Wolf at the Door

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One—Jack

  Chapter Two—Jack

  Chapter Three—Danny

  Chapter Four—Gregor

  Chapter Five—Gregor

  Chapter Six—Nick

  Chapter Seven—Jack

  Chapter Eight—Jack

  Chapter Nine—Danny

  Chapter Ten—Gregor

  Chapter Eleven—Gregor

  Chapter Twelve—Nick

  Chapter Thirteen—Jack

  Chapter Fourteen—Jack

  Chapter Fifteen—Danny

  Chapter Sixteen—Gregor

  Chapter Seventeen—Gregor

  Chapter Eighteen—Nick

  Chapter Nineteen—Jack

  Chapter Twenty—Jack

  Chapter Twenty-One—Danny

  Chapter Twenty-Two—Gregor

  Chapter Twenty-Three—Gregor

  Chapter Twenty-Four—Nick

  Chapter Twenty-Five—Jack

  Chapter Twenty-Six—Jack

  Chapter Twenty-Seven—Danny

  Chapter Twenty-Eight—Gregor

  Epilogue

  More from TA Moore

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  Copyright

  Wolf at the Door

  By TA Moore

  Sequel to Stone the Crows

  A Winter Wolf Novel

  Home.

  For Jack and Gregor, the exiled Wolf Princes of the Scottish pack, it’s someplace they never wanted to leave. For Danny, who fled as soon as he could, it’s someplace he never planned to return. As for Nick, pathologist and carrion bird, he has nowhere else to be.

  It offers only one thing—the Old Man’s help in putting down the bloody-handed treachery from the prophets who dogged them all the way from Durham. The twins’ father is many things, not all of them kind, but not even the prophets would cross him.

  But when they finally arrive home, they find the Old Man gone and the prophets’ puppet installed in his place. Outnumbered, bereaved, and haunted by old mistakes, the four of them must discover the prophet Rose’s plan before it’s too late. As the stakes rise and the cold settles into their bones, they find that the old fairy tales hide horrors under their pretty words.

  In the Highlands, Fenrir has stirred, and he’s hungry.

  The prophets have always said that a Wolf Winter is red as blood—but they never said whose.

  To the Five, who always believed in me. To my mum, who always gets the first copy. To Elizabeth North and Lynn West, who gave this series a chance.

  Prologue

  FOR THE first time in generations, the Numitor came down from his high perch, crossed the dark waters of the loch, and walked into town. He arrived on four feet, drenched and with ice heavy in his thick ruff, but shrugged his skin back on and padded naked through the empty streets.

  A courtesy he remembered, although to whom had slipped away from him.

  Wolves wore the years lightly enough. The Numitor might be old, his hair run to gray and most who’d loved him in the ground, but he was strong and straight. Every full moon he led the hunt, and only a few of his wolves could keep pace with him. But if age couldn’t claim her tithe from his flesh and bones, she’d take her due from his memory.

  She’d give him fifty years, a hundred even, but after that, she had first pick. It had seemed like nothing at first—a first kiss whose face was worn down to the scruff of ginger stubble and the idea of love, a brawl he could remember every detail of except it floated unmoored in the “when,” a promise he’d made to someone important enough it was ingrained in his bones even when the idea of them was a ghost—but what was gone was gone forever.

  Now, when he looked back over his long, bloody life, it was like an old house someone had started to shut up for the night. Some rooms were lost, bricked off, and others were only lit by a few fairy lights of sweet memories. And every time one of his old friends died or some touchstone wore to nothing under the passage of years, another light went out.

  Frost crusted on the thick fur that layered his body even as a human and pinched his toes and the tips of his ears as he walked through the abandoned brick boxes of Lochwinnoch. Most people had left early, locked their doors and drawn their curtains behind them. For a few days after the town was all but abandoned, it still lit up at night, clockwork precise as the old lamplighters, until the wind tore up the electricity pylons. Some villagers had left it until the last moment—the priest, old farmers in their crofts—as though they thought the old gray stones of this place somehow belonged to them.

