Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  He turned his attention back to the ground under him as he tripped over a rock buried in the snow. The wolf on his left yanked him back to his feet briskly and kept him in motion.

  “The dog?” Kath asked in a harsh voice. She wiped her mouth again, even though it had already healed. “He’s where he belongs.”

  “Kath,” Jack said. The wolf’s anger bubbled under his tongue, thick and harsh in his throat. “Kathleen. Where’s your son?”

  She turned around and walked backward for a moment. Her face was hard. “What’s it to you, Jack? He’s a dog. A pet. Nothing in the long run. Isn’t that right?”

  There was something expectant in her face, almost hopeful. Gregor hated the instinct that made him lean forward against his captors’ hands. Two years ago, he’d have been happy to use his brother’s weakness for the dog against him. But Gregor would never rule now, and Jack was a soft-hearted idiot.

  “He’s pack,” he rasped out the harsh interruption. “Dog or not.”

  Kath gave him a cold look. She’d never thrown her weight behind either of them officially, but when the time came, she would have picked Jack despite the fact he’d ruined her son’s chances of being a good dog… or a shit human.

  “Not anymore,” she said as she turned back around. Her hands were in fists at her sides and there was frost on the ends of her hair. “Dogs have a master, not a pack. They were a test we nearly failed, but the prophets have given us a second chance.”

  Jack snarled and tried to wrench free from the hands on him. The wolves wrestled him roughly to the ground and put their boots in while he was down. Jack made a thick, furious noise in his throat and curled into a ball to absorb the abuse against his hips and forearms. Gregor sagged in exhaustion, blood hot against cold skin as it soaked his shirt. One of the wolves snorted in disgust and the other shifted his grip to pull back up.

  The second the grip on his arm slipped, Gregor kicked out sideways and took the wolf’s knee out with a loud, grainy pop. Shock made the wolf’s eyes bulge as he folded, and Gregor took advantage of the other wolf’s surprise to pull free. He lunged forward, grabbed Kath by the throat, and dug his fingers down the tendons as he shoved her up against the wall of his da’s house and pulled the knife out of her belt. He pressed the point of it against her stomach, through the pretty blue flowers of her dress.

  Kath’s eyes filmed over amber, but she held on to her skin as Gregor squeezed her throat.

  “Call them off,” he ordered.

  Her bright yellow eyes flicked past him, and when she looked back, they’d faded to gray-flecked brown. She curled her lip in a sneer and leaned into the knife until it sliced her stomach open.

  “Trust me,” she whispered urgently against his jaw, the smell of fear acrid under the rich salt and metal of her blood. “Do what you’re told.”

  Gregor could hear her heart as it stuttered against her breastbone. It could have been desperation or just pain from the sliver of poisoned knife he’d slid into her gut. Maybe, if he still had his wolf, he could have been sure. Instead he had to act on faith—something no wolf trafficked in.

  She’d birthed her dog, raised him, taught him to fight. Of course, she wished he were a wolf—for her sake as well as his—but she loved him as much as Gregor had loved his wee broken daughter, and neither of them would give the prophets their due.

  Gregor let her take the knife back. She scruffed him by the collar like he was her get and hauled him down the road. The others didn’t bother to get Jack to his feet. They just dragged him along.

  Prisons were for humans. The justice of wolves was usually clean and straightforward—exile or death at the Old Man’s jaws. If the accused ran from it, that narrowed the options to death. Still, there were those who’d sinned enough that the Old Man didn’t want the taste of them on his tongue or the responsibility of their future on him, even elsewhere.

  Wolves sent for prophets—to be lamed, ruined, and bent over so they could lick the gods’ feet—would run if they could. Anyone would. The loss of the wolf—that would have made Gregor walk into the snow to die if he didn’t have rage and Nick to fill the hollow of it—was only the first step.

  That was what the old icehouse behind the farm was for. Half-buried in the ground, the low hump of the roof thick rock padded with sound-muffling turf, the stone box was the perfect physical prison. And if the prophet-to-be was strong enough or desperate enough to reach the Wild….

