Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  Even if there was anything to go back to—one day—Jack had ruined it. He’d been there, in Danny’s bed and in his life, and now he wouldn’t be. Danny didn’t know how he’d live with that.

  He dragged his hand down his face and sighed. “I don’t suppose I’m either now.”

  Kath snorted at him. “It was what you did. That doesn’t change who you are,” she said as she stepped inside and dragged the door shut behind her. The wind rattled at it like it resented being closed out, and she had to latch it with the loop of rope nailed to the jam. “As for the Numitor’s boys, I tried to warn them, but I was too late. Lachlan already knew they were coming somehow—”

  “You knew I was here,” Danny pointed out as he sat down on the edge of the narrow metal cot, the smell of mildew worked down into the stuffing of the bedroll he’d found propped up in the corner. “Why wouldn’t Lach?”

  Kath huffed and shook her head. “Dog or not,” she said, “I carried you, I birthed you. You think you could come back to Lochwinnoch and I wouldn’t catch your scent in the Wild? Besides, once the snows came, I knew to look out for you. Whatever you pretended to be down over the Wall, we’re your blood. Your family. Where else would you go?”

  Guilt cut through Danny’s anger and made him look down. He focused on his fingers as he wrenched the buckles of the duffel loose. It had been his once, the stitches still strained where he’d stuffed it with books and errands, but the canvas had gotten discolored and stiff with disuse since he left.

  There was an old glasses case on top, patched together with duct tape where he’d broken it. The glasses inside had heavy, battered rims, and the prescription was a few years out of date, but they’d do. Danny unfolded the legs and put them on. The world came back into focus and didn’t make him feel any better about himself.

  If Jack hadn’t come to find him and brought the prophets on his tail, Danny would never have come back here. The idea that he might need to check on Bron and Mam had never occurred to him. He’d have stayed with Jenny and the others, kept his mouth shut and his head down. Maybe he’d have gotten back together with Jenny, because he was still a dog and he wanted a pack.

  What good would he have done back here? They were wolves, and this was their winter. All he could do was remind people their bloodline had thrown a dog.

  Kath had always thought she knew him better than she did, though.

  “However he knew, he knew. You should have—I should have done something,” he said.

  “What? Die?” Kath asked. She leaned over and rapped her knuckles on the top of his head. “I told you when you were a little boy that if you read too much you’d get stupid. Squeeze too many other people’s words in there and where is there for your wits to live?”

  Danny leaned his head to the side out from under her hand. “I could have warned them. When you told me what happened, I could have gone back and stopped them before they reached the wolves.”

  She grabbed his ear and pulled his head back so he had to look at her. “I make pretty kids, Danny, but not that pretty. If you told them their da was dead and Lach had taken their crown, they’d have gotten back quicker, been taken earlier. Nothing would have changed, except the prophets would have you as well. What good would that do anyone? What good would it do your sister?”

  Danny grabbed her wrist. He didn’t know which of them was more surprised.

  “Don’t.”

  “Or?”

  Another of her old lessons. Danny hadn’t forgotten any of them, though.

  “I make pinching my ear more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Let go, Mam.”

  She did and then startled him by pressing her cold palm against his hot ear. Like a balm, or an apology. Except Kath never apologized to anyone.

  “I swear,” she said earnestly, “when I asked you to do this, I didn’t think Jack and Gregor would be in danger. There should have been time to warn them, to plan what to do next. They’re the Old Man’s only sons. The last thing I expected was for Lachlan to try and murder them on their own doorstep. That’s not how we do things. Whoever this woman he talks about is—this prophet—she’s fucked the good sense out of him.”

  Danny rubbed his neck. Sometimes he could still feel the constriction of the leather when he swallowed.

  “Nick—the dark man with Gregor—said she was his grandmother,” he said. “Rose Blake.”

  Kath abruptly pulled her hand away. “No,” she said. “He’s wrong.”