  The Numitor had sent the Wild to the wolves to show them their error. Broken doors and slaughtered herds, supplies that rotted overnight or sprouted like they’d been planted and seen the year through to harvest.

  He’d no desire to kill them. The people of Lochwinnoch had been tolerable enough over the decades, insular and incurious about their neighbors and the sullen, wild children who came over the lake to have figures and letters drummed into their heads no matter how much they snarled about it.

  They were wolves, but they were men too. A wolf had its fangs and its speed, but a man had the brain between his ears and what he put into it. The Numitor had no room in his space for a fool who wouldn’t keep both honed.

  Tolerable or not, there was no place for them here but in the ground. The Wolf Age had begun, and there was no place for men but as prey.

  Most of them had realized that on their own. They’d left their houses open to the elements, once-scrubbed hallways full of snow and the things they held precious left to crack and ruin in the cold. Better the things than the people. For now, anyhow.

  As for the ones who’d stayed, the Numitor had come to deal with them himself. Some things you didn’t delegate.

  The old gray walls of the church were limned with ice. It dripped down from the snow-tipped spire and clotted around the windows and the high peak of the door. The Numitor’s skin stuck to the black iron gate, the metal hinges frost-cracked and broken, as he pushed it open and walked up to the door.

  It was unlocked. Not that it would have stopped him if it weren’t.

  Candles burned on every surface—thick yellow wax dripped in long trails down the altar and walls, and cast unsteady, gray shadows over the walls and windows.

  The priest was still there, seated in black robes and a heavy parka on one of the old oak benches. A black fisherman’s hat was pulled down low over his ears, and white tufts of hair stuck out under it. The head was in his lap, loosely cradled in his arms. It had been severed roughly at the neck, the skin torn in ragged strips and the pink-stained vertebra cracked.

  Blood puddled around the old man’s boots, dark red and curdled with the cold as it sank into the stones. It was still fresh, the salt and metal tang of it sharp as it rose off the cold stone.

  The bittersweet nostalgia that had dogged the Numitor’s heels like weeds from the lake withered under a raw-meat flash of anger. He had no real desire to murder an old priest tonight, but that someone had dared to snatch his kill from between his teeth made him growl. The sound echoed off the high bare walls.

  “So, whose balls dropped?” the Numitor asked. He walked into the church, and his feet left wet prints on the stone as he paced from flag to flag. The air smelled of blood and hot wax, cut with a bitter undertone of some spiced incense that itched the throat. He coughed and spat to clear it. “Or was it your fangs? You here to challenge the old wolf?”

  Somewhere in the building, something scraped, metal on metal. The Numitor turned toward the noise and took a step forward. His
heel came down in the puddle of blood, unexpected warmth between his toes, and then he heard the heavy rasp of labored breathing outside.

  More than one. Had he grown old enough to miss such an obvious trap, he wondered, but then he felt the evergreen tug of the Wild in his bones. He took a deep breath of it—a cold so clean it burned—and let it ripple through the church. For a moment, haphazard old trees, trunks glued together with moss and frost, took the place of the walls. The eerie blue of a sky untouched by smog shone overhead, and a stag’s raw head, antlers glassy with ice, was strung from the branches. Misshapen shadows moved through the trees, snouts wreathed with the wet steam of their breath.

  In the Wild they stank of rot, greasy sweet like old pork in the back of the Numitor’s throat, and a hint of that sweet, pickled incense. He let the woods and the trees slip away from him, burst like bubbles on the hard-edged stone of this world, and he could almost taste the smoky burn of perfume on his tongue and something like….

  Sickness. The nicotine and sour smell of a sick room, of curdled ulcers and the hopeless sweat of someone who didn’t think they’d get better. The stink of it reached down the Numitor’s throat and stoked the heady flush of anger. Another scent cut through that fetid stink, though—a familiar one.

  He pulled the wolf up until it pressed hot and itchy against the underside of his skin, the fangs and ache behind the bones of his skull.

