Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “In this I do. We put you in those bodies, and we can put you in others. Every death we will jam you back into a corpse, trim what doesn’t fit, and make you walk,” Nick said. His voice was dry as dust in his throat, and he’d have felt more confident in his threat if he had clothes. “You never lie down and rest. Not if that baby dies. Help us. You’ve nothing to lose. Trust me, my gran won’t need any more excuse than what you did here to make you suffer. And you don’t want to be on the run from us both.”

  The Sannock snorted, low and wet like an animal. Nick remembered cloth on his shoulders, like woven shadows, and hissed some of his tension out between his teeth.

  “Please.”

  Gregor made a disgusted noise at the plea.

  The Sannock turned slightly as they traded glances, conversation worn down to sketched expressions and twitched fingers by centuries of familiarity. After a moment they came to an agreement, and the horned Sannock turned back to Nick. He smiled, not pleasantly.

  “Why lie, little bird?” he asked. “You already know where your great mother has fled. Does the crow have your tongue?”

  Everyone looked sharply at Nick, even Gregor, suspicion cracked through those sharp, green eyes.

  Nick swallowed the pain of that like a stone, like the bird’s bones his gran had pushed down his throat. He started to shake his head, but then he remembered the dead Sannock’s coat on his shoulders and the musky stink of the thing on the moors. He could almost taste it, oily and rank on his tongue as he swallowed.

  “The Run-Away Man,” he said.

  Gregor grimaced and looked away impatiently as he scrubbed his hand over his face. “It’s not the time for fairy tales.” He looked grim, his face tired and pale under the filth and blood. Nick supposed he’d look the same if he had a child that his gran somehow got her hands on. She’d never had any kindness in her. Not—Nick remembered the faded affection, cut with fear, on his grandfather’s face as Ewan talked about Rose—for as long as he’d known her.

  “The wolves and the Wall were fairy tales too, to me,” Nick said. “So is the Run-Away Man. I saw him out in the storm with a dead thing on the moors. But… why would Gran have anything to do with him? She was afraid of him, as close as she could get to being afraid.”

  He could remember the pinch of her fingers—on his ear, just behind his armpit, on the backs of his thighs—as she made him look at the old picture. So he’d always remember what the Run-Away Man looked like and what he was to do if he ever saw him.

  Run. Of all the terrible things his gran had conjured in her stories, that was the only one he was to run from.

  “That was then. This is the Wolf Winter,” Danny pointed out. He made a wry face around his torn cheek as he said the words. “Maybe her position on him has changed, or he… he might have. Your Run-Away Man might not be what he once was.”

  Danny looked thoughtful as he said that, as though something had occurred to him, but he shook his head when Jack raised a questioning eyebrow at him. He was pale, except for the shiny flush of infection on his cheek, and once Jack nodded at him, he slouched back down into his dog. It flopped onto the ground, stretched out so as much of its skin touched the cold floor as possible, and panted.

  “Fine. I don’t care who he is, or what he was,” Jack said. “Is Rose there? Is that where we’ll find her?”

  The Sannock shrugged. “If you run.” They traded another shorthand conversation in a look. It ended with a nod from a woman, her hair black at the ends and almost translucent at the roots as if she’d run in the wash. “If we help.”

  “And the cost?” Gregor asked cynically. “Another eye?”

  “Peace,” the Sannock said. “You take your wolves down over your wall, and you forget we breathe and walk again on this world’s dirt.”

  It would have been an easy “done” from Nick. He’d learned not to love anywhere he lived as a kid, bounced from placement to placement. Where Gregor went, he’d follow.

  He expected it to be harder for the wolves, who’d called this their place for centuries.

  “Done,” Jack and Gregor said in unison, their voices overlapping almost perfectly.

  They glanced sharply at each other, and Gregor shrugged his surrender before he stepped back to cede authority to his brother. He took Nick’s hand and squeezed it roughly as they waited, cold blood-slick fingers tangled together. It meant something, Nick was too tired to work out what or hold a grudge against that flash of doubt. He leaned against Gregor and slouched down to rest his chin on his shoulder.

  “Any wolf that follows me leaves Scotland,” Jack said. “Any wolf that doesn’t, that’s up to you, but my Pack won’t avenge them.”

