Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  Nick squeezed his hands into fists until he felt his nails slice into his palm. The pain cut through the fuzz of panic like a razor and let in clarity.

  He couldn’t do this.

  The first time he’d stood over a corpse in medical school, with a scalpel in his hand and his voice still Glasgie-thick, he’d realized the same thing. Then he sliced that cold body from sternum to pubis, because that’s what he had to do to get what he wanted.

  This was the same. Whether he could or not, he had to.

  “Goddammit, Gregor,” Nick muttered as he pushed himself upright. “You’ve got to learn to time your rescues better.”

  Because he knew Gregor would find him. All he had to do was not die or get turned into a monster by his gran until then. Nick shoved the sleeves of the stolen hoodie up his arms and turned to grab the scalpel. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror hung on the back of the door as he did so. It didn’t look… right.

  Nick wiped the scalpel on his jeans and walked over to the door. He had to crouch down slightly to see. The mirror had been hung at the right height for the doctor whose too-short trousers Nick wore. When he saw his face, he flinched in surprise. Hectic red stained his cheekbones, stark against his pale skin, and his eyes were pink and sticky. He leaned in closer to the glass and pulled his eyelid down with one finger. Strings of the discharge stretched between the white of his eye and the lashes. The skin exposed was tender red and splattered with hard, white blisters. It stung as the air touched it.

  That Malloy had looked at that and still wanted to feel Nick up was testament on its own that there was something wrong going on here.

  It looked like an allergic reaction or—Nick drew back from the mirror as it occurred to him—like a reaction to a caustic agent.

  Nick let go of his eye and scrambled around the bed. There was a puddle of saline on the floor, pinkish with diluted blood. Most of the liquid had drained out of the bag and it dangled flaccid from the hook. Nick reeled up the tube and licked the needle. It tasted like blood—salt and metals, nothing that made his stomach twist or the bird in his head ruffle—and something sharp and ethanol sweet. Nick spat it out on the ground, twice, to clear it off his tongue and wrenched the tainted bag off the hook. He threw the bag against the wall, where it hit with a wet slap and flopped down onto the floor.

  Gran had said it made wolves see farther, not that it blinded them. But his gran said more than her prayers, and whatever Nick might have been born, he wasn’t a wolf now.

  He roughly rubbed his knuckles over his eyes until they smeared oily color across the backs of his lids. It wasn’t likely to help, but Nick couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t help but imagine what he’d see if he weren’t half blinded.

  It would wear off, Nick reminded himself. He’d seen that in the people his gran had poisoned before.

  Eventually. Mostly.

  Nick shuddered that thought away before it could root. Most of his life, he’d wanted to stop seeing things that weren’t there, but now the thought of being blind to them made him flinch. Without the carrion bird, what would he be to Gregor? Not that he’d had much time to spend with the wolves so far, but they didn’t seem like they needed a pathologist or even a surgeon, if he could remember what it was like to work on living people.

  Worry about that later, he told himself. Blind was better than dead. Maybe.

  He padded over to the door and pressed his ear against it. All he could hear was the panicked rush of blood in his ears.

  Shit.

  He rolled the dice and opened the door. There was no one outside. Nick let his breath out between his teeth and stepped out the door. He hesitated in the starkly lit hall as he weighed up his choices. Left or right? The flip of a coin in his head made him turn right. The soles of his sneakers squeaked on the floor as he padded down the hall. Just before he reached the end, a familiar voice stopped him dead in his tracks, feet nailed to the floor. Between one breath and the next, he was a little boy again, damp with night terrors and holding his breath in case his gran knew what he was doing.

  “What about Nicholas?” Gran asked. Her voice was still rough, scorched from fire and smoke. Behind her he could hear the sound of laughter and things being broken over the dull thump of bass-heavy music. “Is it still in him?”

  “… yes. The carrion god is still inside him,” a man said. He had the same accent as Gran, same as Gregor and Jack. Highland born and bred, without any attempt to soften it for the English. “I’ve just blinded him to it for now—”

  The crack of a hand against skin made Nick jump. He could almost feel the sting of the slap against his cheek, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from yelping.

