Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “What—”

  “You said the wolves killed your daughter?” Nick said. “I guess that’s true, because Rose told me that she cut me out of her daughter’s stomach herself.”

  Ewan’s bony face twisted away from the truth as though Nick had punched him with it. The muscles in his jaw bulged as he shook his head.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I know Rose. She has done terrible things—for lust, for pride, and even to save us all—but she’d never hurt Ashley. She loved her. Maybe she couldn’t show it, too much the wolf, but everything she did was for Ashley.”

  Had that been her name? Nick had never known. Or if Gran had told him at some point, he’d lost it under the gorier stories.

  “So?” Nick asked. “She loves me too. Otherwise when she killed me, it would have been a murder, not a sacrifice. Why did she do it, Ewan? You owe me that much. What was more important than her daughter? Her grandson.”

  Ewan pulled off his hat. He dug his fingers into the wool and twisted at it unhappily. Underneath it, his hair was sparse and red. Some small, hived-off part of Nick that he tried not to think about much wondered if his mother had looked like that.

  “I turned my back on everything, let them cut my wolf out of me, because she told me that the Old Man had murdered our daughter to punish her. An eye for an eye. A child for a child. That he’d taken the pup she was going to have—taken you—and sent you down over the Wall to raise.”

  Nick shrugged. “She lied. Rose does that.”

  A distant yelp made them both flinch. Ewan let the hat drop to the ground. He wiped his hand down his face and smeared wet from the corner of his eyes.

  “I loved her,” he said. “She never loved me, but I knew that. It didn’t matter. I knew what she’d done, what she would have done, but I told myself there were limits. That there were lines she wouldn’t cross.”

  Nick edged away from the bike, caught between keeping an eye on Ewan and one on the trees.

  “That’s your problem,” he said bluntly. “What is she going to do? Why did she come back here, back to where she knew they’d try and stop her?”

  Ewan stared at him. Conflicted emotions warred visibly on his face.

  “I don’t know you,” he said. “Why should I trust you? Over the woman I’ve followed for decades?”

  Nick shrugged. He didn’t have an answer, and it didn’t matter. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said. “One way or another.”

  The monsters spilled into the clearing, half made and still raw from the fever that birthed them. Broken bones stuck out of wasted skin as the—curse, infection, whatever it was—pulled muscles loose to reknit their bodies to order. Plates of Kevlar were stitched roughly into their puffy pale flesh with seams of gray-green scabs and the rags of their old uniforms still strained across their swollen, hunched shoulders and thick thighs.

  Gregor was in the middle of them, flesh torn to shreds and his teeth bared in a blood-streaked snark as though he’d forgotten he couldn’t turn. He shoved his forearm into a monster’s mouth, muscles shredded down to bone, and dug the fingers of his free hand into its eyes. They split and seeped pink fluid down its face. It shrieked and lurched backward as it clawed at its face. Wet, white skin slipped off its bones in ragged sheets as it pulled at it.

  “Run,” Gregor yelled as he wrenched himself free and tackled the other monster. It went down in a tangle of limbs it wasn’t entirely used to yet. “Get out of here. I’ll catch up.”

  Liar.

  Nick tightened his grip on the knife and lurched forward, but a hand on his shoulder pulled him back. Ewan bore down hard enough that Nick felt his collarbone creak.

  Ewan’s fingers tightened and he took a breath as though he had something else to say. It never came out. Instead he threw Nick aside into the snow and stalked forward to wade into the brawl. Like a man with a misbehaving terrier, he grabbed the monster by the ear and dragged it off Gregor.

  “Enough,” he ordered. His voice was harsh and thick with authority. “If we wanted him dead, we’d have told you. Back, you fucker.”

  He bullied the two monsters and got them to crouch beneath one of the trees, slabber hanging in strings from badly hinged jaws. They growled and shifted uneasily on blistered, flayed paws, the compulsion to obey their master’s voice conflicting with the bloodlust in their swollen eyes as they stared at the bloody mess they’d left of Gregor.