  A snarl echoed from a few of the wolves in shocked protest. A few of the most recovered pulled their skin on, pale and clammy with the effort of it, and found the words to disagree.

  “This is our land!”

  “The prophecies said we’d go down over the Wall to reclaim the whole island, not that we’d lose our home.”

  “We killed them once, we can do it again.”

  “Should we even try to stop her?” It was James’s protest, his voice thick and congested, that silenced the others. He braced himself against the wall as he pulled himself to his feet. Scars, faded but not yet gone, laced his leg where Kath had shredded it, and he looked smaller somehow. The Sannock couldn’t touch his bones, but they seemed to have culled some of the bulk from his muscles and the fat from under his skin. “Fenrir rises. Isn’t that what we want? Isn’t that what we’ve spent the last centuries here to wait for? So what if it is early? So what if this sackcloth-and-skin bitch does it for us? Once Fenrir is here, we won’t need a Numitor anymore. We won’t give one green blade of what is ours to these freaks. And what is the life of one child compared to that? How many of us have lost children? How many have had their get sent away if they weren’t strong enough, weren’t good enough? We’ve all sacrificed, except the Old Man’s sons. Let them bleed for the Pack. Then maybe Fenrir will let them run with us.”

  As they listened to him speak, a few of the wolves nodded slowly in agreement. Others refused to look at Jack and Gregor, faces turned away and ears flat on those still in their fur.

  “Idiots,” Gregor said. He cast a scathing look around the room. “You think that Fenrir will be grateful for this? That he’ll think a change of chains is as good as a rest? Would you?”

  “And we should take your word that Rose is evil?” James spat out. “Maybe all she wants is for us to have the Wolf Winter we were promised. More than you seem to want.”

  “Go fuck yourself, James,” Gregor said. “If you’re too scared to face down an old woman, just admit it.”

  James shoved himself off the wall and took an unsteady step forward, his fists knotted. Before he could go any farther, Danny, back on his paws, shot in front of him. The dog’s thick ruff was matted with blood, and the thready nasal growl that squeezed out of him sounded dangerous. He waited until James spat on the floor and loosened his fists. Then the dog backed up cautiously to take up position next to Gregor.

  “I’d say the dog was smarter than you, James, but that wouldn’t be news,” Jack said. He picked a scab of blood out of the corner of his ruined eye and flicked it away. “Do what you want, what you can live with, but since when does a wolf lie to itself? Rose has stolen and murdered our children, maimed our wolves, and defiled our dead. Yet you’ll stand here and say she did it for our own good? The Scottish Pack will live or die with my brother and me, because anyone who stays here because they buy that? They aren’t wolves. They’re just humans with a fur coat.”

  “Are we to die for the Pack?” Ellie asked. “Or because a dog wants it? Prove you’re our Numitor, Jack. Take me as your mate—name any wolf as it—and we’ll follow you to Surtr’s door. He’s a dog. Love him if you want, but he’s not pack. Not really.”

  Jack looked around as wolves nodded and looked at him expectantly for the excuse they needed to do the right thing.
They’d just given him the excuse he needed to do the necessary thing, and Gregor waited expectantly for his brother to seal his position as Numitor.

  “Danny doesn’t make my decisions for me. I lead the Pack,” Jack said. Then he spat on the floor. “But he is my mate, my Pack. If you don’t like it, then rot down here with the prophets.”

  He was a fool, Gregor thought with frustration as Jack turned his back on the Pack and stalked over to the Sannock, but it was the first time he’d ever admired his brother. Their da had raised them to put the Pack above everything, and here they both were—idiots in love with the impossible choice.

  “I told you it’s a deal,” Jack said to the horned Sannock. “So let’s go. The Sannock and Scottish wolves hunt together for the first and the last time.”

  Gregor squeezed Nick’s hand again and then let go. “I hope you can keep up.”

  The Sannock tilted his head and gave Gregor an unreadable look. “Not the first.”

  It raised its hand and flexed its fingers. As it closed them, a spear was already there, ice-caked and thrust headfirst into the ground. The smell of the Wild, air so fresh it felt like it had never seen the inside of someone’s lungs, bloomed in the dank concrete slaughterhouse as the Sannock wrenched the spear free.

