Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  He’d grown up a dog among wolves. They’d been bigger, stronger, and healed faster. All Danny had was that he was clever and that he fought dirty. The idea that he’d lost that advantage to someone who could love Gregor, bothered him.

  But one thing he had learned from the wolves was how not to react when something drew blood.

  “I hope he was a good one, then,” Danny said. “I’d like to believe him.”

  “That’s not how I knew,” Nick said quietly, his eyes still focused on the face behind the frost-trail-obscured windshield. He blinked and looked away with a nervous twitch of his shoulders and pulled up a dry smile from somewhere. “But I am good at what I do.”

  “Did.” Jack’s curt correction dropped like a stone. “What you did, before you died.”

  Nick winced at the reminder. He rubbed his chest absently with a gloved hand, dislodging a fluff of snow that clung to his coat. “I’m not sure it counts,” he said. “If you come back.”

  A growl trickled between Gregor’s lips, the scrape of sound thinner than Danny remembered. He grabbed the back of Jack’s neck and pulled him roughly close. “If you drop that in front of the Old Man,” he warned as Jack shoved him away, “this truce will be over before the prophets are.”

  It was an empty threat these days, but it took Gregor longer to lose a habit than it had to lose a wolf.

  Danny flinched as he caught the cruelty of that thought. It was hard to pity Gregor—and unwise, there was nothing more guaranteed to rile his temper—and easy to resent someone who couldn’t be bothered to use Danny’s name. Still, as often as Danny had resented what he was, he couldn’t imagine being without his dog, alone in his skin. The discomfort of the idea made it hard to enjoy Gregor’s fall from grace.

  “You’ve taken a bird to bed,” Jack pointed out with a snort. He scrubbed his hand over his nape as he stepped back. “I think Da’ll notice that all on his own, even if I don’t mention he was dead.”

  The potential for violence hung in the air for a moment, brittle as one of the icicles that dangled from the trees. Then Gregor snorted out a laugh.

  “Look at that,” he said. “After all these years, I’ve finally outdone you. Da’s going to hate mine more than yours.”

  Reluctant humor warmed Jack’s expression as he thought about that. After a second, he inclined his head in brisk acknowledgment, his dimple a faded mirror of the deep, crescent slash that scored Gregor’s lean cheek.

  “When you put it that way,” Jack said. “You win.”

  Nick clicked his tongue. “I’m glad I’m good for something,” he said dryly, a hint of something rough under his voice. If Gregor noticed it, he didn’t think it mattered enough to apologize.

  Danny used his nail to scrape a porthole in the smear of ice on the windshield. There was an empty white bottle of pills clutched in the woman’s hand. He couldn’t read the label, but it was unlikely to be vitamins. It looked like Nick had been right.

  “We should get going again,” Jack said as he looked up at the sky. “If we can, I want to get home before nightfall. The Wild’s gotten strange as it’s gotten stronger, and there were things in it that always liked the dark best.”

  They all, even Gregor, looked at Nick.

  He scowled at them. “My world was perfectly normal until you came into it,” he said.

  Gregor laughed at him. “You cut up dead people to weigh their brains and read their past in their guts,” he said. “You love a wolf. What’s normal in that?”

  “You love that wolf,” Danny corrected, with a jab of his chin toward Gregor.

  Muscle memory made him shift his weight, ready to run. Clever had been an advantage, but his smart mouth had only ever gotten him into trouble. Gregor took a step forward, but Jack put an arm in front of his chest before Gregor committed to the chase.

  “Enough,” Jack said. “If he hadn’t said it, I would.”

  “You’re my brother, like it or not. He’s a dog,” Gregor said. “He should remember his place.”

  “He does,” Jack said. He dropped his arm. “That’s always been Danny’s problem. Let it go.”

  Gregor gave Danny a narrow, green-eyed stare warning, and Danny cowed as he hunched his shoulders and looked down. His chapped lips stung as he licked them in polite submission and gave Gregor enough of an excuse to back down.