  “You should have let them finish,” Gregor said. He propped himself up on his other elbow, his breath ragged and his arm slack and bloody. “I won’t give you the same quarter.”

  Nick dragged himself out of the snow. His hips and ribs ached as he staggered to his feet. It wouldn’t kill him, so he ignored it as he limped over to Gregor. He dropped back to his knees in the snow and tried to patch the gory wounds with wads of cloth and pressure. The blood oozed between his fingers, wet and potent with life, and Nick tried to focus through the woozy nausea.

  He’d eaten an eyeball—or the bird had. He wasn’t going to puke at the sight of some blood. It was a lie, and it didn’t even help. Gregor sucked his breath in between his teeth at the pain and gave Nick a hard, green look.

  “I told you to run,” he said.

  “And I didn’t,” Nick said. The cold slowed the blood but not enough. He knew Gregor would heal if he got the chance, but some lizard-instinct in Nick’s brain didn’t believe that. Every wet red flower of blood that bloomed on the rucked-up snow made the tension in his chest ratchet tighter. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Gregor rasped out a laugh. “One day you’ll do as you’re told.”

  “Not today.”

  Ewan turned to look at them. The two monsters crouched at heel on either side of him, and he put his hands on the bony jut of their deformed shoulders. He looked small and oddly normal between them—a neat, slightly weathered man with a tired face. But Nick’s shoulder still ached from the iron grip of those fingers.

  “I would have been a bad grandfather,” Ewan said. “I was a bad father, and I learned nothing from it. That’s why my daughter’s dead, no matter what the Old Man did or didn’t do. All these years, all this god fuckery, because I didn’t want to admit that.”

  Gregor used Nick’s shoulder to push himself up onto his feet. He folded his arm over his stomach to hold the wound shut with his forearm.

  “They’re not alone,” he said. “Prophets. They’ll catch up soon.”

  Ewan smiled thinly. “I know. I brought them,” he said. “It was a trap.”

  “Yeah,” Gregor said. “We got that. And now?”

  There was silence for a moment as Ewan glanced at Nick. His eyes were dark with unsaid things, and then he let his smile stretch ruefully over his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Call it my bid to be the favorite grandparent.”

  Blood had cooled stickily on Nick’s hands. He wiped them on his trousers as he struggled to his feet. His heart thumped in his ears, too fast and too hot.

  “What’s she going to do?” he asked.

  One of the monsters raised its head. It flared its nostrils, split like petals, and slurred something out of its broken jaw.

  “… now y’r plas,” it rasped, raw lips peeled back and wet with blood.

  Nick felt the itch of the bird’s feathers behind his eyes as it stirred and pecked irritably at him. In the shadows, between the trees, he caught a foggy glimpse of a dead woman. Dark stains clotted on the front of her oversized Aran jumper and gloved her hands. Nick couldn’t make out her face, and he didn’t want to.

  The monsters saw her too, or at least knew she was there, since their eyes didn’t track her. They growled at the air where she’d been, thick runs of goose pimples on their spines as they tried to raise their hackles while she walked around them and stood behind Ewan. Her mouth moved close to his ear.

  Nick couldn’t make out the words. He tried, but the bird croaked and flapped to drown it out. It—they—might be a god, but not everything was meant for them.
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  Ewan tilted his head as though he could hear her too. Then he sighed and shook his head to dislodge whatever it was.

  “Rose made you a god, but only a small one. She made herself… something. That won’t be enough when the real gods come back. They’ll still expect us to bend the neck. That’s why she’s here. That’s what the humans are for… will be. Gods, ones who will bend the neck to her and do as they are told. So when Odin sets his one eye on us and Selene finally comes down to earth, we’ll meet them as equals.” He tightened his grip on the monsters and glanced over his shoulder. Nick thought, at first, that he’d heard something the dead woman said. Instead he hissed under his breath. “The others are coming. You have to go. Go as far as you can. It’s too late to stop Rose, but maybe if you run far enough, she won’t come after you. My daughter thought she could do that, but I guess she didn’t go far enough.”

