Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “Take him, then.” He waved his blistered hand in the dog’s direction. “Let me go. I won’t tell her.”

  Once a traitor.

  The dog bolted down the hill. Long straps of muscle in its back legs and hips burned with the quick flare of exertion. Snow slipped and stones slid underfoot, but the dog had already shifted his footing before it could lose balance.

  It had never won a fight with Lachlan. Lachlan had never enjoyed his win, but that had never gotten the dog back on its feet faster. It didn’t matter. The past was gone, and the future hadn’t happened to it yet. All that mattered was the wind in the dog’s ears as it lunged, and the howl that escaped Lachlan as the not-quite-wolf-sized hound slammed into him.

  The dog tore at Lachlan’s throat, the wolf’s blood sickly sweet as it spilled, until its teeth hooked around his collarbone. Then it shook itself like a terrier with an oversized rat.

  Bone snapped, and Lachlan howled again. He managed to grab hold of the dog’s scruff and toss him toward a nearby rock. The dog hit the stone, felt the shock pop of its ribs as they gave, and then nothing as it slid to the ground.

  Its legs didn’t want to work. Pain radiated from between its shoulder blades up into its skull.

  “Fine,” Lachlan snarled. His T-shirt hung in rags where the dog had torn it. Something was wrong until the shreds of cotton, but the dog couldn’t tell what. “Have it your way. I’ve wanted to cut the fucking pride out of you for years.”

  He reached behind him and pulled a knife out of his waistband. Blood was scabbed along the worn blade, clotted around the handle. The dog could still smell the ash wood that stained the old ritual blade under that. It had been in Kath’s kitchen. Danny had seen it.

  The dog tried to move again. This time its legs cooperated, or tried to, although they were still numb and clumsy. Pain stitched down its spine to its toes as it scrambled to its feet. Blood—its own? Lachlan’s?—splattered from its mouth as it panted.

  “I’d rather you were human for this,” Lachlan said. “I’d make you beg for all the times you shamed me.”

  It had been a lot of times. The dog shook its head despite the pain and crouched down. Lachlan was predictable. He always went for the kick to the ribs before he went for the throat.

  Blood-smeared teeth flashed in a tight grin as Lachlan lunged forward and slashed the knife across the dog’s face. It caught under its lip and ripped up to its ear in an uneven gash. The edge might have caught the dog’s eye too on the way through, but it was hard to tell as a welter of blood filled its vision on that side.

  It burned with an itch that stitched back from the injury, into its skull. The last time it hurt like this, it had stuck its head into a nettle patch. The dog yelped at the pain and latched on to Lachlan’s wrist before he could slice at it again. Its fangs slid between the bones, sawed at the tight hawsers of tendons, and the knife slid from suddenly boneless fingers and dropped into kicked-up, turned-over snow.

  Lachlan swore and punched the dog in the side of the head, hard enough that it couldn’t see at all for a second. It hung on, jaws locked and growl strangled by its grip, and Lachlan hit it again. He wrenched backward, and the dog let go. Lachlan sprawled back on his ass in the snow and over Tom’s legs as the dog screamed and Danny pushed himself to his feet.

  He sucked in a ragged breath of cold air and regretted it. The cold pinched at the raw cut on his face sent jabs of pain through exposed teeth. It would heal, Danny reminded himself as he reached up to push the flap of skin back into place with the back of his wrist… eventually.

  The dog felt too big under his skin as the Wild crested with the moon on the horizon. Danny could feel his bones creak with the need to change, the first dim warning of the pain that resistance could bring.

  He’d done that once—his first month at university, hunched in the corner of his room as his bones turned to hot milk and he felt hair grow on the inside of his skin while he tried to stay human. But this time he hoped the Wild would be more tolerant. It had helped him once against the prophets.

  “Where’s the baby?” Danny asked.

  Lachlan propped himself on his elbow. The T-shirt hung by the seam on his shoulder, and Danny could see what had looked wrong about Lachlan’s torso. It had been flayed, strips of ginger, freckled flesh peeled off and the holes patched with…. Jack. The scraped-thin rashers of skin were marked with tattooed lines and deep worked dots that Danny remembered from when they were fresh and still sweated ink.

