Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  The sense of being watched dug into his shoulders again. He froze, his hackles raised, and growled low and scratchy in his throat. All he could smell was frost and empty air, a hint of icy heather and oak. When he twitched his ears, he could hear the creak of the snow as it settled and the distant crackle of frozen trees.

  On the wind the echoes of the wolves’ voices drew back together and stitched into a stale exhalation from the wild.

  Little wolf, little wolf…

  It was barely there, a breathy whisper that faded when he tried to actually listen to it. Cold, bone-hard fingers pinched the end of his tail and yanked. Jack pinned his ear and spun around. He snapped his teeth at the empty air and felt cold bite up into his nose as something laughed.

  …run away home….

  The cold fingers shoved and jabbed at him. Jack stumbled and spun, teeth bared, as he was buffeted and pinched. They stretched out his lips, wet and tight, and flicked the end of his nose.

  Through the thin huffs of laughter, his assailants found their words again. The voice was clearer now, but not louder. It was a dozen voices layered, not quite perfectly, on top of each other as they singsonged,

  Your father is gone…on…on…

  The fingers pinched his ear and bore down, suddenly hot as the skin split under the force.

  …and your brother soon too!

  A yank made Jack stagger as a quick rip of pain jabbed down into the corner of his eye, and then the itch at the base of his neck was gone.

  He was alone. Blood dripped down onto the snow in fat red drops from his split ear and crystalized on the snow. Habit made him reach for the Wild and then recoil from the cramped muscle tightness of it. It felt like a sprain did under your skin, the rubber-band tension and soft, inflamed tenderness of infection.

  If he needed to, he could still drag it to heel, rip it open and see what spilled out, but not easily and with no guarantee that the infected grafts wouldn’t slow him down. So he’d wait until he needed it. The Wild always took a kinder view of need than it did of pride. Even with the Wolves.

  Jack snarled at the emptiness, hair still bristled down his spine like a hog, and wrinkled his lips back until he could feel the cold on his gums. Sannock Dead or just dead, he didn’t care for his new visitors.

  Harbingers never helped anyone.

  He pushed himself into a ground-eating lope. The familiar singsong rhythm of the song carried the stand-in words around his head on a loop. Worry ate at his bones like acid and released a cold broth of anger into his blood.

  They might never know what happened to the Old Man, but the prophets had been behind it, behind everything. It had been Job’s poison in Da’s ear that saw Jack stripped of position and exiled. They’d taken his da, his tattoos, and—accidentally or not—given him Danny only so they could take him away too.

  It was enough. Jack would be damned if they got the satisfaction of killing Gregor too.

  He barreled back into the wolves’ settlement on ice-raw paws, his breath hot as it smoked over his tongue and between his lips. Sweat matted his fur down from his shoulders to his tail. He stripped it off like a sodden coat. The slap of cold air against his spine and between his legs felt good against his overheated skin, even as his balls tightened and goose pimples pricked his arms and legs.

  Nothing.

  Jack had expected bloodshed and confusion, to find whatever was left of his brother dead or dying in the heart of their territory. Instead it was quiet, almost peaceful under the thick quilt of snow.

  Except Jack knew he was too late. He could feel the awful weight of it in his gut, an anticipation of something terrible held back by a single thin thread of ignorance. Jack stood there for a second with the bleak knowledge that he was going to find out what it was.

  “Get the fuck off me!” It was Danny’s voice, but raw and broken. “This was your fault.”

  Jack moved before his brain caught up with his feet. He sprinted through the snow toward Danny’s voice, between the houses and across the neglected scrub at the back of the Old Man’s house.

  The old barn was there to pen sheep in the winter, when the hunting was thin and the pups needed mutton to wolf down with scraps of deer. Da had always said it was always easier than trying to fill hungry bellies from their neighbors’ farm stock and pets. But this was the Wolf Winter, when the wolves expected to get fat on easy prey, so no one had bothered. The old building, weathered wood patched with tarred planks where it had rotted into holes, should have been empty.