  Kath grabbed one of the hinged steel rings from the wall. It was cold enough to stick to her skin and freeze-dried scabs to the metal as she forced the collar open. She snapped it around his neck and padlocked it shut with competent hands.

  “Where’s your son, Kath?” Gregor asked quietly.

  Kath glanced over her shoulder at the other wolves, her face sharp with reluctant suspicion.

  “Safer than my daughter,” she whispered through stiff lips. “Safer than you, if you aren’t smart.”

  She pulled the gate open and shoved him down into the dark. He hunched his head from the memory of a low ceiling and staggered down the steps into the reeking dark. A second later, Jack, a matched collar bright against his bloody neck, rolled down after him.

  “It won’t be long,” Kath told them. “The prophets will be back soon. You just have to wait.”

  The lock clanked shut, and Gregor was left in the dark with his twin and the source of the reek. Metal clanked in the corners of the room and eyes flashed dim blue in the scant light that filtered into the space as bodies moved away from the walls.

  Gregor grabbed Jack’s collar and hauled him to his feet.

  They’d found dogs, just not the one they wanted.

  Chapter Six—Nick

  THE DEAD girl bobbed in the storm, anchored to her corpse by an umbilical of old bones and slimy flesh. Fish had taken her eyes and her tongue—the bird envied them the tender tidbits—but it could still feel her accusation. Promises had been and were going unfulfilled.

  With a flip of its wing, the tips of its feathers frost-painted, and a snap of its bone-white beak at her tether, the bird rejected the idea of a debt owed. It sheared a strip of rot-sweet tendon from its moorings and tossed it down, slick and slippery as a worm. The girl recoiled with a silent shriek of offense, her shed bones and old grudges caught up in her hands like a matron’s skirts, and the bird jeered after her.

  It had hooked her out of the broth of skin and marrow she’d brewed in and as good as spat the wolf up into her hungry mouth. That she’d given him a chill in his liver and a shadow in his brain was not the bird’s fault.

  In the back of his brain, Nick wondered if the wolf with the knife and the pale eyes had killed her. It was a mortal thing to think, a mortal thing to feel the sticky weight of pity and anger for the dead girl. The bird had no time for it as the storm buffeted it back and forth with no regard for its person or its calling.

  A wolf killed her, it shrugged to Nick as it tried to orient itself in the storm. That one or another. The living all look the same to the dead.

  The dead girl crawled back down her umbilical to the wolf she’d spat her death into her, fingers sunk in between the woven bones. The slick rope was plugged into his ear, gray tendrils of rot spread out from the root for those with eyes to see, and the wolf shuddered as the dead girl hung over his head.

  Serve him right, the bird thought darkly. The aftertaste of Nick’s desperate fear was still on the back of its tongue, tight in its chest. Another mortal thing, but it still felt like it belonged to the bird. The same as Gregor.

  Their wolf.

  Nick grumbled at that, but the bird ignored him as it labored cold-stiffened wings to climb higher. A frustrated croak of annoyance creaked out of it as it felt the weight of the Wild push down. It wasn’t a thing of the Wild—it looked like a bird but had hatched from a… thought, a need for a thing with wings and hunger, not an egg—but it wasn’t an enemy of it either.

  Not as far as it knew.

  It finally burst out of
the sullen bubble of the Wild that hung over the old farmhouse, tatters of it caught in the bird’s stiff feathers. The bite of winter was still harsh, bitter with generations of divine patience as it spread through the world, but the winds that battered the bird were impersonal.

  After a moment the bird steadied itself, shook off the sour residue of the Wild, and drifted into a slow circle over the scattered collection of buildings. Through the veil of snow that blew sideways over the countryside, the bird’s sharp black eyes picked out the shadowy outlines of wolves on the ground as they slammed the door to a hole in the ground.

  Discomfort crawled under the bird’s feathers and raised the ruff around its throat like a dog’s hackles. Once things went under the earth, they weren’t for it anymore. Corpses on battlefields or in ditches, strung from gallows or bloated in the street belonged to it. The slain, the murdered, the angry were its business. Maybe the occasional shallow grave could come under its remit, but tombs were its brothers’ to stalk out.