  Fragments of voices carried on the wind—curses and Ewan’s name.

  Gregor grimaced and grabbed Nick’s arm to pull him away, although Nick didn’t know where they meant to go. He dug his heels in and looked at Ewan.

  “What’s the dead thing on the mound?” he asked. The rot-musk of it was strong enough in his memory that he could taste it. The oil of it coated his tongue. “And why did Rose leave the Run-Away Man to guard it?”

  Ewan looked confused for a moment, but he didn’t have time to puzzle out whatever part he’d missed. The monsters were restless at the approach of the other prophets, and they pulled against the restraint of his hand on their shoulders. He dug his fingers in and wrenched them back, sweat on his face despite the cold.

  “God or not, she needs to have the wolves at her heel,” he said through gritted teeth. “And when the Old Man wouldn’t bend his neck or give her his cock, that only left her one path.”

  Ewan spoke like he’d shared something profound. It meant nothing to Nick.

  “I don’t understand.” he said. “What path? What’s she going to do?”

  Maybe Ewan would have answered, but he didn’t get a chance. The prophet limped into the clearing on malformed legs. She was half-wolf, but the rotted hide was torn to rags and it couldn’t cover her. The long, fanged muzzle of a wolf was unfinished, her ribbon of a tongue shredded as she tried to fit it between broken teeth crammed in a human jaw. Her eyes—one clouded amber and the other human as it peered through a split in the hide—flicked from Ewan to the bloody Gregor, and she leered.

  “Kill the whoreson,” she said. “I’ll pluck the bird.”

  Ewan smiled. “You make it easy, Ailsa.” He dragged the monsters around by the scruffs of their neck, skin loose and too elastic in his fists, and set them on her with a snarled command. She went down with a shocked screech as the mass of twisted bone and claw hit her. Ewan shot a quick look at Nick and Gregor and snapped. “It won’t work for long. Run.”

  Guilt pinned Nick in place. It felt like he should care, but he couldn’t. Gregor growled and dragged him away. The last thing Nick saw as the Wild closed around him was the monsters lurch away from Ailsa and turn on Ewan.

  He held his ground.

  Nick didn’t need to see the end of the fight to know it wouldn’t make much difference.

  Chapter Nineteen—Jack

  THE HARE, scrawny in its patchy winter coat, threw itself across the snowy field in a desperate dash for safety. It jinked and turned in a frantic attempt to stay ahead of Jack’s teeth. A snap of his jaws caught him a tuft of tail fluff and the sweet bloom of blood on his tongue. It wasn’t enough to bring the rabbit down, and as Jack collected himself from the lunge, it gained an inch on him. It might have been enough.

  On a summer’s day, with the Old Man’s sheep penned up in the field and someone willing waiting for him, Jack might have called it a day. The hunt then had been as much about the chase as the catch, a sop for the wolf who sometimes chafed at even the barely there domestication of the Scottish Pack.

  Jack would have spat out the shit-matted fur, rolled off his frustration in the heather, and mocked Gregor for running his paws bloody for a stringy mouthful of squirrel. It would have been the hare’s lucky day.

  In the summer, but this was winter—The Winter—and Jack needed the kill. His world narrowed down to the slip of snow under his paws and the yellow flash of the hare’s hind feet ahead of him. Cold air scraped at the back of his throat, caught like glass in the lungs that labored in his chest as he ran. Snow sprayed up from under his feet as he pushed himself faster, each millimeter of space the hare claimed with an impossibly tight turn won back on the straight stretch. Ellie fell back, the reserves of speed in her muscles exhausted.

  Jack flicked his ears. Even over the rasp of his own breath in his throat, he could hear the hare—the stutter-fast beat of its heart as he ran it down, the panic-fast huff of each breath that powered the desperate stretch of its body.

  It went left, but it should have gone right. Jack had solid ground underfoot and lunged as the hare’s body twisted. He bowled it over into the snow and tried to pin it down with his paws as it squirmed. It rammed a foot into his eye, hard enough to make him yelp, but then his teeth closed around its neck. Jack bit down, bone crunched, and the hare went limp.

