Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There was too much blood. It drowned out any other scents.”

  “Did it? She turned her coat once,” someone muttered under their breath but loud enough to hear. Ellie flushed, but she kept her eyes on Jack. “Maybe she helped.”

  “I didn’t,” Ellie swore. “But there was a wolf. Or a prophet. They left by the Wild. I wouldn’t do this, Numitor, and I’ll kill whoever did.”

  “If you’re lying, I’ll kill you myself and make sure your wolf never finds the Wild,” Jack told her. He glanced over at Danny, who had twisted his fingers into his hair while the wolves didn’t look at him. “And if you didn’t, then you don’t have first claim to the killer’s throat.”

  Gregor put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “If you want an answer, ask Bron,” he said.

  “What?” Jack said as he jerked around in surprise. “I thought she was… that she died.”

  “No,” Gregor said. His voice was thick and rough in his throat, the way it had always gone when he needed the wolf to hide from something. But he was alone in this, the only one of the Pack who was really alone. “Not yet.”

  Without really thinking about it, Jack reached up and gripped Gregor’s hand in sympathy. The fingers were cold and stiff under Jack’s, and it took a second before he pulled away.

  “I don’t need your pity. Save it for your dog,” he said flatly as he jerked his head toward the barn. “Or for Bron.”

  Chapter Twenty—Jack

  BRON LAY on the roughly swept boards, sliced open from one hip bone to the other, like a bizarre zipper. There was an apron of blood that dripped down to her thighs, the rags of her nightgown shredded and plastered to the floor. She was unconscious, her face slack and tear-stained.

  The silence was the shock. Bron was so rarely quiet, even as a wolf on the hunt.

  Jack grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket by the door and pulled them on. The cuffs folded under his heels and the waistband sagged around his hips.

  Nothing should have been funny right then, but part of Jack’s brain insisted that he register how ludicrous it was.

  The Numitor in a pair of pants—and a title—that were too big for him.

  And then there was Nick—harbinger, carrion god, collector of the dead—fish-belly gray and sweaty as he worked on her. His hands shook every time he lifted them out of her guts to wipe his face on his sleeve. As though Jack hadn’t seen him in bird form peck a frozen eyeball from a corpse’s skull like it was a melon ball at a party.

  It wasn’t humor, just a bleak recognition of how ridiculous they all were.

  “He doesn’t like blood,” Gregor said quietly, the same faded, terrible shred of acknowledgment in his voice. “Not when it’s come out of the living.”

  Faint as it was, the macabre flicker of amusement faded as Jack walked gingerly over, as though a creaked board might be what made her slip away. He took in more injuries as he looked her over, cuts to her arms and feet, bruises on her shoulders. The smell of blood was bright and metallic—the tang of the rabbit’s blood caught in the back of Jack’s throat and made his stomach turn—with a sour undertone of infection.

  Bron’s chest fluttered in fast, shallow breaths and her sallow face was wet with tears. She looked like Danny, so much it grabbed Jack’s guts and twisted. If she hadn’t healed yet….

  “Just let her go,” Jack said. His throat was so dry the words hurt. “We’re wolves. We live or we die, but we don’t linger. We don’t suffer. This isn’t right. She’s—”

  “Shut up,” Nick said through his teeth without looking up. “That’s the choice everyone gets. You’re not some special case. Life or death. And I know what kills people a lot better than you do. It was my—it is our—job. She can survive this.”

  It was Gregor who put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, although he stopped short of trying to pull him away from what he was doing.

  “In your hospitals, maybe,” Gregor said. “Here? On the floor of a sheep byre, with a storm on the way?”

  Nick grunted. “Good. She’s going to have a fever soon. If the temperature drops, that will keep it down. You. Hector? Get her to drink more of the tartar.”

  Hector hesitated as his eyes skipped from the gory scene on the floor to Jack and Gregor. His worn hands worked nervously around the large brown bottle he held.

  “I don’t know if—”

  Nick lifted his head sharply and fixed Hector with a bleak glare. “Good thing I do, then,” he said. “Pour it down her throat.”