  “More than you know,” Danny agreed with a grimace. It bothered him a little that he still had a wolf’s insular rejection to anything different to them, but he couldn’t help it. It bothered him more that Gregor was more adaptable than he was, but he couldn’t help that either. He leaned his elbows on his bag and looked up at Kath. This close he could make out her face, but it blurred as she stepped away from him. “But he probably knows her name. Do you know her?”

  “No. I knew her,” Kath said. She raked her fingers through her hair to slick the half-frozen curls back from her face. “She was no prophet, though. Just a mad bitch of a wolf that the Old Man had to put down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she deserved it,” Kath said flatly. “It doesn’t matter why. Whoever raised this Nick, it wasn’t her. I threw the dirt on her face myself.”

  There was an uneasy undertone to her voice. Danny hesitated, but the other prophets in Girvan had known the name too. They’d never questioned it….

  “What if it is?” Danny said carefully. “If I knew what she did—”

  “If it was her—if it is her—then Bron’s already dead,” Kath said quietly. There was no doubt in her voice. “So why would I send her my son to gut too? You want to try and save Jack, don’t convince me it’s her. I won’t let you go. Let the Old Man worry about his blood, and I’ll worry about mine.”

  “You can’t stop me.” Kath turned toward him, and Danny smiled crookedly at her. “Dog or not, I’m your kid. When did anyone ever stop you doing what you wanted?”

  He waited and Kath finally walked back to him. She sighed heavily and stroked his hair back from his face.

  “I brought the books, the maps you asked for,” she said. “Do you really think you can do it? Find the prophet’s temple on this side of the Wild? Find where they took the children and the dogs?”

  Danny glanced down at the bag still in his lap. He could feel the weight of the books against his thigh. He wanted to say no, to shed that responsibility, but now it wasn’t just his sister he needed to find.

  “I can,” he said. “Mam, if it is Rose Blake, do you know why she was exiled?”

  Kath’s fingers tightened around the back of his head, and then she leaned down to press a cold-lipped kiss to his forehead. She didn’t pull away immediately but rested her head against his. Uncertain of how to respond, Danny froze awkwardly. His mother loved him as best she could. He’d always known that, like he’d always known it wasn’t enough. Kath wasn’t a woman to be casually demonstrative. A sentimental moment was hand on a shoulder or nod of approval as she hauled you up out of the mud. The last time she’d kissed him had been his first day of school. Under the expectant eyes of other parents, she realized more than a sandwich and a brusque “Do well” was expected.

  From what Danny remembered, he’d felt a lot like this about it—frozen uncomfortably to the spot. He hadn’t understood school at that point, and the kiss had seemed like a formal goodbye. Someone had been there to take him home at the end of the day, but it had felt like something released. This had the same finality, and for a moment, Danny felt the old, frantic desire to cling to his mother.

  “She wasn’t exiled, she was executed,” she said as she drew back. “But did you ever wonder why the Old Man was kind to dogs?”

  Danny shrugged. “We’re useful,” he said. The rationale was one he’d heard often enough to have off by heart growing up. There was always a wolf ready to grumble because the Old Man kept his dogs, insisted they be treated as pack even
if they were at the bottom of the pecking order. “It makes dealing with humans easier, and there’s nowhere to live anymore where you don’t have to deal with humans.”

  “You are, and that’s why he let Millie and the like hang around. He was never kind, though, until he had a dog,” Kath said. “A daughter, before the twins, but with their ma.”

  That was new information. Danny blinked as he tried to absorb it and then grimaced as his mind made grim sense of it. He’d always known that his mam loved him, because she kept him when she had old, dark options she could have picked instead.

  “He got rid of her,” Danny said. “Sacked her.”

  That was the traditional way—a sack, a stone, and the loch. It surprised Danny how much that thought troubled him. He’d never put that much value on the Old Man’s fondness for him—Danny had been smart and useful—but the thought that the Numitor would have preferred to drown him threaded a chill through his memories.