  “Jack,” he said. He should have known. What other wolf would walk the Wild to come and challenge him here? Now, at the end of things. The reek of them… there were strange things in the Wild these days. Old things. Maybe they’d killed something foul and rolled in it. “Gregor. Which of you is it, boy? Who’s come home?”

  It shouldn’t have been an easy choice. He’d tried to love them both, and he would mourn the fallen, but he knew which son would take something of who the wolves were now through the long wolf age.

  The wolf split through his skin. He let the thick, dense hair bristle over his shoulders and crawl down to his knuckles, the sharp nails on the ends of his fingers split to let claws through, but no further. The wolf pushed at the back of his throat, but he scruffed it back. He wanted to say goodbye to his last son.

  It was the first time he’d been challenged and not wanted to win. He’d kill his child—again—if he had to. The wolves needed a strong leader, but if Jack, or Gregor, put their teeth in his throat, he’d not curse them for it.

  Age had already closed up the windows and boarded the doors of his life. Maybe it was time for him to turn off the lights and leave before winter.

  “DON’T KEEP me waiting,” he said, the wolf’s rasp trapped under his tongue. “Come and give an old man a hug before you try to kill him.”

  Someone stepped halfway out of the shadows behind the altar. A raw scalp shone red in the candlelight, black charred strings of flesh stuck to it, and a bloodshot eye peered at him from under a scar-wrinkled, stitched-open eyelid.

  “If you insist,” she rasped, the inside of her mouth bright and blister raw. “Take him.”

  The windows smashed, shards of stained glass bright as they rained down into the church. Splinters of it caught in the dead priest’s coat and lay in bright flakes on the puddle of his blood. The Numitor instinctively turned his head away, one hand raised to shield his eyes, and felt the needle pricks of it against his skin.

  “Old wolf,” something slurred, the words wet as though it had to chew them out, “Old man. Easy prey.”

  The Numitor dropped his hand. Threads of blood dribbled down his palm and dripped onto the stone. Three raw-boned things—all broken bones and twisted flesh—jumped down into the church. Bones poked out of them at strange angles, broken and taped back together with straps of muscle, and hair sprouted in mangy lines and patches of matted, tawny fur. Inked lines pulled out of true over humps of muscle that bulged at shoulder and hip, sutured lines pulled tight enough to tear and peel. Broken, ragged bone stuck out of their mouths, between and behind small human teeth, and the insides of their mouths were bloody red bags of skin.

  He had seen monsters before. When he was young, the Wild had still spread across the world, thin in places, pulled taut over worked stone and mathematics that merchants brought back from the East, but deep as a lake in others. Things had lived in those places, monsters that no human had seen and lived to spread stories about and that wolves were smart enough to hold their tongue on.

  Even centuries back, things like this in a town they’d burned. Twisted bones and monstrous stories had been blamed on the plague, and after some thought, the survivors of the neighboring towns had chosen to believe it.

  But he’d never seen the ink he’d worked into his sons’ skins strained over the leathered hide of a thing.

  The Numitor let the wolf have him. The huge gray dire wolf, built with the shoulders and jaws to take down an Irish elk, to fight off a bear, snarled and lunged for the monster that wore his son.

  Or had been his son.

  Chapter One—Jack

  THE BLADE hurt least the first time it went under Jack’s skin. In the moment, as the old bitch sliced him from hip to hip and unzipped him like a coat, he hadn’t thought that was true, not as she pinched the flap of his flesh between bony fingers and peeled it off his bones, the raw crackle of torn fibers lost under the raw scrape of his screams.

  Then it grew back.

  Soft skin, raw nerve endings, virgin flesh.

  Then the old bitch started again, and it hurt more this time. And the next. The next….

  Jack startled out of the memory. The back of his throat felt caked, thick with the taste of his own pain, and a snarl tried to find fangs to twist over. His heart hammered against his breastbone, alarmed at the phantom threat of pain, and he reached out blindly for Danny.

  He was there, curled against Jack’s side under a tangle of blankets. Jack gripped his forearm for a moment—warm skin and muscle under a scratchy Aran sleeve—and then rolled away from him. He sat up, the stink of his own sweat with him, and caught the jet-black glitter of eyes in the dark on the other side of the car.