  He didn’t bother to wait and see if Hector did as he was told. Nick’s attention dropped back to Bron’s ruined stomach as he grabbed a bleach-white sheet to sop up the blood. He visibly gagged as it squelched under his fingers, his lips a thin, white line. Then he dove back in with bare fingers and a needle that Jack had seen Hector use to sew up a ewe’s fox-shredded stomach.

  The first jab of the needle made Bron flinch and choke out a moan. She dug her fingers into the barn floor until she gouged up splinters with her fingernails.

  Jack lunged down and grabbed Nick’s wrist. It was slick with hot blood, sticky under Jack’s fingers.

  “Stop it,” he ordered thickly. “This is torture.”

  “It’s medicine,” Nick corrected him sharply. “Done right, sometimes there isn’t much difference.”

  “If she’s going to die,” Jack said. He tightened his grip on Nick’s wrist until he could feel the tight play of tendons under his fingertips. “Let her die. Cleanly. I can smell the prophets’ taint on her. It’s a bad way to go.”

  A hand grabbed his ankle. It was weak, but Jack was surprised enough that Bron could grab at all that he nearly jumped out of his skin. He recovered after a breath and crouched down next to her. However else he’d fucked up as Numitor, at least he could do this. A Scottish wolf should die with her Numitor by her side.

  “I’m here,” he said. “You don’t have to fight anymore.”

  “Fuck. That,” Bron gritted out between chapped lips and clenched teeth. “I am. Not. Gonna die by dog.”

  Gregor snorted a startled laugh, but the brief moment of humor faded quickly. He came over and squatted down beside Jack.

  “Bron, I don’t think pride has healing properties,” he said. “You aren’t healing, and Nick’s not really much of a doctor.”

  Nick grumbled under his breath. “I don’t like working on the living,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I wasn’t good at it.”

  Bron swallowed and tried for a smile. It didn’t quite make it. Her lips twisted down in a grimace as Nick grabbed the torn sides of her gut and pulled them together.

  “You. You puked. When you saw me,” she gasped out, her eyes closed and hand on Jack’s leg.

  “It was puke or faint. I’m not much good unconscious.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Bron said as she opened her eyes. “There’s people I need to kill. Can’t depend on my dog brother to do… can I? Give me the fucking drink.”

  This time when Hector looked for approval, Jack gave it to him with a nod. Gregor put his arm under Bron’s shoulders to prop her up, and Hector poured the thick, acrid liquid down her throat. She swallowed, throat working with each gulp until the taste got too much for her and she had to turn her head away.

  “What’s that for, anyhow?” Jack asked.

  Nick lifted his head briefly. His eyes were black and bright in the sweaty mask of his face as he glanced at the bottle. “To make sheep puke,” he said bluntly. “We didn’t have any activated charcoal and no time to make it. If blood loss and infection don’t kill her, that won’t.”

  Jack recoiled. “Why the fuck would you give her that? She’s—”

  “To get out any of the prophets’ potion left in her stomach,” Gregor interrupted. “You think it’ll be the same as you? That she’ll heal once the poison’s out of her system, the same way you got the bird back in your head?”

  Bron retched and then tried to curl up around the pain. “How’s there even any le
ft in there?” she groaned. “They sliced me open like a fish and emptied me—oh gods—out.”

  She rolled her head to the side as much as she could and retched again. Thin streams of black bile dripped from her lips. Hector wiped it for her on the sleeve of his sweater and then offered her the bottle again.

  “They didn’t,” Nick said. He sounded detached, almost polite in a weird way, as though he didn’t have a naked woman on the floor with his hands covered in her blood. “It was quite a neat job. They knew what they were doing.”

  Bron lurched up to try and grab him, her fingers clawed as she reached for his throat. That wouldn’t make his stitches any neater, so Jack grabbed her shoulders to push her back down.

  “Their job was to kill my baby,” she spat out and then twisted to glare at Gregor. “Our baby, Gregor. So it’s no fucking comfort they did it well.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Nick’s hands, all gore and neat movements of the needle, pause midstitch. He hadn’t known that. Of course not, why would Gregor do something that might not backfire on them all.