  Gregor, Nick thought from where the bird had put him. He’s safe.

  His relief was alien. The bird stitched it into his experience—wet beak, full craw—but it only mostly fit. Mortal things were a strange delight. It knew lust, the peacock preen of feathers and a well-chosen mating gift, but this?

  Love. That was something it had only seen in the aftermath, when tears and blood had been shed.

  Nick flinched at that thought. He believed it didn’t have to end badly. People could just be happy.

  People could, the bird agreed as it stooped on wide, black wings to perch in the bare, brittle branches of a wild hawthorn. The thorns poked at its toes as it shuffled into a comfortable perch and fluffed its feathers out against the cold. It tucked its beak in and preened at its breast feathers, flakes of snow cold on its tongue, around the knot of scar tissue that ran down its chest. But you already ended badly.

  There was no answer to that. The bird chuckled to himself, smug that he’d won, and plucked a stray black feather from its breast to drop into the snow. It lay there for a second, like an arrow pointed to the wolves’ den. Nick wondered, with a flicker of suspicion, why it had done that. The bird yawned, tucked its feather back under its skin, and croaked with laughter as Nick fell off the branch.

  Fuck!

  Thin branches whipped against Nick’s thighs and back as he tumbled gracelessly out of the tree. With a jolt of pain and shock that ran from his tailbone to the back of his skull, he hit the ground backside-first and sucked in a shocked mouthful of air and iced needles. His chest cramped painfully, and his hips ached as he dragged himself to his feet.

  The bird chuckled hoarsely at him as it nested down into his… soul, he supposed. Nick thought about that for a second, but it was too long, and he shied away from the idea as he felt his composure start to slip. He’d built his whole life, his surgical career, on the rock-solid foundation that his grandmother had been crazy, and he was nothing like that. The world made sense in a way that could be taken apart and pinned down, like an autopsy of reality.

  Then he found out his grandmother was not only sane but right about the world, and that somehow made all her old cruelties worse. Superstition and fear were what stitched the world together against the monsters—the bird clicked its beak at him and he amended the thought—and gods outside, and the stitches had started to fray.

  And he had died.

  His life had fallen apart under him, the history he thought he knew snagged on gran’s secrets and her murder of his mother, and he’d accepted that. In a way it was easier to stop his decades-long resistance to the fairy-tale reality his gran had constructed for him when he was a child. It was only when he poked at the edges—when he tried to find the logic—that he tasted panic in the back of his throat.

  He would have to deal with it one day, let his new reality sink down into his bones, but not yet. Nick grimaced to himself as he chafed cold hands over his pale forearms—naked in the storm wasn’t a good time to do anything.

  We should go. He poked at the bird. It wasn’t a bird exactly in his head, just a sense of something dark that was all hunger and wickedness. Despite that, it still managed to convey that it had tucked its head under its wing and wasn’t paying him any attention.

  The wind shoved at Nick to dislodge him from the sad shelter of the wind-blown hawthorn’s bent trunk. It poked snow in his ears and pinched at his thighs and between his legs as he hunched over on himself. The old scar on his stomach—nearly the same age as him, where his gran had sliced him open—itched and flushed red against his pale skin.

  Thirty minutes. That’s how long it took hypothermia to set in. Less if you were stupid enough to go out naked in the snow. In the back of his head, the echo of his own calm, clinical voice diagnosed the cause of death in too many cold, stiff bodies back in Girvan. “Reddening of the extremities due to frost erythema, damage to the extremities from frostbite, in the gastric lining, evidence of Wischnewski spots….”

  Nick exhaled, smoke on his lips, and pushed the nag of a voice to the back of his head. His body was used to being alarmed by the signs of extreme cold. It pulled the blood from his fingers and toes to make his heart race and make him shiver. But he’d already died, bled out on a beach in Gregor’s arms, and the bird had brought him back. It wasn’t going to lose him to a bad chill.

  The bird chuckled darkly in his head. He ignored it too.

