Wolf at the Door

by TA Moore

  “Leave him,” Gregor snapped. “Lachlan doesn’t matter anymore. We need to get to Rose, before she kills another fucking child. Bron’s child. Mine.”

  The dog showed its teeth to Lachlan, so he knew, and backed, stiff-legged, away from him. It whined sadly as it passed the Old Man. Danny’s feelings for the Numitor were complicated, but the dog’s world had always been simpler. It could just do what Danny couldn’t easily do—mourn.

  Somewhere in the storm, the wind caught the threads of the child’s thin, weak cry and tossed it to them. It caught at Danny’s instincts with the knowledge that this was his kin, his sister’s pup.

  “Follow Rose,” he said. “You’re fast enough to catch her. We’ll be behind you.”

  The dog didn’t want to do it, but Gregor was right. It could run better than it could fight.

  It gave Jack one quick, longing look and then took off after the not-dead Fenrir.

  The cold was a two-edged sword as it ran. It numbed raw wounds but stiffened bones, dredged up the dregs of its last reserves, and pushed itself to go faster. It stumbled over a dead Sannock in the snow, human flesh torn apart to reveal lichen and stick bones underneath. The Sannock parts were already half dust, brittle and crumbling as the Wild fastidiously picked them out of the world. That meant something to Danny too, and the urgency of his thoughts was a distraction.

  Something bad was going to happen. The dog could see the knots of Danny’s thoughts as it pieced together, but it couldn’t chase the trail down to the why. That didn’t matter. It knew what mattered.

  Bron’s pup. Jack. Distance from the slaughter behind it.

  The dog shook its head in annoyance. It would give Danny his skin back if what he thought was so important. Otherwise that part of it needed to let the dog be until this was done.

  It didn’t help. Danny’s worry picked nervously at the edges of the dog’s mind no matter how it tried to ignore it. On the snow ahead of it, a gray shadow, distorted by the wind and the dim moonlight, kept pace with him.

  The reek of the place hit the dog’s nose before it saw it—a low cairn stacked up on a hill, ringed by scrubby trees and gorse. Dead dogs flapped from trees like flags, flayed paws staked to the frozen trunks. The hackles on the back of the dog’s neck stood on end as it felt something brush in and around it. Cold, not-there noses sniffed at its wounds, and teeth clicked silently—but he still knew—next to its ear. The dog swallowed the whine in its throat, clamped its tail between its legs, and sidled closer.

  Rose lay on top of the stones. Her scrawny legs were spread, another hide laid over her thighs and groin. It was filthy with blood. The few prophets she had left gathered around and chanted guttural prayers as they rubbed grease over her stomach and up along her scarred thighs. Under the draped hide the baby squalled, and Rose braced both hands on her swollen stomach and pushed down.

  Fresh blood spilled into the stone, and the baby slipped after it, into the greasy hands of a prophet. Bron’s pup, small, blind, and red as a skinned rabbit as the prophet passed it to Rose. She laid it on her breast, and it squalled as it turned its screwed-up face away from the slack nipple presented.

  Something else squirmed and wriggled in her stomach. It didn’t need any encouragement to find its way out as it clawed at the thin membrane that wrapped around it. Rose grimaced at the pain and clutched the baby to her chest. She thrust her hand into her old stomach and hauled out a wet, unfinished thing that was all bones and spider limbs. It opened its mouth and croaked a tea-kettle hiss through razor-sharp teeth.

  She gave it a hard shake and tossed the thing at one of the prophets. With Bron’s baby clutched in one arm, she scrambled up onto her feet.

  The dog… needed… to understand the stale-penny stink of Danny’s panic in its throat. It knew it was about the pup, and it had promised. They’d promised Bron. Kath.

  If the Wild didn’t like it, the Wild could fuck off.

  Danny tumbled face-first into the snow. He scrambled to his feet and regretted it. The dog hurt but it didn’t think about it, but Danny could feel the damage and work out how long it would take to heal… if it healed. He was a dog, not a wolf. With him, some things just patched back together good enough.

  “It never works,” Danny muttered to himself as he scraped snow from his eyes. “I was wrong. New isn’t enough. Wolf isn’t enough. It killed Nick, getting the bird stuffed in him.”