  The blade was chipped obsidian, black and glossy, and the shaft just plain wood. It wasn’t ornate or enchanted, just a very old thing that belonged in the Wild.

  “You know the way, murder-bird,” the Sannock said as he raised the spear. His arm tensed as though there were something heavy caught around the chipped blade. The air creased around it and then parted in a long, rippled sheet, and the Wild poured around them. “Lead the way.”

  This time the change wasn’t a choice. Nick and the bird both cried out in pain as the Wild remade them to its design and tossed it into the air. Its scream was a harsh rasp of indignation, and it flapped it wings frantically as it took flight.

  Chapter Twenty-Five—Jack

  THE EDGE of the bird’s wing clipped Jack’s cheekbone, the impact of it hard enough to sting. He hadn’t realized it was so close, hadn’t seen it. He dodged backward to avoid another blow and absently touched his cheek. His eye, where it had been, throbbed with a dull, hot ache spread back into his skull. He could smell his own blood, taste it caught in the back of his throat.

  It would heal. If Jack lived long enough.

  The carrion god shot up toward the high ceiling, and angry croaks trailed behind him. But it wasn’t the smooth, cast concrete of the humans’ bunker anymore. Now it was the vaulted roof of a huge cave, strung with stalagmites and limned with streaks of soot and salt, that he swooped around.

  The gray bloody walls had ceded the space to rough rock, painted with strong ochre lines half lit by the glow from the bonefire’s embers. Blood still stained the uneven floor, but it was old and dried out. The dead were left behind, but the skins the prophets had worn lay spread out on the stone—whole again, lush and clean. Whatever the prophets thought they’d gained from their treachery, the Wild had chosen what belonged to it.

  Jack took a deep breath. The air was so fresh that he thought it might never have seen the inside of someone else’s lungs before. He could have used it to try and rally his wolves, but there was a bitter knot in his throat that wouldn’t give way. Let them do what they wanted. He was done trying to be what they wanted.

  The carrion god screeched and swooped down from the ceiling. It skimmed over their heads close enough that Jack could smell the odd sweet-and-salt smell of its feathers as they brushed his head and disappeared through the twisted fracture that was the mouth of the cave.

  Jack pulled his wolf up from under his skin and went after the bird as soon as his feet hit the uneven floor of the cave. He squeezed his heavy shoulders through the crack and heard Gregor curse as he got stuck behind Jack’s tail. It didn’t take long to lose the bird in the narrow, switchback tunnel, but he could feel a tickle of fresh air on his nose, so he followed that.

  He scrambled up a bank of shale at the end of it, gravel sharp as it dug under his toes, and out into the frozen, snow-blind maw of a storm. Ice pinched at his nose, and snow crusted in his ears as the wind slammed into him. The raw socket of his eye felt like it had cracked as the cold seeped into his bones.

  Even a wolf could shudder at this Winter.

  Gregor grabbed a handful of Jack’s fur and dragged himself up out of the cave. He tightened his grip as the wind hit him with spiteful force, and he hunched down to brace himself against Jack’s shoulder. For the first time in his life he was glad of his brother’s company.

  “Where’s Nick?” Gregor asked. He had to stop and cough, hunched over, his free hand braced against his side as the air got into his lungs. When he was done, he rested his head against Jack’s, his confession for Jack’s ears only. “If I’m the one who can’t keep up, leave me.”

  Jack growled at him but didn’t shrug him off. He could smell blood and exhaustion on Gregor, the stale chemical stink of spent adrenaline. Even without his wolf, Gregor would run until he dropped… but he’d already tapped his reserves. There wasn’t much left.

  A flick of Jack’s ear signaled his agreement as he turned his head away. If Gregor fell behind, Jack would let him… but if they lived, he’d come back. The only people his brother had ever loved were Nick and his dead daughter, so he deserved the chance to at least hold this child.

  To rest with them if that was all he could offer.

  Danny scrambled out of the cave, ungainly and graceless. His front paws scraped the rock, and Gregor grabbed him by the scruff to drag him the rest of the way out.

  The Sannock were next, boneless and graceful as they slid out of the hole. They had dirt in their hair and scrapes on their hands. It didn’t make them any less strange, any less other. Nothing else followed them out of the cave.