  He gritted his teeth, pushed himself off the tree, and froze as the snow picked out the outline of one of the Sannock Dead. It looked tenuous as frost and shadows, but it was solid enough to leave footprints in the snow as it walked toward him.

  Nick glanced down at the tracks and corrected himself.

  Hoofprints.

  It was what killed Nick the first time, the fossilized ghosts of rage and extinction that were all the wolves had left of the other Wild things that had lived in Britain. Maybe that was why they’d followed him up the coast—to see how he’d done it.

  They’d fallen behind while he rode the train, the steel made their edges bloat and split. He still caught sight of them as they paced along through the trees and through the frozen, abandoned towns. Despite the horns and hooves, they somehow never looked out of place.

  Nick swallowed as the Sannock joined him under the hawthorn. The pronged rack of its horns rattled the branches and dislodged thick, half-frozen chunks of snow, and it stamped neat, split hooves in the snow. There was no heat from its body, no wisps of breath on its lips. It did smell, though, with a faint bitterness that reminded him of mothballs and Sunday knit dresses.

  It should have looked human. Other than the narrow hooves and horned brow, it was shaped like a man with bony callused hands and a wide, sensual face. Something about the eyes and the mouth—a little too wide set and green, too lush and red—made it off, unmistakably other. It compelled and repelled at the same time. Nick was reminded of a school visit to the zoo and the poison dart frogs in their damp glass aquariums. The bright colors warned of toxins, but he still wanted to pick them up and marvel at them.

  “What do you want?” Nick asked, as his teeth chattered. It made his voice unsteady, the words stuttered as though he were nervous, not cold. Maybe he was both. “I can’t help you. I don’t want to help you.”

  The smile was close-lipped, as though there were something behind the scarlet pout that Nick wasn’t meant to see, and the Sannock didn’t look directly at Nick. It unbuttoned the stiff, high-collared coat it wore and shrugged it off. Without the folds of cloth to disguise them, the lines of the body were more obviously wrong—too deep in the chest, and the arms fit oddly into his shoulders, like someone had gotten halfway through making a deer into a human and given up. Yet it was dressed in what had been finery, with a faded red knot of silk at its throat and the glitter of cufflinks on its wrists.

  “I don’t—” Nick started to protest. The black bird, stirred from its fake sleep, croaked angrily at him. That, it insisted, would be stupid. It tried to push out of his s
kin, feathers sharp and itchy against his spine, but he held his ground.

  The Sannock held the coat out and dangled it from one thin, hooked finger. It was a dead thing’s coat, a ghost’s memory of what it had worn, but as the wind whipped it, the faded lines of it thickened and grew heavy. It was dark and plain, with a high collar and frayed cuffs. The Sannock held it and waited. The fact it never looked directly at Nick made it appear casual, but the tension of the moment was strung tight as a tendon between them.

  In the haze of snow around them, soft-edged silhouettes of almost-human and almost-beast shapes faded in and out of view as they drifted. The shadow of a dog, head huge and eyes like dimmed torches, came close enough to sniff the coat and then veered away. A slab of meat had been sliced from its flank, peeled away to show the white, bowed arch of its ribs.

  Sometimes they remembered how they died, but not always.

  “It’s not a gift if it’s not an exchange.” The memory of his gran’s harsh voice echoed from his childhood. “It’s just an obligation.”

  The bird gurgled in disgust at being in agreement with Gran, but Nick knew he shouldn’t take the coat. But he was cold, and they already expected something from him. If he took the first step of the exchange, maybe he’d work out what they wanted him to do.

  He reached out gingerly, his fingers unsteady, and took the coat. His hand brushed the Sannock’s as he did, and he felt it crunch and collapse under the touch. It was made of frost and will and dripped to the ground as meltwater as the Sannock withdrew.

  The coat was heavy and unexpectedly warm to the touch, as though it had stored the long-dead Sannock’s body heat for all these years. Nick hesitated for a second, the garment held at arm’s length like roadkill he’d just picked up, but he could still feel the weight of the Sannock’s attention on him.

  He could do this. Nick pulled the coat on. His skin crawled at the rough, greasy touch of the wool, but the heat sank down into him.