  Yet what looked like half the Pack were huddled around it. The rest were trying—and failing—to drag Danny away. He was naked and battered, blood half-dried on his skin and gloved on his hands, but that didn’t stop him. He spat every swear word he’d ever learned at Gregor—battered and with a bloodstained, makeshift bandage around his leg—as he struggled against the wolves who had their hands on him.

  In that second, Jack didn’t care what had happened. The harbinger’s warning took on a different tone in his head—if Gregor had hurt Danny, then Jack could learn to do without his brother—and he snarled through human teeth as he threw himself at Gregor. He rammed his shoulder into his brother’s stomach and took both of them down into the snow.

  Numitor or not, he couldn’t fight the whole Pack. Wolf or man, both of them agreed on that simple fact. It didn’t matter. If they’d hurt Danny, he’d fucking try.

  He threw a punch at Gregor’s face and barked his knuckles against skull as Gregor twisted out of the way. They scuffled in the snow, all fists and knees and the strange release of years of animosity. It always felt good to split Gregor’s lip, in Jack’s experience, but for the first time, he could appreciate how simple it was too.

  No complicated prophet schemes. No reluctant alliance or grudged respect.

  Just the old, easy hatred of each other and the satisfaction of being in the right.

  Gregor spat blood into Jack’s eyes and followed it up with a headbutt. Stars flashed black across Jack’s field of vision, and Gregor managed to get him on his back and by the throat. Hard thumbs dug into Jack’s windpipe, and he choked as he tried to suck in air. He groped around for something and wrapped his fingers around a rock, but before he could swing it, Gregor was dragged off him.

  He managed to get a kick in to Jack as they dragged him away. Jack wheezed out a thin “fuck” as he felt his ribs bow under the impact, but they didn’t break. He sucked in cold air through his raw throat and scrambled to his feet to go after Gregor. Or whoever had broken up the fight. In the red of his temper, he wasn’t sure what he intended.

  Millie stepped in front of him, her good hand up to hold him back, and the other—the one she might still lose after she saved Jack’s ass in the fight with the prophets’ monsters—held gingerly across her body. She smelled like blood and pain, sharp and sour on her skin.

  “Stop it,” she said, her voice thin. Then she glanced over her shoulder. “Both of you.”

  There was a sudden scuffle around the wolves that held Danny and a startled yelp. It wasn’t Danny.

  Millie took a deep breath and let it out raggedly. “All of you,” she shouted. “Just stop it. This isn’t going to help.”

  Behind her, Gregor sucked blood from his split lip. He looked as frustrated as Jack did to have their fight interrupted.

  “He started it.”

  Jack stepped forward until Millie’s hand was braced against his chest. He ignored her as he glared at Gregor, into the grim mask of his own face.

  “You touch Danny again, and I’ll throw you off the fucking cliff,” he snarled.

  “Try.”

  Ellie stepped up next to Millie. She met Jack’s eyes as though she thought she had the right.

  “Nobody has laid a hand on your dog,” she said. “We’re trying to stop him hurting himself.”

  The same old instinct that had made Jack punch Gregor made him look to his brother for confirmation. Gregor was a lot of things, but he’d never been much of a liar. Afte
r a sullen moment, Gregor shrugged away from the wolves holding him and nodded.

  “Your dog has more bark than brains,” he said. There was respect in his tone despite the words Gregor had never much respected prudence. “He wants to run off after the prophets on his own and get himself killed.”

  To the side, apart from both factions of the Pack, James curled his lip at them all.

  “I told them to let him go,” he said, his voice still rough with misery. “If your dog can take a bite out of that old bitch, more power to his jaw. And if she kills him… who gives a fuck? No one does about my boy, and he was a wolf, not just a dog.”

  Gregor turned to glare at James. “It won’t bring your son any closer to home either,” he said. “The Wild has him, not Hel.”

  “And you’re not even a wolf anymore,” James sneered. There was a glitter in his eye that spoke of wanting to hurt anything—Gregor, Danny, or himself. “Not a prophet either. So why don’t you mind your betters or, better still, you can—”

  Gregor punched him in the throat, and something popped under his knuckles. James’s eyes bulged as he choked on the words he’d been about to say, and he clawed at the collar of his jumper with blunt fingers as he gaped like a fish for air.