  Jack sagged. He’d thought some of the Pack would follow, from the habit of loyalty if nothing else. But they’d had too much asked of them, from his dog to the Sannock. The Wolf Winter was meant to be their triumph, not their undoing. Maybe it was best that Jack wouldn’t be remembered in the catechism—king for a day and then packless.

  Before he could slide too far into self-pity, the dog bumped against him, all rangy muscle and bony shoulders. It laid its head over Jack’s shoulders in reassurance, and Jack remembered he had a pack. A bird, a dog, and his brother—but they were his.

  “Pick your path, wolf king,” the horned Sannock said. “Pick up the thread, never mind the blood, and pull your fate to you.”

  The bird dipped out of the storm overhead. Its wings were rimed with frost, threads of it spread over black pinions like lacework, and it cracked on its beak as he croaked at them. It turned on one weighted wing, buffeted by the wind, and headed toward the frozen sea of the moors.

  The dog lifted his head off Jack and focused on the bird, ears pricked forward as though it were prey. The side of its face was still bloody, half-frozen and raw, but it ignored that as it bolted after the bird. The big gray dog plunged over the lip of the hill and skidded down through the shale and snow, his momentum all that kept him on his feet and aimed at the right one.

  “Not going to be shown up by a dog,” Gregor said dourly as he pushed himself up straight. He flashed Jack a shadow of his old, challenging smirk. “Last hunt, brother. Let’s see who’s best.”

  He followed Danny down the hill, nearly on his ass as he slid down, one misstep away from a fall. His boots kicked deep muddy furrows in the virgin sheet of untouched white. Jack tensed to lunge after him—old habits and older instincts—and then hesitated as he remembered the Sannock. Before he could check on them, they surged past him and ran over Gregor’s trail, gleeful as malicious children as they kicked stones and trampled the brittle leaves of frozen heather underfoot.

  The Sannock had been tragic and dead, but even in memorial, no one had ever claimed they were nice.

  Jack chased after them and growled to himself in annoyance at bein
g last. The wind yanked at his ears and tweaked his tail as he dodged through the Sannock’s legs. It buffeted him roughly, a rude shove that banged his shoulder against a rock or rolled the snow away from under his feet.

  Overhead the bird pitched and rolled on the wind. Its wings battered the air, wrenched and awkward as it tried to make headway.

  Did the Wild agree with the rest of the Pack that they should let Fenrir rise, no matter how? Jack’s head ached at the thought, but he roughly pushed it away. He didn’t serve the Wild any more than it served him. If it wanted to stop him, it would have to do worse than a breeze.

  Maybe it didn’t want to. The closer Jack got to the bottom of the hill, the more the push and pull of the Wild felt less angry and more… impatient. It reminded Jack of sleepy mornings and the clip of his da’s hand around his ear to hurry him on down to the ferry.

  The memory made Jack’s heart rattle painfully against his ribs as he sucked in his breath. He let it ache as he reached the bottom of the hill. It felt right to mourn here, even if he couldn’t stop to do it.

  The bird was already gone, tossed on the storm. It was the unsteady cross of his shadow they chased over the snow. The dog raced ahead on long, rangy legs, just a shadow of lean haunches and tail in the storm. For once, there wasn’t any sense of joy in the long stretch of the lean body, just determination. At some point they slid out of the Sannocks’ way, into the Wild and back into the world, where the snow was tinged with gray and the air was stale with use.

  Jack pushed himself into a dead run and ignored the danger of the uneven ground underfoot. His lungs ached, swollen with the cold, and his muscles were hot and liquid as they stretched and pulled along his bones. The Wild pulsed through his veins, green and sharp as nettles, and stitched him back together—a cracked ankle as his paw plunged into a pothole, the burst blood vessels that spat blood up his throat and onto his tongue—so he could run.

  He didn’t have to stop. The thought itched through his head that he’d never have to stop, he could just let the Wild have him. A distant howl caught his ear. Twisted on the wind, it almost sounded like one of his wolves. Like home. He could stay here, where it didn’t matter if the world ended in blood, fire, and ice. The Wild had existed once and so it always would. The wolf could stay and hunt, chase endless prey whose meat was so clean it was almost candied. Forever.