  “Fine. Let him run his mouth dry out here where there’s no one else to hear,” Gregor said. “He does it in front of the Pack, though, you won’t be able to save him from a beating.”

  He turned and stalked away along the road. After a second, Nick coughed uncomfortably and followed him.

  “He’s right,” Jack said. “You have to play the part.”

  Danny crossed his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “I know,” he said as he walked away from the dead woman who he might have known if he’d bothered. “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good dog.”

  There had been a time when Jack would have accepted that at face value. Now he knew enough to look resigned as he waited for Danny to catch up with him. He caught Danny’s arm and pulled him into a rough embrace, his lips rough with stubble as he grazed a kiss over Danny’s mouth.

  “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “You’ve just been gone too long, but once you get back, you’ll get used to it again.”

  Danny supposed it would. He almost had before—whole weeks of time where being a dog in a wolf pack had seemed worth it if he was Jack’s dog. Except he didn’t plan to stay that long. It was a Wolf Winter and, like Nick’s gran had told him as she collared him, the only place for a dog in it was skinned and butchered for meat.

  There was no point telling Jack that, though, any more than there had been in his conviction that the dead dogs, whatever other use they had, had been left as a warning for him.

  “Well, like you said,” he noted dryly as he leaned into Jack’s warmth, “at least they’ll hate Nick more.”

  Jack chuckled his agreement as they walked. He didn’t get it. The wolves might distrust Nick for his gran’s sake or kill him because that’s what they’d done with everything else in Britain that wasn’t them. But he was too different to hate. People saved that for the things that were almost like them but not quite.

  Like wolves hated dogs.

  THEY DIDN’T quite make it before night. The faded winter sun didn’t seem to give much heat during the day, but in its absence, the cold chewed down to the bone. Every time Danny stopped to catch his breath from the wind, he could feel his clothes stiffen and crack as they froze. Overhead the moon was a fat wheel with a single bite taken out of it, and he could feel the dog tug at the back of his throat as it wanted to howl.

  Not yet.

  He swallowed the sound as he stopped at the shore of the loch and stared over the dark, half-frozen water. Even without his glasses, he probably couldn’t have picked out the landmarks he’d known. Under the snow, even the cottage he’d grown up in was lost among the crags and drifts. If he squinted, he could see the Old Man’s run-down farmhouse, where it squatted halfway up the hill—gray walls and corrugated iron roof stark against all that white, the smell of generations of wolves worn thick and musty under the wood and mortar.

  Old stones, mortared together in the old way. It was drafty as a barn, plagued with damp and vermin. Squirrels had given the stink of old predator a wide berth, but rats and mice, as it turned out, were no respecters of the Numitor’s dignity. It had been Danny’s job to set traps in the rafters and basements, his fingers blistered from the springs and bloody from the teeth of not-quite-dead rats when he cleared them.

  Back then, Danny thought it stacked up poorly against the houses of his friends from school, with their hot-water boilers, radiators, and microwaves. Now….

  Danny snorted to himself, breath white as hoarfrost as it smoked out of his body. If someone could offer him on-demand hot water and a pot of coffee, he’d still trade every hand-carved old block of granite from under the Old Man’s nose for it.

&
nbsp; The farmhouse would weather the Wolf Winter. The frost might crack the mortar or burst the old pipes—probably still lead, Danny had always darkly suspected—but the structure would be left intact. There was nothing there that the Wild objected to. In fact, rumor had it among the wolves that the Old Man’s den stood unchanged in the Wild itself. If you could find it, of course.

  Danny had never wanted to. He never planned to come back at all. The pipe dreams that other kids at university had—of going home in a BMW with a beautiful wife or handsome husband to rub their bullies’ noses in it—had never worked for him. Wolves didn’t value any of that.

  Yet now he was here, and as he squinted across black water at the place he’d grown up, it didn’t feel like home.

  Danny was surprised to discover he didn’t know how he felt about that.

  “I should go,” he said as he turned back to the others. “Alone.”

  “No,” Jack and Gregor snapped at the same moment.