  “If you have damaged him or it, I will crack your ribs open and use your beating heart as a snack to lure the bird back to us,” Gran said flatly. “He’s a god, Ewan. The first god to walk our world in millennia. The others need to see that before they’ll trust us.”

  “And once they know they can’t?” Ewan asked. “What will it do to him then? What will we do with him? He’s your blood, your grandson.”

  Gran huffed an impatient breath through her teeth. “Don’t borrow trouble, Ewan. Once the gods come to our table, everything is possible. Look at me.”

  There was a pause, and Ewan’s voice was thick with longing as he said, “You’re as beautiful as the first day I saw you, like fire in a meadow. But it’s not real, Rose.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “… no.”

  The sound of wet kissing jarred Nick out of his paralysis, and he gagged as he recoiled from the sounds. There were some things that you didn’t want to imagine your gran doing, especially when she was an evil old monster.

  Something bigger than a glass smashed down where the party was going on, and a roar of approval and anger rose up.

  It reminded Nick of the rest of the medics back in Girvan after they’d swigged the prophets’ tainted brew.

  He licked his lips and tasted the sharp poison on his tongue again. What was his gran doing here? What did she want with soldiers and civil servants like Malloy? And what did the Run-Away Man have to do with it?

  The answers lay—probably—somewhere ahead of him, but escape didn’t. Nick closed his eyes, turned, and jogged back down the corridor. This wasn’t Girvan. He didn’t owe these people anything.

  He’d set Jepson’s ghost free back in Girvan, cut her loose of her bones and her duty to go to whatever reward the ex-army surgeon had earned. Even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t have seen her right then. That didn’t matter. The memory of her still haunted the windows he passed, her face pinched with disapproval.

  Yeah, well, she was dead, so she didn’t get a vote.

  Someone had stenciled directions on the wall at the end of the hall where it branched. Nick stopped to read them.

  Mess and Med-bay were behind him.

  Barracks straight ahead.

  Labs to the right.

  Nothing indicated what was to the left, so Nick went that way. Two more turns and the floor started to incline upward. It got colder too, and Nick shivered as the chill worked under his hoodie to bare flesh. If whatever they’d done to him had killed the bird, would he still be able to survive out there?

  It didn’t matter. Gregor would find him. He just had to make it easier to be found.

  Two sets of heavy doors got him to the end of the corridor, where heavy, snow-damp coats and insulated boots had been left to drip in front of a heavy steel door painted with a sharp white three.

  Something about that seemed important. Nick stared at the door as he tried to work out what, but it wouldn’t stick. He grabbed one of the thick, pixelated-gray camo jackets and dragged it on, then swapped too-big sneakers for too-big boots. Once he zipped the coat up, he could smell the man who’d worn it before him—rank sweat and a meaty, sour undertone that reminded him of typhoid.

  He had a feeling none of the others would smell better.

  The door
was sealed with a heavy-duty door bar. It was meant to keep people out, though, not in. He supposed most people wouldn’t want to go back into the storm. He yanked it up with both hands and shouldered the door open against the drift of snow that had formed outside.

  An alarm went off as the door opened, flickering red against the walls for a second before a siren kicked in. No going back now. He pulled the hood up with one hand and squeezed out through the crack of the door.

  The wind caught him and shoved him forward as he stumbled outside, as though it thought he needed to get away too. The snow was so thick it was like fog. Nick stretched his hands out in front of him and lost sight of them. When he drew them back, they were blanched white and frost rimmed his cuticles.

  He clumsily shoved his already numb fingers into his pockets and pushed himself into a shuffling jog through the snow. The direction didn’t matter. He didn’t know where he was or where he should be going, so “away” was the best he could plan.

  Voices yelled through the snow behind him, almost lost under the mournful drone of the wind.

  “… how’d he get….”

  “… go and freeze….”