  The realization was still all knots and threads in his brain. He knew he had to stop Rose, but he hadn’t picked it apart to understand it yet. Or why he’d thought he’d do better—naked and half-blind in the storm—than the dog would. He staggered toward the hill anyhow, slowed down by the thick drifts that the dog had sailed over.

  He remembered the taste of dead sheep on his tongue and the long nights he’d spent out with Hector during lambing season. Wolves were useless for that. The sheep would rather run off a cliff than come to a wolf’s hand, so the dogs were always recruited. Sometimes lambs died or the sheep died giving birth, but there was a trick to get a bereaved sheep to accept an orphan lamb.

  Just skin her dead lamb and dress the live one in it. The sheep would never know any better.

  Wolves were smarter than sheep, smarter than the dog. Fenrir wasn’t like Jack, though. He’d never been human, never learned how to lie or trick. Rose had dressed Lachlan in Jack’s skin to fuck him, so she’d smell like the skin Fenrir wore. Then she’d skinned it back off the moron to make a leash for the wolf. Now she’d taken the Old Man’s grandson, his blood and his bone to….

  Danny cursed to himself and forced himself to run faster. He’d left Jack and Gregor behind, caught in the middle of a slaughter, and there wasn’t time to wait for them to catch up. He’d promised to bring the baby home, but someone else would have to do that. If Danny didn’t stop this, all they’d bring home was a corpse.

  Probably.

  Some wild flash of humor sparked through Danny’s brain as he thought about how stupid he’d look if he was wrong. It probably wouldn’t be for long, but it would be impressive.

  Danny didn’t bother to fight the prophets. He just flung himself between them and ignored the yank of urgent hands on his arms and the fingers in his hair. Rose’s scarred face twisted in contempt when she saw him—there was a horrid, impossible beauty knit into that scarred corpse mask, but the thought of his mam’s corpse dulled Danny’s reaction to it—and she raised her hand to push him away.

  He stooped to grab a rock that had rolled away from the cairn. It was round and smooth in his palm, and he straightened up to swing it in one smooth motion. It crushed her fingers and snapped her wrist at a weird angle. She swore at him for the indignity, and he caught her on the jaw on the backswing. It broke with a dramatic pop and knocked her backward onto the altar.

  Danny dropped the rock, grabbed the baby from her loosened grip, and backed away. It didn’t cry, but he soothed it anyhow as he looked around for a way out.

  “The dog,” Rose said, her voice slurred. She poked her jaw back into place with her fingers. “I should have expected it. Loyal as a cur and just as dumb.”

  Fear stuck in Danny’s throat like nettles, and a bleak, awful fury backed up behind it. It felt like an allergic reaction, a physical response to the scarred old prophet that made Danny feel like he was about to throw up or have a heart attack. He wanted to run away. He wanted to peel her apart like a present in musical chairs, just tear off the stolen layers until all that was left was the bitter old bag whose voice he heard when Nick talked about his childhood.

  “You killed my mother.”

  Rose’s scarred lips twitched in a sour smile. “She killed me.”

  “If my mam had killed you, you’d be dead,” Danny said flatly. One of the prophets grabbed for him, and he dodged away from the swollen hand. He knew the face under the dead wolf, the too-small eyes and too-wide mouth of a girl he’d grown up with. She’d never been particularly nice, but he wondered what she’d done that the Old Man had sent her
for a prophet. He growled at her and backed away. “I won’t let you have my sister’s baby.”

  Rose leaned forward. Her stomach squelched as it folded around her knee. She tilted her head, and her eyes glittered. It was a look that sourly reminded Danny of Nick. “Are you sure that’s him? Is that the right baby?”

  Danny glanced down. It had been too early for the baby to come, and it had spent hours sweltered in Rose’s curse-foul guts. Yellow-gray crud coated the pale, bluish body like grease, and it had a jellyfish translucency to it. Danny could practically see its heartbeat through its skin. The wean wouldn’t win any prizes, but it was a baby.

  The other—

  He glanced at what the prophet held roughly by the back of the neck. It looked the same, the rough edges of inhumanity rubbed down from instinct. Danny fumbled the baby he did have as he tried to convince himself that Rose hadn’t exchanged babies in the minute it had taken him to reach her.