  It made Danny blink uncomfortably. He’d never had trouble telling Jack from Gregor. Even though they had the same face, they wore it differently. It was moments like this, when who they were ran in lockstep, that caught him off-balance. Even if they’d reached that stop from different directions.

  “What if Rose is there?” Jack asked. “Or the prophets are there to stop you from reaching the Old Man.”

  “So you can put Jack’s side first?” Gregor said. “Get Da to back him?”

  “Why?” Nick asked. He brushed snow off a rock and sat down with a sigh of relief. Once they left the road, he’d limped most of the last few miles. Birds and pathologists didn’t do much hiking. He tucked his hands between his knees and looked curious. “I’d think this Numitor would want to see his sons first?”

  Danny’s cheeks hurt from the cold as he smiled grimly. “I forgot that you don’t know him,” he said. “Jack was told to leave, and now he’s come back. Gregor was told to stay, and he left. No one told me to leave or asked me to stay. The Numitor probably won’t be happy to see me, but he won’t be angry either.”

  “That’s what you think,” Jack corrected as he stalked over to poke a finger against Danny’s forehead. “You think he won’t be angry. You think the prophets won’t be ready for you. But thinking isn’t knowing, Danny-dog.”

  Danny moved his head away with a flicker of annoyance. “What I know is that the Old Man doesn’t like to be defied. He’ll at least hear me out, long enough for me to convince him he needs to listen to what you and Gregor have to say.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  Sometimes Danny could still feel the choke of the prophets’ collar on his throat, so tight that every time he swallowed it made him retch and strangle. The prophets had never cared one way or the other about him when he was a boy, but either that indifference had been an act or they’d coarsened themselves with their rites and rituals. They’d taken great delight in the petty torment of a dog.

  It had cowed him. He didn’t know why, maybe because, for the first time, he couldn’t fight back or because he’d realized he was going to die before anyone came to get him. It turned out he’d been wrong about that, but…. If the prophets got him again, would they have to start from scratch or where the fault lines already were?

  A wolf would have survived… better. Bounced back without scars. Danny hadn’t, but he wasn’t going to betray that to Jack. He wouldn’t be the liability, especially not when others had suffered more than he had.

  So he shrugged as he dropped his backpack to the ground.

  “You get to play the hero again.” He cast a glance toward the black, sullen waters of the loch, the ice crusted outward from the rocky shore. “This time, try and get me out before they dunk me in the water.”

  Jack growled under his breath. “If you get yourself in trouble again,” he threatened as he scruffed the back of Danny’s neck, “maybe this time I won’t bother to get you out of it. Think about that before you dive headfirst into a fight.”

  Most of Danny knew that wasn’t true. Even when they were kids, Jack was always there when Danny needed him. Even if he couldn’t always interfere—some of the fights Danny had gotten into were ones he picked—Jack was always there to drag Danny back to his feet afterward.

  But most wasn’t all. There was always that cold sliver of doubt somewhere in his heart that believed his ma instead. She always told him to never depend on Jack, “You need him, he wants you. One day you’ll both realize it’s not the same thing, but you’ll be the one left bleeding.”

  Danny never paid any attention, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t listened.

  “Good thing I can swim, then,” he said as he stripped down to his skin. Then he turned it for another. “Take the long way around. By the time you get there, they’ll have either listened or not.”

  The dog sneezed and shook itself from ears to tail to shed rough gray hairs onto the snow. Everything that had worried at Danny sloughed away like dead skin, too full of stuff to fit into the dog’s thoughts.

  It knew where they were—for Danny, for later—but the dog was built for now. What mattered was the bite of cold in its nose, the itch on its back leg, and Jack’s hand as he rubbed its ears. Tomorrow and yesterday, the prophets and their monsters, heartbreak and longing—it would worry about them when they got here.

  The dog leaned against Jack’s legs and grunted happily as Jack scratched under its jaw.

  “Be careful,” Jack said. “Don’t get killed.”

  The dog thought about that for a second and then dropped it with the rest of the things that were for its Danny-self to handle.