  Danny recoiled in unexpected disgust, and Lachlan flushed as he dragged the rags of his shirt back up to cover the patchwork mess he’d been made into.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Lachlan spat as he scrambled to his feet. “She gave me his rank, his strength. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have taken that deal if she’d told you she could make you into a wolf.”

  “You were already a wolf,” Danny said.

  “Not enough of one,” Lachlan said. “I was never good enough until she came. Then they all bowed, didn’t they? Your ma.”

  “Fuck she did.” Danny’s mouth was dry, his lips like leather, and he didn’t know if it was the pulse of poison under his face or just anger. “And I don’t care why you did it, Lachlan. If you wanted to make excuses, you should have done it before you had my sister’s blood under your nails.”

  Lachlan looked at his fingers and shrugged. “That could be anyone’s.”

  “What did you do with the baby?”

  “I gave it to her,” Lachlan said as he lunged forward. He grabbed for Danny with both clawed hands, and Danny ducked under them and scrambled between Lachlan’s legs. He scraped through the snow as he lurched back to his feet. Lachlan spun around and paused at the sight of the knife clutched in Danny’s hand. Then he shrugged it off. “That won’t help you. Or Gregor’s bastard. You know it wouldn’t have lived anyhow, right? I could tell that when I pulled it out of your sister. It was made wrong, like that other brat of his.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” Danny said.

  “Why should I tell you anything?” Hair prickled over Lachlan’s chest as the Wild tried to shift him around Jack’s stolen skin. Lachlan grimaced and spat into the stained snow. Tom whined and rolled onto his side as he felt the shift pull at him.

  Danny feinted forward. Despite his stolen skin and his brave words, Lachlan flinched. At the last second, Danny veered to the side and stooped over Tom’s body. He grabbed a handful of tangled, unwashed hair, yanked his head back, and cut his throat.

  Bile scalded the back of Danny’s throat as hot blood spilled over his fingers, and he had to choke back a retch. It shouldn’t have bothered him—no matter how pathetic Tom was right now, he’d helped kill Kath—but it did.

  Tom stared at him, face slack with shock as his mind tried to catch up with his body, and then his lips moved jerkily.

  “I’m… sorry,” he croaked out. A tear slid out of the corner of his eye and dribbled back into his hair. “I just… I wanted….”

  There was no pleasure in Tom’s death, but Danny didn’t care about his regret. He dropped Tom’s head back into the snow to let him bleed out and backed away.

  “Where you going to get her a dog skin now?” Danny asked.

  His voice sounded weird around the hot pressure in his face. The skin felt numb and his skull weirdly soft. He still couldn’t see out of that eye. It gave him something to distract him from the dog as it squirmed around in his bones.

  Lachlan shrugged. “You,” he said. “What? You think I’m not going pull the skin off your bones just ’cause I knew you when we were kids. That just makes it better.”

  Danny flipped the knife in his hand and pressed the point against his throat. He could feel it scratch the skin as his heart thumped.

  “Where are you going to get a skin?” he repeated.

  Lachlan laughed. “So you’ll kill yourself to stop me killing you? Not much of a threat.”

  “So you have to go back to your bitch prophet empty-han
ded?” Danny asked. “Sure. What do I have to lose, Lachlan?”

  Confusion creased Lachlan’s face, and he rocked uncomfortably on the balls of his feet. He stepped forward, and Danny dug the knife into his skin. Now both sides of his face pulsed unhappily, and he could feel the burn in his blood. He inhaled raggedly through his nose as Lachlan jumped back.

  “What’s to stop you, then?” Lachlan demanded. “You’d just fucking die to spite me.”

  Danny grinned at him. It hurt his face, and one side of his mouth didn’t want to cooperate.

  “I’ll have hope,” he said, “and I only lie down to die when there’s no point in fighting anymore.”

  “Hope?” Lachlan shuddered, and his face twisted around itself in a moment of unexpected self-loathing. He scratched at his chest and dug his fingers into the raw, tender spans of Jack’s skin. “I gave your sister’s brat to Rose. She’s going to feed it to that abomination she’s growing in her stomach. To my son, so he can be strong and worthy.”

  “Where is she?” Danny asked. His voice cracked with the need to know. “Is she at the bunker?”