  Wolf eyes saw better in the dark, but even skin-side Jack wasn’t human. It took a second for his eyes to adjust, but once they did, he picked out the silhouette of the little god sitting cross-legged on one of the crates. If Jack had been a god, even a minor one, he’d have picked a better body to steal than Nick Blake’s. Even the heavy wool coat he wore didn’t add enough bulk to his scrawny frame, and he had the face of a ferret behind that nose.

  Maybe a bird. Definitely not a wolf.

  Yet Gregor loved him. Jack still wasn’t sure what put him on his heels more, that his brother could love or that he loved someone that had been—mostly—human at one point.

  “You should sleep,” Jack said. His voice sounded rough as it squeezed out of his throat, and it still tasted of blood. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and was glad it was dark. He didn’t need to see if his dreams had clawed his throat raw again.

  Nick smiled wryly and shoved his hand through his crest of dark hair. It had gotten darker since they jumped the train in Girvan, a stain that spread down the strands like reverse aging.

  “That’s what he says,” he said. Jack glanced automatically at Gregor, his brother’s body sprawled out as though, even in sleep, he was too arrogant to worry about anything. In disagreement, Nick clicked his tongue behind his teeth and, when Jack looked back at him, tapped his finger against his forehead. “The bird. He wants to roost.”

  “But you want to watch me sleep?”

  When Nick smiled, Jack could see the old bitch from Girvan in his face. It was in the slightly crooked cant of his mouth, the long crease of a dimple that slashed from cheek to nearly his jaw. The family resemblance wasn’t strong, but it was there. Sometimes Jack wasn’t sure what bothered him more, when he saw Nick’s god or when he saw his grandmother.

  “You aren’t sleeping,” Nick pointed out.

  Jack grimaced and pushed himself up of
f the floor in one smooth movement. He wanted to turn his skin and run on four legs, track the slow crawl of the train through the white countryside. Life was always easier in the wolf’s heart, the chaff of regret and doubt shed like a baby tooth. Except he didn’t trust Danny to Nick’s care, not after the old bitch had collared and leashed Danny, bound him into a dog’s skin against his will when even Jack—the Numitor’s own get—hadn’t known that could be done.

  The prophets had known. It turned out that the prophets knew a lot of things wolves didn’t—a fact that made Jack even more uneasy than the current company.

  “What did your gran tell you about us?” Jack asked.

  Nick shifted. “Nothing,” he said. “Before Girvan, I thought she was dead. I hadn’t spoken to her since I was taken into care.”

  For a second the horror of the ruined old wolf with the knife and Nick’s smile on her face was cut through with contempt. Every wolf in the Old Man’s territory knew to stay under the radar of the authorities. They went to school enough not to raise alarm in their neighbors, and when they had to go into town, they behaved themselves… more or less.

  None of the Scottish wolves cared that much for humans, but only a fool ignored that they could be dangerous if they had the numbers. A fool or a prophet, he supposed.

  “She never talked of the wolves before that? Of the prophets? Her plans?”

  The bird-bead glitter went out of Nick’s eyes, and he looked simply human again as he hunched down into his coat. He pulled the cuffs down over his hands.

  “Nothing useful,” he said. “Children’s stories, about the Wolf Winter and the wolves who’d come down over the Wall.”

  “Is that why you can’t sleep?” Jack asked. “You think we’re going to kill you?”

  Nick glanced past him, into the shadows. His eyes flickered as though whatever he could see had moved. “Wolves weren’t the only monsters in her stories.”

  Something cold tickled the back of Jack’s neck, a thread from his T-shirt, a rough tag, or a single ragged nail. Jack tried to ignore the itch. He couldn’t stomach it for long and snarled in frustration to himself as he spun around to see what Nick saw behind him. Nothing. Even when he tugged at the Wild, the smell of cold heather sharp in his nose, there was nothing there, just a faint stink of old meat and old milk that clung to the tarred oak walls.