  “No,” Kath said. She twisted her mouth as though the memory was sour. “He would have. He was expected to. Fiona, his mate, she wouldn’t have it. Dog or not, it was her wain, and she wouldn’t give it over to the prophets. Fiona would have taken the girl and gone south first, rather than give another litter to the man who killed his own get.”

  No one ever talked about the twins’ mother, the Old Man’s mate. Death had rubbed the human edges off her and left this idea of a perfect wolf. Danny had known his mam knew her, but until he heard this story, he hadn’t realized Kath liked the other wolf. It occurred to Danny that he might have too. She sounded a lot like Jack.

  “What happened?”

  “The Old Man let Fiona stay, and let her keep the baby,” Kath said. “He wasn’t gracious about it at first, but dogs love like it’s easy, and that’s hard to resist. By the time she died, he cared enough to grieve. I think that’s the only reason Fiona was able to stay.”

  Danny absorbed that. It was a story that he’d never heard even whispered in all his years in the Pack. Not a secret, exactly, just unspoken because it was too tender a scar to poke. He supposed it explained a lot about the Old Man, but so far it didn’t answer his question.

  “Did Nick’s grandmother kill the wee girl?” Danny asked.

  “See?” Kath said. “You don’t need books to be smart, Danny.”

  “Why?”

  “She was rabid,” Kath said. Her lips curled back in an expression that hovered between a sneer and a scowl. “No one saw it, though, not until that night. Rose was the highest-ranking wolf in the Pack, the Old Man’s right hand, and if she was a traditionalist, it wasn’t any more than some of the other old wolves. Then one night she got up, stole a baby, and we found her at dawn by the loch with a wet, still sack. People said she was moonstruck, that she’d gotten too close to the moon goddess’s heels during the hunt and been maddened.”

  “And you?”

  “I think she was jealous,” Kath said. “All those years she’d spent at the Numitor’s side, his loyal wolf, and what did she have for it? Bad enough Fiona had the Numitor’s heart and his cock, but now she had his ear and his child too. I think that was the final straw, that all the wolves Rose whelped had been sent away for being too weak, but Fiona got to keep her dog. She dressed it up with rants about purity and fate and the gods, but in the end, it was her spite. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Old Man killed her, and we buried her out in the moors.”

  Danny rubbed his neck, the phantom bite of leather still there, and remembered the contemptuous bite in Rose’s voice as she booted him in the ribs. “You’ll wish your ma had been brave enough to put you in a sack.”

  Dead and buried should have been good enough, but Danny had seen enough over the last few weeks that he didn’t think it was that simple. The prophets had kept secrets.

  “What does that have to do with Bron?” he asked. “Why would Rose hold it against her?”

  Kath looked away. “Because, until that morning when we found her at the loch, I’d agreed with her,” she said. “I thought Fiona should have gotten rid of the baby. I thought the Old Man should have gotten rid of Fiona. I didn’t know what Rose had planned, but I’d heard every word that came out of her mouth and nodded my approval. So when I turned on her, dragged her back to the Old Man with the others, she cursed us for it. If she had a chance to pay me back by killing my daughter, she would.”

  Not her son, though, Danny thought, not the dog. That was why Rose hadn’t killed him in Girvan—she thought it was more of an insult to Kath to leave him alive.

  “Check her bones,” Danny said. “Make sure they’re there. It’s the Wolf Winter, Mam, a lot of things are coming back.”

  MAYBE SHE would. Danny hoped she did, but it was up to her.

  This was up to him. He jogged into the storm, head down and shoulders up. The snow had finally let up but was replaced by an icy rain. It was full of splinters of ice sharp enough to draw blood when the wind found the right angle, and it froze in his hair and the scruff of stubble on his jaw. Danny clambered over a low stone fence and stopped in the shelter of a twisted ash tree, lightning-struck and charred, to pull the map out of his pocket. The rain quickly soaked the map, and he cursed as the paper tore under his fingers.

