Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  He ignored the brief urge to prove that to the soldiers and instead thumped ice-locked garage doors and rattled padlocks on the way past until they finally fell through a broken blue gate into someone’s abandoned garden.

  “Leave it!” one of the soldiers ordered behind them. “Crazy bastards didn’t have anything with them, and they’ll freeze soon enough. Get back to work. We need to get moving again.”

  Danny swore breathlessly and bent over, hands braced on his thighs. Steam wreathed his face as he panted, the smell of spent adrenaline thick and musty on his skin.

  “All that time I was gone,” he muttered as he wiped his sleeve over his mouth. “Not one person tried to kill me.”

  Jack laughed and grabbed Danny’s jacket to drag him up into a quick, cold kiss.

  “I always knew the south was fucking boring,” he growled against Danny’s mouth and tasted the reluctant tilt of a smile. For the first time in days, he felt like himself again.

  HE SHOULD have known it wouldn’t last.

  “Fuck,” Nick muttered, and his voice slid thickly Glaswegian as all those practiced vowels deserted him. He turned and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as he gagged. The hunch of his shoulders tried to conjure disgust, but Jack would smell the sharp nutty sweetness of hunger off his skin. “Are those…?”

  “Dogs,” Danny said flatly. “They’re all dogs.”

  The soldiers on the train wouldn’t have trouble with any feral packs for a few miles from the look of it. The streets of Glengarnock were full of dead dogs. They’d been slaughtered in the streets, blood spray left to dry on the churned-up snow and the gray walls of abandoned houses. Skinned carcasses were hung from street signs and splayed out over cars.

  “Your grandma left us a message,” Jack said, the words rough as he dragged them up out of a dry throat. “Or maybe it was a packed lunch for her darlin’ boy?”

  Gregor glared at him, green eyes cold behind frost-flecked lashes. Whatever fragile ceasefire they’d cobbled together since Durham, it was still tainted by years of resentment and competition. If it came to a choice between Jack and the bird, Jack wouldn’t win.

  Not that Jack would pick Gregor over Danny, if it came to that, but that was different. Danny had been Jack’s since the first time he saw him, and Danny wasn’t a carrion god in a bony man’s skin.

  The crack of Nick’s laugh, more tension in it that humor, broke the silence. “If it was for me, she’d have left the eyes.”

  Danny made a wet sound in the back of his throat. “That’s disgusting.”

  Nick hunched his shoulders up to his ears and grimaced. His voice was dry as bones as he admitted, “I know.”

  The body of something that, in life, had been a mastiff of some sort was lying curled neatly in the middle of the road. As though it was asleep. Jack walked over and crouched down, cold jeans pulled tight over his knees.

  “Careful,” Gregor said as Jack reached out of the dog.

  It should have been ridiculous, but after the last few months, Jack supposed Gregor had a point. Every wolf pup in the Scottish Pack had been raised with the Wolf Winter as the bloody golden ring at the end of their long exile. Hadrian had sent the wolves he found in his legions up over his Wall, and Fenrir would lead them back down again. It had always sounded simple enough, but now the Wolf Winter was here, nothing had gone as Jack expected. Nothing that had come out of a prophet’s mouth could be trusted as fact, and even a dead dog couldn’t entirely be taken at face value anymore.

  Jack touched the dog. It was solid. That’s why they hadn’t smelled the charnel house on the way into the town. The flesh and muscle were frozen solid and furred with a light coat of hoarfrost. The warmth of Jack’s fingers left wet, red prints on the shoulder of the corpse.

  It had been a quick death. At least the animal’s throat was slit from ear to ear before they skinned it. The skin was gone, the canines and guts.

  And the eyes.

  “Sacrifice?” Gregor suggested as he crouched down next to Jack. Other than his hands, the backs still riddled with slow-to-fade thick white scars, he was Jack’s mirror image. For a while there’d been differences between them that Jack had relished and resented in equal measure, the side effect of too much time spent as a wolf. They’d faded since the prophets had cut Gregor’s wolf out of him, reset him to the template they’d both been cut from. Identical twins, always a bit interchangeable. “Whatever she wants, it’ll have a price.”

