked up as the Wild grew stronger, like a hand on the dog’s ruff to urge him forward.

  “Please.” The word was whined in a strangled, snot-filled voice from over a low rise. The dog flicked its ear as it tried to decide if that was Tom’s voice. “I did what I was told. I was a good dog. That’s what she wanted. She said that if we were good dogs, the gods would keep us.”

  “She lied.” That was definitely Lachlan, his Highlands brogue thicker than normal on his words. “She does that. To you. To me. Worse for you, though, I suppose.”

  He sounded drunk, but the edges of the word were still crisp. The dog pulled its lips back from its teeth in a silent snarl as it cast around the landscape. There was no cover worth the name, just a few scrubby patches of heather that sagged under the weight of the snow and a scattering of stones. The dog stalked, stiff-legged and slung l
ow, up and around the rise. The steady drone of the wind disguised the soft crunch of his paws on the snow as he climbed. He came up behind the two murderers, barely out of their line of sight.

  The baby wasn’t there, and it looked like they weren’t allies anymore.

  Tom lay on the bloody ground, naked and blanched with the cold. His arms and legs lay at unnatural angles, jerked roughly loose from where they’d been moored in the joints, and his fingers and toes looked gray. Stiff. His ribs and chest were deformed, the bones lumpy and misshapen under red-blotched skin.

  The dog felt a cold satisfaction that felt alien. It laid its ears flat to its skull and pushed the Danny-feeling back down under the surface. Tom was no threat now, and that was good, but gloating was a human thing.

  Down below, Lachlan tilted his head up to the sky. “The bitch…. Selene,” Lachlan corrected himself self-consciously, “will be in her chariot soon. You’ll turn then, like it or not. Why drag this out?”

  Tom squirmed on the snow as he tried to push himself back on ruined elbows. He wouldn’t have gotten far, but Lachlan bent down to grab his ankle and drag him back. Tom’s leg stretched in a way that a human leg wasn’t meant to, and he screamed.

  Tears dripped down his face. His blind eye was flushed pink with broken blood vessels.

  “I did everything she asked,” he said. A sob retched out of him. “I helped you kill Kath. I held Bron down. They’d never done owt to me. They’d been kind, but I did for her.”

  “You hated them for being kind,” Lachlan spat. “And she appreciates your service, but now we need one thing from you.”

  “Why?” Tom begged, his voice breaking.

  “You were the only dog stupid enough to think you’d ever matter,” Lachlan said. He booted Tom in the side with a slippery crunch of already damaged bone. The impact rolled Tom onto his side. “And she needs one more skin.”

  As Tom flopped back onto his side, he saw the dog midslink down the hill. His face twisted with self-hatred, but he still opened his mouth.