  “She was,” Lachlan said almost absently. “She’s done with them, but she’s still got to finish him. You’ll all show the throat to him then.”

  Danny lowered the knife from his throat. His hand had started to shake anyhow, his fingers stiff and clumsy. Lachlan relaxed slightly at the sight and smirked.

  “Ready to fight, then?” he asked. “One last time?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Danny said and threw the knife.

  It wasn’t a great throw—the knife wobbled end over end in a weak arc—but it was good enough. Danny let the dog out as Lachlan’s attention shifted to the blade, and he bolted at the still-two-legged wolf. He dodged at the last second, and Lachlan grabbed at the empty air where he expected the dog to be.

  The dog hurt, but it ran anyhow. Long legs boosted it through the now-thick snowfall in a brutal gallop that ate up the ground. Each time its paws hit the ground, pain jarred up through its bones to its ears and its blood felt too hot. But it left Lachlan behind, curses tossed after it into the dark.

  “Run, then,” Lachlan yelled. He sounded afraid. “It’s too late for the brat! It’s too late for all you fuckers. She won’t stop now, and you’ll all bend the neck.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two—Gregor

  BLOOD SPLASHED the institutionally gray walls as Gregor used the butt of his stolen gun to hammer at the thick-domed skull of a monster’s head until it went limp. The impact jarred up his arm into his shoulder, and there was something viscerally satisfying about it. He had to force himself to stop, sweat itchy on the back of his neck and his mouth dry as he panted raggedly.

  The prophet’s handmade wolves smelled wrong in that way that made Gregor want to scrape them out of existence. They healed efficiently enough that they needed to be.

  Sprawled out on the floor in a puddle of its own blood and liquids, the half-made monster twitched as its body tried to string itself back together. Gregor put his boot down on the back of its neck and bent down to grab the gray strings of hair it had left. One sharp yank popped the spine and it went limp. The acrid smell of death seeped out of its pores.

  He straightened up and tried not to groan. His leg burned with each step and teased his nose with the sour smell of the wound. More than that, he was tired. His muscles ached from the run, from the fight, and his joints felt gritty.

  It wasn’t new. This was life without a wolf. Like any other pain, it was something to endure and ignore. But he’d already been hurt and sore when they set the Old Man’s house on fire, already down to the fumes of what he had left. Now he could feel himself slow down, the strength sapped from his muscles as he fought. The moon hung fat and smug in the sky outside, and his gut ached as the Wild soured and clotted where the wolf should be.

  His brother’s dog was probably more use in a fight. At least Danny had a lifetime to get used to his limitations. Gregor closed his eyes for long enough to take a deep breath and think about giving up. It would be easy, but the cobweb idea of it shriveled to nothing under the weight of obligation.

  And guilt.

  He didn’t love the baby the fucking prophets had cut out of Bron. It wasn’t like his daughter—his first dead child—whose heartbeat he’d listened to through her ma’s belly. Gregor had time with her to let his sticky satisfaction at being the first to sire a child turn into something… better. He’d never found it easy. Love. Except with Nick.

  Bron’s child had doorstepped him. It felt like a trap, the universe’s pitfall if Gregor let his heart soften. But it was still his, and that was why Rose had sent her curs to cut the wee thing out of its ma’s stomach. He owed it to the child and to Bron to take it home.

  Gregor spat on the corpse at his feet and limped away from it. His own limitations would have to wait. Today wasn’t the day to accept them. He pushed into a loping run and followed the sound of fighting down.

  It was always down.

  The bunker was a rabbit warren of sunken concrete boxes connected by a plumber’s nightmare of pipes and junctions. Scents stuck like oil to the cheap paints that plastered the walls, sound bounced off high ceilings and doubled back on itself, and the open doors had let Winter in. The floors were slippery with a thin rime of frost, and the vents rattled and groaned as they were blocked with ice.

  Halfway down the tunnel, Jack was thrown out of a door and bounced off a wall. The huge wolf grunted at impact as it landed on the ground, green eyes unfocused as Jack tried to remember how to breathe. Gregor backed up and leaned against the door frame to wait.

  His breath was tight in his throat, like it still needed to pant, but he kept it steady.