  “What’s a dog worth?” Jack asked.

  Gregor shrugged. “To the gods, who knows? To me? Nothing,” he said. There was a thread of cruelty in his smile as he glanced over Jack’s shoulder at Danny. It was an unexpected courtesy that he dropped his voice. “To you? We’ll find out when we face the Old Man.”

  That made Jack flinch. Sometimes he forgot that no one, not even Danny, knew him as well as Gregor. Understood him, hardly ever, but they’d shared a womb and grown up cheek by jowl. They’d never been able to read each other’s minds, but they didn’t need to when their thoughts were written on the same page with the same pen.

  Yet somehow a neutral thought always turned shitty when the other read it aloud.

  “Go to hell,” Jack said quietly.

  Gregor smiled sourly. He scratched at the scars where they clotted between his knuckles.

  “I’ve been there,” he said.

  Something dark flitted through Gregor’s eyes as he said that, shadows under the green. Jack looked away before he had to acknowledge the familiarity. So, they’d both suffered. That wouldn’t change anything. One day he might have to kill Gregor—he’d known that since he was a pup, a fact of life like the moon or the cuff of his dad’s hand—and he couldn’t let sympathy make him hesitate.

  Not when he knew Gregor wouldn’t.

  “I hoped the Sannock Dead’s prison would hold her longer,” Jack said instead as he pushed himself to his feet. The warmth of his body near the dog had been enough to thaw the outer layer of frost. He could smell the stink of the raw meat. “It held them long enough.”

  “Wolves are better,” Gregor said. “Otherwise it would have been our prison, while the Sannock Living walked abroad and told their children horror stories of us. Who else would do this?”

  It was a good question. There were plenty who’d have seen their absence as an opportunity and who wouldn’t be thrilled to see the pup princes back to stake their claim.

  They would have tried to kill them, though. Maybe from ambush with the weaker wolves as backup, as though the twins were prey, but honest enough in its way. It would have come down to the simple question of who lived and who didn’t. Not… this. Cats played games, and toothless prophets.

  “People do terrible things,” Nick said. He’d turned back around, but his chin was tilted up so he could stare fixedly at the horizon instead of the carnage. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his coat, and he shivered under it as he nervously shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I was a pathologist. My gran’s a wicked old woman, but she wasn’t the only monster in the world, even before the… the Wild… cracked open.”

  Jack glanced around skeptically at the slaughterhouse explosion of what had once been a quiet main street. He’d seen humans who liked to kill. Like any other animal that had a sickness, Da either had them chased off or put down if they came onto his lands. Glengarnock didn’t seem the sort of place such a thing could go unnoticed until it exploded like this at the first opportunity.

  “He’s right,” Danny said in a stiff, distant voice. He used the side of his boot to scrape bloodstained snow up over a nearby corpse. “People can be worse than any wolf, but it doesn’t matter anyhow.”

  Gregor curled his lip. “After what the bitch did to Nick? To Jack?” he rasped. The old growl wasn’t there, the wolf’s hackles behind human words, but he made do. “I know you’re a dog, but even a cur’ll bite a hand raised to it eventually.”

  “Jesus, Gregor,” Nick blurted in surprise, the divinity offended r
ight out of him. His eyes were dark and indignant as he dropped them down from the skyline to glare. “That was—”

  Danny interrupted him with a harsh laugh. “Thicken your skin, Dr. Blake,” he said. “If you want to run with the wolves, you’ll hear worse than that out of them. And it doesn’t matter who did this, Gregor, because it doesn’t change anything. If Rose dragged her mangy hide out of the Wild or a madman with a butcher’s knife decided to play dogcatcher, we’ll still need to get over the loch to tell the Numitor the prophets have turned on him… if they were ever for him. And we’ll never get there if we stand here all day, playing Columbo over a dead dog.”

  “Who?” Gregor asked blankly.