  He lifted his head, the long hare body dangling limp in his jaws, and looked around. There was nothing there, but his wolf still wanted to retreat to shelter before he ate. Jack tossed the hare up into the air and then snapped his jaws back around its midsection as it fell, so he could carry it easier.

  As he loped toward the shelter of a nearby cairn, he felt his hackles go up between his shoulders. It felt like eyes on him, but there was nothing to watch him. The world might not be empty, but this particular stretch of moors was. The half-fed hare in his jaws was the only living thing he’d seen since he left Danny sleeping to check out the boundaries of his—his, now—territory.

  Alone like an idiot, a mental voice that made the effort to sound a lot like Danny noted inside his head.

  Jack snorted at the thought, for all his wolf agreed. The wolf wanted the comfort of the pack, the reassurance of a dozen kin at its heels.

  And a dozen hungry bellies who could have seen him bested by a hare.

  The stomach always won for a wolf. They were a hungry breed.

  Despite the distraction, he still felt watched. He hunkered down under the stones and tore into the softness of the hare’s stomach. It was still warm, full of sweet meat and the bitterness of guts. He wolfed it down, cracked the bones between his teeth, and scraped the fat from under the fur.

  A single hare shouldn’t have been enough to fill a wolf’s belly, but Jack’s hunger was more than just physical. Whatever prayers the hare had for the God of Chased Things added spice to the meat and thickened the marrow. The prophets left their kills uneaten for the gods, but the wolves took it all for themselves.

  Let the moon bitch climb down from her chariot if she was hungry, tear her white robes on the briars and stain her pocked skin with blood. Jack hadn’t sired her that he should chew her meat for her.

  When Jack finished his meal, there was nothing but a stain in the snow and plucked hanks of fur left. He licked up the bloody frost as though it were a Popsicle and crunched it between his teeth. The shock of cold stabbed into his skull, just behind his eyes, and he shook his head until his ears flapped to dislodge it.

  The wind sidled around the stones and pulled at his fur with cold fingers. There was a storm on the horizon, the sky bruised purple with the weight of it. Tonight was the moon hunt. The Wild would wax as the bitch-goddess opened her blind eye, and the prophets would try to put their twisted plans into action.

  Whatever they were.

  Apparently, it was too much to hope for the Winter to sit it out.

  Jack finished, licked his chops of any dregs of blood, and stood up. Chunks of ice were matted into his fur, and the cold had bitten down enough that even a wolf could feel it in their bones. He shook himself and stretched to enjoy the feeling of a full stomach against hi
s ribs.

  Speculation and prediction were human things. There wasn’t room for them in Jack’s fur-skin. The wolf knew that the Scottish Pack would survive whatever the prophets threw at him. What else could the prophets do but lose? They were made for it.

  Then….

  Then.

  The wolf hackled at the thought of losing Danny again, but the Old Man’s son knew his duty. Jack couldn’t remember the last time the two had been at odds inside him.

  He shook himself again as though he could shed his thoughts as easily as the snow and raised his nose to the sky as he howled. In the odd stillness that hung before a storm, his voice trailed upward, thin and sharp, and hung in the air.

  Someone answered from down the hill. It had the raw-edged scrape of a dog’s voice—not Danny—but somewhere between the cell and the fight, his brain had fit them in as pack. The sound rippled back across the landscape—call and response—until something to the north, near the storm, squalled a coarse gargle of sound into the mix. It was an old, ruined voice, cut through with other voices. It was dissonant, with a pus-thick edge of sickness that made it glottal. Other ruined voices picked it up—the shades of dead friends stitched to coarse throats—in mockery and challenge.

  Prophets didn’t raise their voices to the pack. They held their tongues except to howl the catechism. Or they had.

  Unnerved, the Pack fell silent. Jack waited until Rose’s distant voice raggedly trailed off.

  He snorted to himself, twitched his ears, and headed back along the rucked-up trail he’d left on his hare hunt. The Pack already knew the prophets were out there. Now they knew where and how many were left.