  The stutter of gunfire made him flinch and fold his arms over his head. Bullets zipped past him and slammed into the thick-packed snow on the ground. One hit a tree and took a frozen chunk of bark with it.

  “Shit,” he muttered between his elbows.

  Weeks of being a sort of god thing and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be afraid. That had reminded him.

  “Stop! Damn you, hold fire!” a thickly Scottish voice roared, sharply audible. “Don’t shoot him. We need to get him back.”

  “… not your call… make,” Malloy said, voice muffled by the snow. “… in charge here, Ewan.”

  There was a pause, and then, even with half his brain still tranquilized, Nick felt the world shift around him. It felt like the tide.

  “Not anymore,” Ewan said, his voice still eerily clear. “Find him. Bring him back. In one piece.”

  There was a pause and then easy mutters of agreement. Nick dropped his hands from over his head, exhaled raggedly through his teeth, and veered to the left away from the noise behind him. He scrambled over a low wall and, almost on his hands and knees, up an unexpectedly steep field.

  The air was like splinters when he breathed, and it made his lungs cramp painfully. But at least the wind, unruly as it shoved him back and forth, filled the tracks he left behind with soft snow.

  A shadow in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he stopped in place, shivering, to track it through the snow. He managed for a few steps, and then the snow thickened, and he lost sight of whatever it was.

  The Sannock?

  Nick creaked out a stiff laugh at the madness that he hoped to see one of them. He still turned and headed toward the last place he’d seen it. The muscles in his legs ached as he kicked his way through the snow and then nearly tripped over what he had to assume was the shadow he’d chased.

  A weathered stone bench was perched on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. He leaned on it to catch his breath, and something snarled—a high, thin noise from somewhere in the storm. Nick turned, hands raised, and a heavy, cold body crashed into him. The impact knocked him off his feet, the air shocked out of his lungs, and he pitched backward down the hill. A rock caught him on the hip and dug into the small of his back, and rough ice scraped across his back where the coat rode up.

  They tumbled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, the other man on top of him with his arm cocked back for a punch. Nick swung first in a wild arc that cracked his knuckles against the sharp line of a heavy jaw, and he twisted his hip to try and throw the other man off. It didn’t work. He was slammed back into the ground hard, and the man leaned down to scowl at him.

  “How come every time I lose track of you?” Gregor asked in a rough voice. He curled his lip as he sniffed the air. “You turn up smelling like shit?”

  Nick didn’t have the air in his lungs to laugh. He grabbed the back of Gregor’s neck instead, fingers twisted into the snow-matted knots, and dragged him down into a cold, eager kiss. The heat of Gregor’s breath warmed his mouth and slid through him.

  Even half-frozen and battered, Nick felt the hungry tug of desire under his skin as Gregor shifted his weight on top of him. It wasn’t the time, but his body didn’t care, and neither did Nick really. There was something reassuring about this, the private bubble of hunger and unexpected love that pulled them together.

  It wasn’t about the carrion bird or the wolves, his gran or Gregor’s brother. This was theirs.

  “My gran’s here,” Nick confessed as Gregor broke the kiss and pulled back. “Back there, with some old wolf.”

  “I know,” Gregor said bluntly, still no fan of wasting words. He glanced down between their bodies. “You’re bleeding, Nick.”

  Nick started to disagree, but then he looked down and saw a splash of blood spread from under his arm across the white crust of snow. The minute he saw it, he felt the hot, dull ache of pain between his ribs and his head swam with woozy discomfort.

  “Oh,” he said. “Can you die twice?”

  Chapter Thirteen—Jack

  THE OLD house shouldn’t have burned so easily. It was halfway to a ruin, but it had stood for decades and was riddled with frozen damp. That made no difference. The flames caught and spread inside the walls with giddy spite for what made sense. The bricks cracked, the mortar crumbled as it was kiln-dried, and unruly licks of flame poked through the shattered roof like hair from under a hat.

  It wouldn’t be Surtr’s turn at the world for seasons yet, but fire was never patient, and he wanted the world for kindling. He took what he could.