  Danny rolled his eyes and stalked away. He picked his way through the corpses, careful of where he stepped, but he couldn’t avoid the bloody snow. It caked his boots in heavy, stained clumps and soaked the lower legs of his jeans.

  “Sometimes I wish I’d left you back in Durham,” Jack said flatly. “Danny’s right.”

  “No surprise you think so,” Gregor said, contrary out of habit as he stood up and brushed the snow off his knees. “That dog’s nearly been the death of you already, and you didn’t even learn anything.”

  “I learned I’m not a prophet,” Jack snapped. He could still taste the sour bite of the prophets’ brew as they poured it into him, feel the burn of shackles that pinned him out in human form like a sacrificial goat. The stink of the prophets’ monsters, only enough of them left to suffer, still woke him gagging at nights. Children’s stories and myths. That was what the Wolf Winter had always been, but somehow he’d expected the advantage to belong to the wolves. “I learned my catechism, I hated the gods, but I never talked to the prophets or went to their rituals. None of us did. That’s how they managed to betray us with nobody any the wiser. Maybe Da will know what this means. Or not. Either way, a dead prophet can’t plot anything.”

  There was a pause, and then Gregor smiled at him—a hard, humorless slant of his mouth. He inclined his head slightly. “That, little brother, is one thing we can agree on.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Jack told him.

  Gregor laugh was a bark of amusement that disturbed a handful of crows from the rooftops. They flew away, shadows cruciform and gray on the snow, and Jack hoped it was coincidence they were headed for the loch. He looked at Nick, whose attention clung to the tails of the birds until they disappeared behind the tree line.

  If his face could be trusted, he hoped the same thing. But it couldn’t, so that didn’t help.

  Jack shook himself. He missed… the wolf who’d come down from the Wall, he supposed. Back then, he’d been sure of his place in the world, sure of his da even after exile, and he’d never woken up with the taste of fear and his own blood in the back of his throat.

  He’d trade a lot to have the wolf back.

  “Start walking, Gregor,” he said grimly. “The prophets won’t kill themselves.”

  “You don’t know that,” Gregor said. There were knives in his voice. “They’re supposed to be able to see the future. Maybe they’ll take the easy way out.”

  Jack hoped not. Maybe if he killed enough prophets, he’d find the certainty they’d carved out of him. He gave the dogs one last hard look, in case there was a chance Da would know a cause for the butchery, and loped down the street after Danny.

  Behind him he heard Gregor question Nick, “Columbo?”

  Chapter Three—Danny

  DANNY CLENCHED his jaw, the ache in his teeth from the cold a new constant as he struggled through the knee-deep snow that drifted across the road to Lochwinnoch. His jeans were crusted with slush and the wet denim chafed against his cold skin. His breath had frozen against the collar of his coat, a thin skin of frost where he tucked his chin down behind the zipper.

  It only took a couple of hours to walk to Lochwinnoch from Glengarnock. It had taken Danny less when he’d left home with a backpack and an acceptance offer to the university, even with how many times he stopped and almost went back. A wolf could have done it quicker than that, even on two feet.

  They’d already been on the road for half a day, slowed down by the wet resistance of the snow and the ice-needled wind that pinched ears and worked its way through every zipper and seam. It pushed them back until they had to lean into it like mimes to make any progress. Danny tried not to think about the Hunt in Durham, when he’d caught the Wild like a tailwind as he ran. This was just weather. If the Wild didn’t want them back on the Old Man’s territory, then Jack or Gregor would have said something.

  Instead they took point, grimly silent as they broke a path through the snow for those not lucky enough to be wolves. All Danny could see without looking up was their sodden jeans and old, ruined boots as they kicked the fresh-fallen snow out of the way. Their uncomplaining stamina made him feel guilty for the sluggish weariness that dragged at him.

  He could feel the dog’s restlessness in his bones. If he shifted, he could cut across country and move faster. The cold wouldn’t bother him as much, and the dog didn’t need glasses.