  A wolf wouldn’t need a map. They knew every rock and piss-scented tree of the territory the Pack claimed. Sometimes that wasn’t an advantage. Wolves ran with the Wild at their heels, their paws sometimes on this world and sometimes on rocks that had been gone for centuries. That was the problem—sometimes the geography and the distances didn’t match.

  Danny had spent his childhood on the long way around the moors and the old stone roads. He knew the lay of the land, the shortcuts and landmarks, in a way that only the footsore and irritated did.

  And he liked to know things. The prophets left no trail to follow to their temple, no path worn through the heather, no scent trail on the rocks. The only way to get there was through the Wild, but no one had been able to find it there either.

  That was because it didn’t exist there. Danny coughed cold water out of his mouth and ran his finger over the map to the blob of gray at the fold. There were some things in the real world that left a stain on the Wild, altered and odd as it would be to the people who knew the original. It was hard to tell what, though, the same way people could read a book but only remember a single extract twenty years on.

  Some places, though, were just empty boxes with no soul. Like Glenlough—a folly built out here on an industrialist’s whim in the 1900s that was neither inhabited nor left for the weather to wear into dereliction. It was neither home nor ruin, like a shell on the beach a crab could move into to disguise itself.

  Danny reoriented himself and struck out over the field to the east. The dog stirred in the back of his head, restless at being penned up in his skin. But Danny needed a human brain for this and human shoulders to carry the duffel.

  At least he would if he was right. Danny wiped his hand down his face to scrape off the film of water and ice. He hoped he was right. Back in Lochwinnoch, with Kath’s expectations dropped back onto his shoulders, he’d felt a lot more confident.

  He found the crick at the boundary of the Glenlough land when he stepped on it. The thin skin of ice cracked under his weight and the frigid water seeped in through the eyelets of his boots and soaked his socks.

  “Shit,” he muttered between cold lips. “I’m going to lose a toe.”

  Back in Durham he’d watched the end of the world a dozen times on TV and speculated with his ex and friends what they’d miss most.

  The internet.

  Music.

  Thai food.

  Socks hadn’t even made the list. Dry socks, spare socks, were something they’d taken for granted. Even Danny, who’d always privately assumed he was better prepared. After all, he hadn’t had Thai food until he was nineteen.

  Wet wool rubbed against his heels and squelched with each step as he climbed up and struck out across the field. There were no roads to Gl
enlough, not anymore. The land had been sold off over the years, repurposed for crops or left for the moors to reclaim. On Danny’s old ordnance survey map it was a ghost-gray ribbon that wriggled across the hills. He found it under his boots, chunks of macadam and rock under the frozen heather, and the thought that it was close made him walk faster.

  A sudden gust of wind hit Danny from the side and made him stagger. It parted the rain for a second and he saw the outline of the old building appear like a ghost ahead of him. It was closer than he’d thought.

  It had been a grand house once. Gargoyles peered out from under the few intact sections of roof, ice frozen over spouted mouths like muzzles, and the remnants of stained glass glittered in the window frames. Someone had taken pride in it. Now wet blisters on the Virgin-Mary-blue front door bulged out of the grain of the wood and ice-crusted scaffolding had been erected to hold up the bowed old walls. No Trespassing signs rattled like tuneless wind chimes on the chain-link fence that marked out the boundaries of the property.

  Danny stared at the building until he realized he was in plain sight of anyone inside. With a muttered curse he hunched over and loped into the shelter of the wind-twisted old ash. The trunk was lightning-scarred and blistered where the frozen sap had exploded out of the living wood. It creaked softly in the wind as Danny crouched down in the roots, the sound of something not quite dead yet.

  He leaned his head back to rest against the tree and waited. The rain soaked his face and ran back into his hair and down under his collar. Danny strained to hear something, smell something, over the storm. If there was anything that he could have sensed—even with his nose and ears muted in this skin—it was lost under the storm. The clatter of the signs against the fence and the aggressive drumbeat of the rain against the old stone building drowned out everything. Any scent in the air was washed away before he could catch it.