  It knew it was to go over the loch to find the Old Man. Once the dog had done that, it would do whatever came next. If it got stuck, then it would pull its skin back on and let Danny worry.

  The dog pushed its cold nose into Jack’s palm, snorted wetly between his fingers, and then scrambled down the side of the loch and onto the ice. The dog could feel the distant echo of Danny’s exasperation as it slid over the frozen sheet and into the frigid water, but it ignored it as struck out for the far shore.

  Halfway over, it realized there was already someone there before it. A figure crouched on the rocks, half hidden between them and with their scent deadened by the cold and the water, watched the dog get closer.

  The dog barked, but the sound was lost in the wind that rippled the water. It hesitated for a second, tongue dangled out between its teeth to trail in the water as the wind pushed it toward the far shore.

  Stubbornness was part of the core kernel of identity that passed between skins. The dog laid his ears flat to his head, sneezed out water, and forced cold-numb legs back into motion.

  The stranger waited.

  Chapter Four—Gregor

  JEALOUS.

  Gregor stood on the shore, his arms crossed, and watched the dog’s long, narrow head as it cut through the loch.

  Of a dog. He licked the back of his teeth and tasted bile. This was what the prophets had reduced him to, what they’d left him.

  Fangless. Fixed. Fucking pathetic.

  It was a familiar litany. Sometimes the words were different, but the sentiment was always the same. Gregor wasn’t what he had been, and no matter how he postured and snarled the minute he stepped in front of the Pack, they’d all know it.

  He’d been heir apparent—by default if not choice—and now he’d be nothing. No wonder he hated himself. Everyone else would.

  Gregor curled his lip in a silent snarl at the taste of self-pity surrender. It wasn’t his. He’d hated himself before—both the face he saw in the mirror and the one he saw on Jack—and he knew what that tasted like. It was resentment and scapegoated blame, all tied up with strings of raw, bloody anger that sharpened his fangs and clenched his fists.

  He took his emotions—his grief, his disappointments, his frustration—out on other people, not on himself. The hunger to have Rose under his heel as he ripped her stolen skin from her sour flesh, revenge and the final fuck-y
ou proof to Da that, even without his wolf, Gregor was better than Jack. That was his, not this self-pity that wanted him to go off somewhere and let the world rot for want of him.

  That came from the raw hole the prophets left in him when they cut him open. They’d taken his wolf with their filthy knives and filthier teeth and left him an infection that festered under the thin scab that held him together. It bubbled out like emotional pus when he picked at it, like a child poked at the gap in their gum left by a baby tooth.

  “What if Da doesn’t listen?” Jack asked. He stalked a short, impatient circuit along the edge of the shore—three strides away and three back. His boots packed the snow down to a hard crust of ice, streaked with mud churned up from the ground beneath. His scent was thin but sharp on the cold air, caught on the wind as it picked up, the burned-heather smell of anger with a sharp, saltwater-and-stone undernote of unhappiness. “He’s always tolerated dogs born to the Pack, but that was when they were useful to him. It’s Winter now, there’s no more bills to pay, and Rangers have played their last match.”

  Gregor snorted. “What if he drowns before he gets there?” he taunted. “Or the monster gets him.”

  It wasn’t a monster, of course, just old and too stupid to know it was dead, bones lost to the mud and silt at the bottom of the lake. As pups they’d all swum out to taunt it with pale, human feet or the bushy lure of a wet tail and yelped when it struck at them with a mouth full of cold-water fangs.

  A chill. A scare if you’d gotten complacent. Nothing more.

  At least not then. Gregor supposed it could be different now. The Wild had let other old bones back into the world, why not these?

  Jack shuddered as though he’d forgotten and took a step onto the ice—it groaned under his weight, a drawn-out sigh that hung over the lake—and scanned the water for any sign. Nothing moved, but the water was dark, and it wouldn’t have been much of a game if the pups had seen the monster as it came for them. Even the long-nosed prow of Danny’s head, seal slick with water, was impossible to pick out as clouds covered the moon.