  She hadn’t.

  She couldn’t.

  It was possible.

  Danny glanced down at the little thing in his arms and tried to see something of Bron in it. When he couldn’t—his little sister had always been bonny, no matter what a goblin she could be—he tightened his grip on it anyhow. Whatever it was, it was new and soft and had no idea why anyone wouldn’t love it. It moved weakly against his chest.

  Dogs weren’t that bright either, after all, and a puppy didn’t even need to smell like them for them to take it in. It didn’t even need to be the same species.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Danny said harshly. It was satisfying to finally get to spit it the words in her face after days spent in Girvan stuffed unwillingly into his fur. His throat ached with the memory of the too-tight collar. “Maybe I can’t stop you, but I’ll kill him myself before I let you touch him.”

  “Liar,” Rose mouthed at him. Then she glanced past Danny into the darkness of the storm and raised her voice. “Do you hear him? He’s going to kill your son, my love. You’ll be trapped again, because of some dog that doesn’t know its place.”

  The reek washed over Danny. He retched, the sting of bile in his throat better than the greasy glue of sweet infection and old musk that filled his nose and stuck to his teeth. Danny tightened his grip on the baby and turned around. The shadow under the trees got its feet under it and rose, stiff and unsteady, onto its paws. Wolves were always bigger than people imagined, and the Scottish wolves bigger still. Jack and Gregor were dire wolves the size of ponies, so big that humans just didn’t believe their eyes when they saw them.

  The wolf that lowered its scabbed muzzle to sniff the air was the size of a Clydesdale. Its eyes were raw pits scabbed with ice and blood, and its lips were stitched with old, white scars.

  It made a passable Fenrir, although Danny balked at the idea it was the real one. He didn’t think he could deal with that, but this was just some old thing from the Wild. A long-dead wolf who—like the thing in the loch—had forgotten the actual boundaries of his body.

  Danny had spent his whole life dealing with things bigger and meaner than him.

  “It’s not a child,” he said as he backed away. “She made a changeling, some empty thing she stitched together from skin and old bones, a baby she dug up from some hole in the ground.”

  Fenrir snorted, his breath visible as it steamed in the cold air. It stank too, like sour milk and morning breath. The baby whimpered, and Fenrir turned his blind head toward it. He twitched a torn ear. Danny scrambled backward. He caught a glimpse of a prophet out of the corner of his eye and twisted to face the man. The baby’s neck felt very small as he closed his hand around it.

  “Get away from me, or I’ll do it,” he threatened desperately. “I’ll kill him rather than let you have him.”

  He tried to sound like he meant it. He tried to mean it. His mam would have meant it. She’d have killed any of them before she let Rose use them. Danny just hoped that when he didn’t do it, his sister would forgive him one day.

  For a second, he thought he heard her voice—the shrill rasp of a howl that was never as piercing as she wanted no matter how she practiced—on the wind. It wasn’t her. If Bron had come up from the loch, she’d have shamed the world into coming with her, but Danny thought maybe she would understand if he was weak.

  The prophet spat at him, but he must have thought Danny sounded convincing enough. The scabby-hided man backed away a step.

  Fenrir slammed into Danny from the side and knocked him flying. Stones and old sticks scraped at Danny’s back and hips as he rolled. He tried to hunch around the baby to protect it from the impact. He slammed into an old tree, and the frozen paw of a dead dog draped over his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something in the snow—the outline of a fat Labrador in frost and leaves. It bristled at the wolf as it came closer, ears flat as it snarled and snapped. Fenrir swiped a paw through it when it got too close, and the wind pulled it apart.

  There was no time to panic or hurt. Danny got his feet under him and shoved himself up. The baby sniffled, so at least it was alive. Fenrir heard it too, and his scarred lips wrinkled back from yellow, ax-sharp teeth as he growled.

  “You were in the Old Man,” Danny said. His back was pressed against the tree so hard that he could feel the bark. The reminder made Fenrir pause. “He knew me, he trusted me. Not the old hag.”

  Fenrir hesitated, and the growl died away in his throat. It was hard to read his face. He was a wolf, but the scars and his torn-out eyes twisted his expressions out of true. Rose swung her legs off the altar. Her stomach lay open, unzipped like a carrier bag, and she stuffed it with one of the dog hides to fill it up.