  Then Nick started to stitch again. His hands were steadier than they had been as he dragged the thread through her skin. Anger worked well when you needed to focus. Jack had always found that too.

  “It wasn’t,” Nick said. His jaw tightened, the muscles drawn taut under pale skin, and he reluctantly corrected himself. “They might have, essentially, but it wasn’t what they were there to do. Look at where they cut. It was a Cesarean. The job was to take the baby out of her, and it looks like they did it neatly enough.”

  There was a crack as Hector dropped the big glass bottle. It was heavy enough that it didn’t break, but the liquid spilled over the floor and stank. Hector cursed and stooped down to pick it up.

  “Tom helped me with the sheep during lambing,” he said as he righted the container. “Sometimes we had to cut them open to get the lamb out. He… he always had a steady hand with it.”

  Bron shoved Jack out of the way and dragged herself halfway up into a sitting position. She curled her hand over her stomach to hold her guts in and glared at Nick.

  “You’re telling me… that they cut my baby out of me. Like I was some… half-dead sheep? And I didn’t notice?”

  Nick grabbed more towels and pressed them over Bron’s hands to soak up the fresh blood that oozed out of her.

  “You weren’t at your best,” he said dryly.

  Bron laughed. Her rusty throat worked as she swallowed her first reaction and then tried again.

  “It would have still died,” she said as stoically as any wolf could fake. “It was too soon for it to be born.”

  Nick hesitated as he glanced uncomfortably at Gregor. “It’s not dead,” he said. His attention dropped back to Bron’s stomach as he peeled the clothes away from her stomach to peer at the injury. “I—we—can tell that much. Not yet, at least.”

  “How can you be sure?” Bron asked. Her eyes were fever bright, and she was shaking as she twisted her hand in Nick’s coat. Her fingers left stains on the fabric, but they’d blend with the rest of the blood and filth. “Do you know? Are you certain?”

  Blood squelched between Nick’s fingers. He looked sick again, his skin greasy with sweat.

  “I know.” He made a faintly revolted face. “Dead things—murdered things—are what we do. If they killed the baby, we’d know.”

  Bron let go of him and sagged back down. It was almost a fall, but Gregor caught her before she hit the ground.

  “Keep me alive,” she ordered roughly. “I don’t care how much it hurts.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Nick muttered as he plucked thread out of torn stitches to start again. It made Bron suck in a hard breath through her teeth and hold it. The tense muscles in her arms and legs trembled under the skin. “Hold as still as you can.”

  Jack waited for a second and then put his hand on Bron’s arm to catch her attention.

  “It was Tom, then?” he asked.

  She exhaled hard through her teeth—almost a scream—and nodded jerkily. Tears swam briefly in her eyes, but she furiously blinked them away.

  “Tom, first. He was sorry, he said he was sorry, over how he’d behaved. Mam….” Her voice broke and she breathed raggedly through the grief and the pain. “She felt bad for him. He’s a dog, you know? Not like Danny. So she let him in and he must have put something in the tea. It made me and Mam weak and stupid. Human. I could have still hit him, I could have fought, but I didn’t. Mam did. She fought, but… then Tom let Lachlan in. Stinking bastard. She couldn’t fight them both, and they… they….”

  She stopped again. At some point she’d grabbed Gregor’s hand and her fingers were twisted around it. His tanned skin was bled white under her grip. Tears squeezed out from under her lashes and down into her ears and already-matted curls.

  “Did they say anything else?” Jack asked. “Anything that might help us find them?”

  The baby was gone, sliced out and stolen, but Bron panted like a woman in labor as Nick finished his work on her stomach and swabbed the raw, puckered stitches with smears of powdery, old iodine. Her face was gray, the years of tan floating on top like a film, and her eyes glazed over before she closed them.

  Jack hated himself. Maybe that was part of being Numitor. He slapped her face twice with a sharp, stinging impact that made Nick curse. Bron’s eyes fluttered back open again. She glared at him.

  “Bastard,” she said weakly.

  “Bron, we can’t wait for you to heal,” Jack said. If she did heal. Whatever Nick claimed about his familiarity with death, Jack had killed a lot of things in his life. Bron smelled like she was dying. “What did they say?”