  Winter wouldn’t have it. Already the wind had picked up to dash thick flurries of snow into the flames where they turned to steam and made the fire crackle out thin curse words in the giant’s sizzle-and-pop language.

  A prophet threw himself from a window on the top floor. Ungainly in his stolen skin, he landed badly, with a crack of bone, and lay broken on the snow until he could pull himself together. Others milled out front, half-blind in the smoke and snow as they tried to pull themselves together.

  The dogs harried them with sharp teeth and quick strikes, louder than any wolf as they barked and yowled to each other. It made Jack want to put his ears back, annoyed at the noise as he used his fangs and the bulk of his dire-wolf muscle to keep the two monsters Rose had left behind at bay.

  Bulldog shoulder-charged him with a pig grunt of a growl and slammed him into a tree. A rib popped, loud and hollow in Jack’s ears, and snow dropped off the tree’s branches onto him. It was heavy, almost solid, and studded with chunks of ice that battered his skull and back. His ears rang with an oddly pitched tone that made him feel unbalanced as he shook the snow off and staggered back to his feet.

  Millie shot in from the snow, low to the ground and with black lips wrinkled back from her teeth. She still had something of the terrier about her, with tricolored fur and wiry muscles, but mapped onto the body of a much larger dog. She grabbed at Bulldog’s tail, a naked knob of bone and twisted nerves, and clamped down. Bulldog screamed in affronted pain, an unexpectedly shrill noise for its size, and spun around in a clumsy circle to try to grab Millie. She slipped in the snow, tumbled paws over tail, and scrambled back to her feet in time to snap at Bulldog’s nose.

  It stung Jack’s pride to leave a dog to fight his battles for him, but as a wolf, he was too practical to dwell on that. He ducked his head to paw blood out of his eye, the skin over his forehead laid open from a sharp bit of ice, and let Millie keep the Bulldog busy while he shot after the long-nosed, mad-eyed monster who pranced through the snow on fingers and toes pulled out long and braided together. Its jaw unhinged all the way back to its ears, revealing serrated rows of thick, see-through teeth that it snapped at Bron as it tried to get around her to the pups.

  “Fucking abortion,” she spat as she turned to keep b
etween them. “Get away from them.”

  Blood dripped from gouges in her arms and legs. The monster feinted to the right to try to shoot around her, but she grabbed it by the ear and pulled it like taffy up onto the top of its skull to haul it back. The ear ripped off and took a long patch of skull with it, revealing porous bone and oddly knit muscle, and Bron yelled her disgust and punched it in the eye.

  It made a glottal, angry noise as it fell back and shook its head. Jack assumed it had been told that it could hurt, but not kill, the prisoners. Otherwise Bron would have been dead. She had a mean streak in a fight, like the rest of her family, but the monsters didn’t care for damage. The skin had already started to pinch together over the raw wound in its scalp.

  Jack hit it before it could gather itself. He sank his fangs into its back leg, braced his feet, and dragged it backward. Overclocked strands of lean muscle pulsed like a heartbeat in his mouth as the thin bones cracked and flaked. Sour blood flooded his mouth and made his tongue squirm back in revulsion. The trickle that ran down his throat made his stomach cramp and try to retch it back up.

  The longer the monsters lived, the worse they smelled, corruption like a layer of fat under their skin. Most of the ones that followed Rose didn’t even have enough of an identity left to pity.

  Jack snapped his head from side to side. The monster’s leg snapped, and it staggered clumsily in the deep snow as it tried to get its balance. He dragged it back, one step after the other, while it clawed at the ground to try and drag itself back toward Bron and the kids. Five feet from them and it suddenly shifted its focus to him as it bent impossibly at the narrow waist to snap at him. The bony, nail-toothed snout struck out at him like a snake and laid his shoulder open in a raw mess.

  Pain sliced hot down Jack’s leg, but he hung on. A muffled growl filtered through his mouthful of meat and bone, and he wrenched again. Flesh and tendons slid against bone, thick and slippery in Jack’s mouth. The monster made a strangled, nasal squeal of frustration and struck out again.