  “The Old Man didn’t want you,” she said viciously. “No one’s ever wanted you, wolf, no one but me. Now you’re going to turn on me? Betray me? Me?! When I made you a home from my own womb? When I bled for you?”

  Fenrir flinched like a beaten dog at the accusation. He pinned his ears flat and struck at Danny. His teeth were so close that they were all Danny could see, and then the black bird dropped out of the storm and slammed into the side of Fenrir’s head.

  Broad black wings battered at Fenrir’s face while a carved white beak tore at the wolf’s ears and cheeks. Gobbets of flesh were pecked out and discarded as blood filled the carved line in the bird’s beak.

  “Nick!” Rose howled in fury as she stood up. “You ungrateful little bastard!”

  It would have been a good time to strike, but Danny didn’t think he could muster much of a fight. So he grabbed the pale gold hide from the tree and yanked it off the spikes. The wind caught it and then it settled around the shape of a dog.

  The Lab gave itself a shake to settle in, woofed happily, and threw itself at Fenrir with all the fury of a genial but very heavy dog pushed too far. Rose screamed at it, but the Wild slid away from her words. It was just an old woman’s rage.

  No matter how the Wild bent to meet the wolves’ needs, at the end of the day, it had its own vision of how the world should be, an idea that it had stitched through onto the real world as the Winter spread white and old over the country.

  The Wild thought dogs should run in packs, not answer to a wolf.

  Danny could feel the thread that the Wild pierced through him—the old Lab’s sorrow at her death and the memory of a pup fat and content against her belly. She wouldn’t let this wolf have the squalling thing in Danny’s arms.

  “The skins,” Danny yelled. He lunged past another prophet and yanked a collie’s spotted fur off a gorse. The wind plucked it out of his hands, and he felt the collie’s furious determination to see off a predator it understood, gene deep, would prey on its flock. “Get them loose.”

  The bird took half of Fenrir’s ear with it as it pushed off his skull. It raked a prophet’s face down to the bone with its talons and ripped a red, glossy setter skin off the nails that pinned it to an old fence post. It took off in the wrong direction, corrected itself in a tangle of legs and kicked-up snow, and dashed back into the f
ight with mad glee and unpredictable speed.

  A spaniel. A shepherd. A dachshund that decided, in death, that it was finally the size it always believed it was—mongrels that had been pampered pets and ones that had been nearly as feral as wolves.

  The prophets had killed a lot of dogs on their way here, and Rose hadn’t entertained the idea that someone would cut their leashes. Free of whatever spells the prophets had chained them with, the dogs darted between Fenrir’s feet and snapped at his tail. The monsters lumbered around in circles as the dogs, just hide and wind, disappeared into the storm.

  Danny wrenched a curly-furred skin off an old rowan. Whatever dog it belonged to was already gone. The skin dangled limply from his fingers.

  He turned, and Lachlan grabbed him by the throat. His face had healed, but not quite right. A drooping eyelid half obscured his glare as he slammed Danny back into the tree.

  “Give me the baby,” he snarled.

  Danny kneed him in the balls. The man really never learned. Although to be fair, he knew how to take a punch. Lachlan hunched over as Danny’s bony knee crushed his balls, but he didn’t loosen his grip. His thumb crushed Danny’s windpipe until the blood pulsed in Danny’s ears and behind his eyes.

  “You can fuck every wolf you meet,” Lachlan said as he straightened back up. “It wouldn’t change shit. You’re still just a fucking dog.”

  The dachshund, badger-sized and hefty, tore Lachlan’s calves open with icicle teeth. Its ears, half skin and half sheer fuck-off attitude, flapped as it locked on and shook its whole body. Lachlan swore as he threw Danny aside and turned to kick furiously at the snarling hound.

  “Get the baby, you idiot,” Rose yelled. “He matters more than your pride or your hamstrings.”

  Lachlan turned on her. His neck was red, the muscles in his scarred shoulders bunched as he stood in front of her. “You said you loved me! You promised me everything, and all I got was fucked.”

  Rose slapped him out of the way. The almost absentminded backhand laid Lachlan out in the snow.