  She squinted and licked split lips with a dry tongue. “Tom couldn’t do it, not at first. He kept cryin’, saying he’d not meant to hurt us. Don’t know what the fuck he thought he was going to do.” She trailed off for as her mouth trembled, and then she took a deep breath through her nose. “He couldn’t put the knife in me. So Lachlan did it. He cut me open and told me, told me not to worry because… because Rose had done this before. I figured he just meant the bitch had killed a lot of babies.”

  Gregor clenched his jaw so hard that Jack could hear his teeth grind. He tightened his grip on Bron’s hands.

  “Not this one,” he said. “I promise, Bron. Whatever happens, the prophets won’t have your baby.”

  She curled her lip. “I’m not letting your mate juggle my guts so I can cheer you on,” she rasped. “When I heal, I’ll get the baby back myself. Then I’ll cut Lach open and stick a badger into his guts. See how he takes it.”

  Jack leaned over and put his hand over Bron’s eyes. He’d seen their da do that to wolves that had lost the run of themselves to grief or who couldn’t pull themselves together to face punishment. It wasn’t something Da had ever taught them. He probably thought they had more time. Jack reached for the Wild and… asked. The Wild knew Bron better than he did, so it would know what she needed better than him.

  He tasted fresh blood on the back of his tongue and the sharp bite of that first gulp of cold water after a run. When he took a breath, he could smell Danny, all sweet sweat and musk, and a flush of self-consciousness made him pull away.

  That was his, not even the Wild’s for sharing.

  “Oh,” Bron said in a small voice. Her body relaxed, muscles loose and shoulders lowered, but she fought it. She forced her eyes open wide and grabbed Jack’s hand. “Where’s Danny? Is he okay?”

  The Wild probably didn’t have the ability to be smug, but Jack imagined it would try in response to his hubris. It hadn’t conjured Danny for him, from him. That had been for Bron, because Danny had been her brother long before Jack ever noticed that the lanky, stubborn dog was beautiful.

  Not everything was about him, he supposed. Danny had probably told him that sometime. It sounded like him.

  “He’s not hurt,” he said as he focused on his injured wolf. “Nobody touched Danny.
”

  Bron looked at him like he was stupid. “I know that. I was there,” she said. This time when she blinked, it lasted longer. She had to fight to open her eyes again and only made it to half mast, her eyes hazy with sleep. “He’s stupid, and he never remembers he’s a dog. Never. You made him come back. Y’gotta take care of him. Make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”

  The protest that he hadn’t made Danny come back caught on the back of Jack’s tongue. He hadn’t—he didn’t think he had—but if Danny hadn’t come around? It wasn’t as though Jack would have given up and left him back in Durham.

  “I’ll take care of him,” he said.

  “Promise?” Bron insisted.

  “I love him,” Jack said. He felt the weight lift off his shoulders as he made the admission out loud. It settled again as he realized it was only to people who already knew or, in Hector’s case, would never repeat it. “I won’t let anyone hurt Danny, not even himself.”

  “You always loved him,” Bron said. “Never changed anything, did it? Never did, never will. Promise.”

  The air tasted like blood and birth, even if it hadn’t been willing, and it scratched on the back of Jack’s throat as he swallowed.

  “I swear,” he said. “On my da. On Danny.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. That was apparently enough. The ragged hitch of her breathing evened out, and the hard lines around her mouth softened.

  “I always thought she hated him,” Jack said.

  Gregor shrugged as he retrieved his hand from Bron’s lax fingers. “Not everyone is lucky enough to have an uncomplicated relationship like us.”

  “Still?” Jack asked.

  It took a second before Gregor answered, and then it was just a grunt as he stood up. From Gregor, that was a concession of… something. Jack was too tired to care what.

  He wiped blood on borrowed jeans. “I should have killed Lachlan the first time he hurt Danny,” he said bitterly. “Been done with it then.”

  “Da would have been thrilled,” Gregor said dryly. “Me too.”

  Jack shrugged and tried not to think what would have been different if he’d just… left with Danny back then. Not that Danny had asked him, but… even the Wild didn’t really let you travel back in time.