  It would heal and it probably wouldn’t take that long, but it was an unpleasant few seconds to spend choked while it did.

  “Anybody else have anything to say about what I’m not?” Gregor asked as he glared around him. Lost wolf or not, nobody quite had the courage to hold his gaze as he caught theirs. Eyes dropped in silent acknowledgment that, for now, they’d submit to him. “Whatever the prophets cut out of me, I’m still the Old Man’s pup. That makes me more wolf than you.”

  “You’re still an asshole,” Jack said, to make the point that he wouldn’t.

  Gregor just showed him bloody teeth. It wasn’t an insult that bothered him. At his feet James sucked in thin ribbons of breath through his broken throat. He glanced up, bloodshot eyes bleak with a rage that needed something to chew on.

  “Tell them to let me go,” Danny said. His voice was steadier, the curses bitten back between his teeth, but still raw. He was on his knees, his arms twisted up behind his back and a wolf’s arm around his throat. His face was flushed and puffy, with a stain that spread from his jaw halfway to his eye where someone had hit him “Jack. They’re hurting me. Get them off me.”

  Jack swallowed the order instead of spitting it out. It didn’t want to go. His throat felt raw with the need to get the wolves off Danny, but the calm was a lie. In all the fights that Danny had lost over the years, he’d never admitted that it had hurt him, not even when he had two dislocated shoulders and was sobbing with the pain of it. He’d never asked for help either, not from anyone.

  Not for himself.

  “Danny. Danny-dog.” Jack pushed through the wolves and crouched down in front of Danny. He started to reach for Danny’s face, but the self-conscious awareness of the wolves watching made him settle for shoulders instead. It was the wrong choice—he could feel it in his gut, in the tension under his fingers—but it was too late to change his mind. “What happened? Who hit you?”

  “I did,” Gregor said. He didn’t sound sorry or amused, just grim. “It was the only way to stop him till someone else got here to hold him down.”

  Danny snarled like his dog, lips wrinkled back from his teeth. He twisted angrily against the wolves holding him, until his joints twisted weirdly under Jack’s hands. Tears dripped down his face, cutting through the grime and blood, as he spat at Gregor “You should have let me go. Coward.”

  A growl rumbled out of Gregor. “I’ll give you one pass, dog,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Danny said.

  Jack shook him hard enough to make Danny’s teeth audibly click together and pull his focus back to Jack.

  “What. Happened?” Jack repeated. He tightened his grip until he could feel bone under the layers of cloth and muscle. It was the Numitor who asked. “Danny, tell me.”

  For a second the mask of anger slipped and Jack saw something terrible and raw underneath.

  “They killed my mam,” Danny said. He sounded like a kid again, all shocked at the unfairness of the world. “They cut my wee sister to bits. I wasn’t there, and they came in the night and… slaughtered… my family.”

  “Kath?” Jack asked Ellie. It was stupid. He knew that even before Danny creaked out a bitter laugh at the question. What did he think Ellie was going to say, that Danny had panicked and mistaken a nap for death? It seemed impossible. Jack had expected blood when he raced back to the village, but not this distinct, unheralded murder. So he still waited for Ellie’s nod before he let himself believe it. “Gods. Let him go. Let him up, for fucks sake, I’ve got him.”

  The wolves at Danny’s shoulders hesitated but did as they were told. Danny slumped, the fight gone from him now that he’d put his grief into words. His hands lay limply on his knees, fingers curled, and he stared at the lines of his family’s blood worked into the creases.

  “Danny. Come on, get up,” Jack said. He pulled Danny to his feet and gripped his shoulders tightly. “Not yet. Not alone. You’re pack. We hunt together.”

  The corner of Danny’s mouth twitched slightly, and then he pressed his lips together in a thin line. He wiped tears and snot off his face onto his sleeve and nodded. It was resentful—a short dip of his chin—but Jack supposed it was what he’d get.