  The monster shouldered through the doorway, clumsy on thick-knuckled paws. A fat round skull swelled out of a puff of dandelion-white hair that clung to the back of its head and to the ends of its stretched-out, flopped-over hound ears. Its skin was furrowed in thick, scaled creases down the back of its neck and into the grotesque hump of his shoulders. The pads of fat and muscle had been ripped open, and strips of tallow-laced raw meat hung from its back as it swaggered forward.

  It was one of the ones that Rose had brought with her, hardened as they dragged it up along the coastline. The frantic elasticity of the first change had faded, and its shape had set like a bone. It made it easier to kill—not easy, but easier—and harder to fight.

  Jack staggered to his feet. One ear was torn, folded down against his skull, and blood was crusted around his nose. He dropped his head down, sharp shoulder blades hunch-raised and bloody ruff spiked out, and growled thin and high in his nose.

  The monster wheezed out something, the sound half-strangled in the loose fat of its throat, and wrinkled liver-dark lips back like a chimp. It didn’t have teeth, but ulcerated gums peeled back from a ridge of serrated chipped bone. Shreds of meat and hair were caught in the gaps and cracks.

  It lurched forward, and Gregor raised the stolen gun in both hands and brought it down like a post-hole digger into stony ground. The barrel of the gun wasn’t sharpened, but Jack had already split the calloused hide. All Gregor had to do was punch down through raw meat and hawser-thick spine. The monster shrieked and reared back… or tried to. Its forequarters were so thickly overmuscled that the scrawny back end—a drapery of loose, crepey skin hung from wasted thighs—couldn’t quite lift it.

  Gregor braced a foot against the thing’s muscle-larded ribs and wrenched at the gun to twist it in the wound. Vertebrae cracked against the cast metal, and fresh blood welled up dark and red as veins split open.

  The monster managed to twist around enough to fix Gregor with a pus-scabbed, milky-blue eye. Its tongue, cut to thin, cured-meat ribbons against the bony ridges on its gums, curled and fluttered.

  “… it ’urts,” it said mournfully.

  “Good,” Gregor said as he twisted the gun to drive it deeper.

  It was a sham of a thing, repulsive despite its best efforts to find the
shape of a wolf in a human’s bones. Probably it hadn’t volunteered. It just had the bad luck to survive the prophet’s bite. Gregor didn’t deny that; he just didn’t care. Pity was a hobble in a fight. He didn’t ask for it from anyone and wouldn’t give it away either.

  Anger twisted the monster’s face up, deep, chafed wrinkles red and clotted with dry white pus, and it flung itself around it in a furious attempt to get hold of Gregor. He grabbed the exposed, bloody blade of its shoulder for balance, the surface rough against his fingertips, and hung on. His booted feet scraped over the floor as he dodged the stamp of the monster’s thick, clubbed feet.

  Around the swollen bulk of its chest, he could see Jack as his brother harried it to keep its attention. Jack took a chunk out of a forearm turned muscle-bound, bowed front leg and latched on to the end of its muzzle.

  The monster rattled out a tea-kettle sound of pain and shook its head violently from side to side. It managed to lift Jack off his feet and flail him about until it smacked him down against the concrete. Jack’s paws slid out from under him, and he went down hard. Without him to run interference, the monster turned its attention to Gregor. It twisted around to snap at him, but it couldn’t reach.

  “Just die,” Gregor told it. “Do us all a favor.”

  Some sort of spite glittered in the thing’s milky eye, and it shuffled around until it could slam Gregor into the wall. The bulk of it pinned him like a bug, and he felt his ribs creak as they started to give. His chest was so compressed he could hardly breathe, and what air he could suck in was rank with the reek of the thing. The monster grunted in satisfaction and shifted its weight so it could grind him against the wall.

  Pain spread through Gregor like heat. His fingers slipped on the bloody gun, and gray bled through his vision as his focus narrowed down to the pressure in his chest.

  A harsh caw snapped his attention back to the world around him, and he looked up as Nick dropped out of the rafters. Wide black wings snapped out, the edges of sleek feathers iridescent, and battered the monster’s head as Nick croaked angrily at it. He dug long, thick talons into the creases that furrowed the thing’s low brow and jabbed his thick, bone-white beak down viciously. Shreds of flesh peeled off the monster’s face, and it forgot about Gregor.