  Danny grimaced at the reminder and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  He’d gotten his first pair of glasses when he was eleven, old enough to realize his ma couldn’t deny he was a dog, but she wouldn’t accept any other defect in him. The fact he couldn’t see farther than the end of his arms, the way he sneezed the spring away, and his habit of being too tall to go unnoticed all had to be character flaws. Something he could overcome if he worked hard enough.

  He hadn’t blamed her, not much, anyhow. She’d wanted him to live, to thrive, and that was how she thought she could make it happen. But he wanted to see, so he bunked off school and went to the optician.

  The sharp edges of the world had amazed him. His ability to land a punch in the right region impressed his ma enough she’d let him keep them. For a while, in Leeds, he tried contacts, but they’d never felt right. The glasses always had, the weight of them on his nose the evidence he didn’t belong up here.

  Now they were gone, and Danny still didn’t belong.

  He refused to belong. Even if sometimes—when Jack pulled him into a kiss or slung a lazy arm over his shoulders—he wanted to. It was easier that way. If you didn’t want something to start with, no one could take it away from you.

  He went to push his glasses up his nose again and huffed out a misty sigh of exasperation when he poked his eyebrow. At least there was nothing along this road he’d miss out on seeing. Even before he lost his glasses, Winter had blurred the edges of the world. It was long stretches of white and the pencil scrawl of bare trees that lined the road. They stood out black against all the white, stripped down to the bark. Ice coated the branches and hung down in long, glittering spears. The trees groaned and creaked under the weight, and occasionally one of the icicles would break free and drop down to break into brittle sprays of needles against the ground.

  Abandoned cars lined the road. A few of them—left behind in the first days of winter—had pulled in crookedly to the verge and locked the doors behind them. Others had been left where they stopped, ice crusted up around their tires and doors left open, so snow filled the inside.

  Danny paused for a second next to an old green Ford. There was someone inside, propped up in the driver’s seat. Danny pulled his sleeve down over his hand and scrubbed it over the window to dislodge snow and a layer of loose ice.

  There was a woman inside, wrapped in a heavy parka and a tartan wool blanket. Faded red hair was clipped up top of her head and her eyes, glazed gray with death and ice, stared blankly forward. Danny wanted to say they’d been blue.

  “Do you know her?” Nick asked. He’d struggled even more than Danny since they left the train. The long black coat he refused to abandon was matted with snow from hem to knees, and the cold pinched the end of his nose white. He still sounded sympathetic, in the slightly distant way that people who dealt with death—pathologists, funeral directors, very bad doctors—tended to approach gr
ief. Danny supposed that carrion gods would have the same polite remove.

  “Maybe,” Danny said. She looked about the right age to have been one of the Lochwinnoch kids he’d practiced his humanity on back then—his friends. It was Scotland. A lot of the girls had been redheads thanks to nature or a bottle. He hadn’t bothered to keep in touch with them when he left. It hadn’t even occurred to him. But with Nick’s attention still on him, that didn’t feel like something he could admit. So, he lied. “Heather, I think. I went to school with her.”

  “She didn’t suffer,” Nick said. The obvious lie gave him pause, and he amended it quietly. “Not for long. If that helps.”

  Ahead of them Gregor and Jack realized there was no one at their heels and stopped to listen. Jack scowled at Nick’s statement. He did that at most things Nick did—talk, shift, breathe. Danny understood the reason for it—he had no fond memories of the prophet either, and Nick shared the sharp bones of his face with her, the relationship unmistakable—but that didn’t make it easier.

  “Freezing isn’t a good way to go,” he said. “We’ve seen that.”

  Nick shook his coat out around him, like a bird fluffed its feathers. He stuck his hands in the pockets and hunched his shoulders and collar up around his ears. “She didn’t die of the cold,” he said. “It was quick enough.”

  “He should know,” Gregor said smugly. “He’s a doctor. A real one.”

  Danny scowled. It was stupid to care. He’d never wanted to get into medicine, and the only reason Gregor even cared was the fact he could use it to get under Jack’s skin. There wasn’t much need of medical care when what didn’t kill a wolf would eventually heal. Danny knew all that, but it didn’t help. The jab still rankled.