  He wanted to say more, to make Danny promise not to get himself killed, because…. Gods, Jack could barely accept the idea of Danny gone from his side. The thought of Danny gone, dead, and not somewhere that Jack could imagine going to someday? That dropped dread through Jack like a stone, from the pit of his throat all the way down to his wolf.

  “Danny….” The words stuck in Jack’s throat, and he couldn’t get them out. It felt too naked, too raw, like he was laid out on Rose’s table again. The Pack didn’t need to know their Numitor was so weak. Jack cupped his hand around the back of Danny’s neck with the old familiar affection. “The prophets won’t take anything else from us.”

  “Won’t they?” Danny pulled away from Jack and walked away. He was barefoot, but he didn’t seem to care as he headed toward the barn.

  Gregor stopped him on the way past, a hand on his chest and a brief, unfriendly look traded between them. Then Danny nodded and went over to fold himself down on the wall outside the barn. He pulled his knees up and hunched over to rest his head on them.

  “Go get him some shoes,” Jack told James. The big wolf sneered at him, defiance in every line. Jack grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet. He leaned in until he could smell James’s breath on his lips, sour with what was going on inside him. “Do as you’re told. Or, if you’re no use to the Pack, I’ll flay you for the prophets myself.”

  The words were enough to make James flinch. He staggered away and glared when Jack let go of him, a flush on his throat and under his stubble. Then his resistance spluttered out. He muttered his surrender under his breath and stalked away, making a point to shoulder past the assembled wolves.

  That left Jack with no more excuses.

  He turned to Gregor. “What happened?”

  Gregor shook his head. He had to swallow before he said anything. “I don’t know,” he said. His mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “It was already… done… when we got back. Kath was dead, Bron… they cut her open to kill the baby. Then they left them both to die. Your dog wasn’t in a state to tell us anything.”

  It sounded brutal, almost careless. Jack knew better. Gregor had always swallowed pain whole instead of in bites, as though letting it hurt all at once was easier.

  The neat little terrier woman from the town was gone. She looked like a scrapper now, in borrowed jeans and a too-big sweater. But her hair was still neat, and her lips were primly pressed together.

  “It was our fault. The dogs,” she said. One of the wolves snarled, a low, ripped-from-his-throat sound, and she flinched. Jack
didn’t bother to look, he held up his hand to shut the wolf up.

  “Go on.”

  Millie swallowed hard. “Tom, our Tom,” her voice cracked as she said his name with the hardness that only came from betrayed love. The cowed dog from the pen, with the milk-glazed eye—as though the gods had thought being a dog wouldn’t be hard enough for him. Jack felt the old, lazy stir of pity, but it flickered out as it faced what Tom was involved with. “He went to talk to Kath. She was always… kind to him, you know. After Danny left, he’d do odd jobs for her that she couldn’t be bothered with. Or she’d send him down to town for errands, to me. Kath could never abide Lochwinnoch.”

  “Does that matter now?”

  Millie had to think about it. Then she shook her head. “No, I suppose not,” she said. “She let him in. I saw him going in, but I didn’t think anything of it. He loved Kath. He followed Bron around like a lost puppy. If anything, I thought he’d finally spit the prophets’ poison out of his gut, once he had the chance. He wasn’t a bad lad, you know. He was angry, resentful of the gods, but we are, us dogs. We know what else we could have been.”

  It wasn’t an excuse. She sounded baffled.

  “What. Happened?”

  This time Millie pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.

  “He poisoned them,” Ellie said instead. “From the smell. Something mixed in their tea. It smelled like the potions the prophets gave their favorite wolves.”

  “That wouldn’t kill them,” Jack said. It would make them sick. It might have twisted Bron’s baby out of her—pregnancies could be fragile even if the wolf wasn’t. They would have been sick and weak, but not dead.

  “No,” Ellie admitted. “He used a knife for that.”

  He finally turned to look at her. It stung. She’d made herself over in Kath’s image, just younger and weaker. She was like a shadow… or a ghost.

  “Who else?”

  Her mouth opened, but the name didn’t come out at first. When it did, her voice was weak and thin.