Wolf at the Door Page 10

  “Kath asked me to trust her,” he said. “But I trust you. At least about this. Danny’s your dog. You care, and you’ve always been stupid for him. So what are you going to do to get him back?”

  He waited.

  So did Jack, but nothing came to him. He pushed himself up the wall—the sudden focus of everyone’s attention—and hoped that would change in a minute.

  “Fuck the prophets,” he said roughly. “And fuck any wolf that shows throat to them. The Wolf Winter belongs to us. We were promised it, and we do not forgive that promise. The gods should fear us. Not the other way around.”

  It was the strange dog who spoke up. “That sounds good, but what are we meant to do? Chained dogs and collared wolves, against the Wild and monsters and… gods?”

  Jack still didn’t know. His head was full of a sick storm of fear and anger. It would have to be enough.

  “We do what we’ve always done, what we did to the Sannock.” He felt a chill on the back of his neck as he said their name—murdered by wolves, butchered for their blood and meat. It was a deed to be ashamed of, not to hold up for people to rally behind, but Jack would use what they had. The Sannock, truly dead now the stagnant resection of the Wild they’d been trapped in had split open, were past being hurt by it. “We hunt them, we bring them to bay, and then we kill them.”

  It would have worked better on wolves. The words would have tickled their pride, and the excitement would have spread through the Pack like contagion. They’d have howled for him, a new catechism to add to the canon. Dogs were more cautious. They liked to sniff before they leaped. Maybe that was their nature.

  It still lifted a few chins and lowered some shoulders as the dogs glanced from him to each other. Only Tom glared sullenly from the shadows and clung stubbornly to his faith in the prophets’ half-promises. It was fragile, but it was faith.

  Of course, it was Gregor who couldn’t resist the urge to foul it. He had never been able to leave well enough alone, even when it was in his best interest. His voice cut roughly through the uncertain silence.

  “Sounds great, but…,” he said. Jack turned and scowled at Gregor, who lifted his chin and smirked at him. “Maybe we should get out of here first?”

  Jack skinned his lips back from his teeth in a grin as an idea crystallized in his brain. The desire to spite his brother maybe wasn’t the best source of inspiration, but he’d take what he could get.

  “Why?” he asked. Gregor caught up a second later and grimaced, caught between understanding and their old, comfortable resentment. Jack turned to sweep his gaze across the dogs as they listened. “Let the prophets come. They’re going to take us exactly where we want to go.”

  Despite their wariness, the ferocity of his words caught the dogs up. Teeth flashed in quick, determined smiles, and they nodded grimly as they traded looks in the dim light. Maybe, Jack thought with a flicker of grim humor, he wasn’t the only one who found odd comfort in the old habits of hating Gregor.

  The scuff of boots on dirt behind made him turn. Gregor met his eyes for a second and then looked away.

  “You have the dogs,” he said. “But to be Numitor, you’ll need the wolves.”

  A ROUGH hand hooked through the ring that collared Jack and dragged him up out of the dark. He squinted at the sudden transition to the snow-bright morning glare and lifted his arm to shade his eyes. The world was white, the sky starched-looking with the next fall, and fresh, crisp sheets of white snow lay over everything. The prophet who had ahold of Jack had pockmarked cheeks and ginger hair that crept back from his furrowed brow. He slapped Jack’s arm out of the way and looked surprised as he recognized his face.

  “See?” Lachlan blurted as he stepped forward. “I told you it was them. The Numitor’s bastards.”

  Gregor laughed at him as he was dragged up out of the hole. “Your parents get wed in a church, Lach?” he mocked. “Yer ma wear a veil over her fur?”

  Color flushed up Lach’s face, freckles sprayed in dark splatters over his forehead and across his cheeks. He stepped in and backhanded Gregor across the face, hard enough to jar Gregor loose from the prophet’s grip and lay him out on the snow.

  “Shut up,” Lachlan spat down at him. He kicked Gregor in the ribs and then the stomach. “You aren’t even a wolf anymore, and you were barely a man before, so who the fuck do you think you are to look down on me?”

  Jack lunged at Lach, but the prophet who had him had a better grip. The metal dug in across Jack’s throat and split open the slice on his throat as the prophet yanked him back and then kicked his feet out from under him and put him on his knees.

  “He’s the Old Man’s son,” Jack spat. He wrapped his fingers around the collar to pull it away from his throat. The nicest thing he’d ever said about Gregor, but whatever Jack felt about his brother, he was a golden son in comparison to Lach. “He’s my brother. And he’s more wolf than you. More man too.”

  Lach stamped down on Gregor’s stomach. The impact made Gregor grunt, the breath shocked out of him, and curl up around the pain.

  “He’s nothing,” Lach said. He bent down to grab Gregor’s collar and pull him up off the ground. Spit strung his lips together like stitches as he snarled into Gregor’s face. “The prophets will kill you, and I’ll lead the Pack into the Winter. It’s my name they’ll remember.”

  Gregor snapped his head forward, and his forehead smacked against Lach’s face hard enough to smash his nose in a welter of blood and pulped tissue. The pale, freckled skin puffed and purpled as it swelled, and Lach yelped in surprise as he staggered back. Blood snorted and spluttered between his fingers as he tried to fumble the mess back into place.

  It would heal, but noses were like joints—it would heal but that didn’t mean it would be pretty.

  “They’ll remember you were lacking,” Gregor jeered. When he grinned, it showed bloodstained teeth. “Lacking Givens, the Prophets’ Puppet.”

  Lach made a stuffy, inchoate noise of rage and let go of his half-molded nose to jerk his arm back and punch Gregor. His knuckles bounced off the side of Gregor’s face as he turned his head to the side to save his nose.

  “I should never have listened to that bitch. I should have killed you when I had the chance,” Lach raged. “I could have made it last all night.”

  The cackle of low, dirty laughter that escaped Gregor despite his swollen eye didn’t need any explanation. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  Jack laughed. Someone else tittered with a stifled burst of repressed humor. Lach kicked Gregor again and turned to glare at the people who’d gathered to watch. Da’s inner circle was there, grim but resolutely not involved, and Jack glanced around to confirm the kids were missing. He’d got one wrong. Jaclyn was there, with a dark scowl on her four-year-old face as her da tethered her in place with a tight grip on her arm. But her ma’s stomach was flat, and the smell of sour milk hung around her. The baby had been born and taken while Jack was away.

  She caught Jack’s attention on her and glared at him. If she couldn’t risk anger at the prophets, Jack supposed, he’d do to blame instead.

  Kath was there too, her back stiff and her hair in damp, half-frozen elflocks around her face. She didn’t look at Gregor, but her lip curled when Lach called her a bitch.

  “Enough,” the ginger prophet barked. He handed Jack over to one of his fellows and limped forward. If he had a new wolfskin to wear, he’d left it behind today. It didn’t matter. Lach still grimaced and backed away from Gregor like a pup who had to cede a kill to the alpha. “Call yourself the Numitor if you want, but the Pack is ours now. You don’t decide who lives or dies. You’re lucky we let you decide when you need to piss… and we can take that away from you too if we can’t trust you to hold your own dick.”

  Lach flushed with a hot, humiliated misery that made his supporters lick their lips nervously and shuffle backward in anticipation of the payback being spilled down. The prophet ignored him as he bent down and pulled Gregor onto his feet. He
even brushed clots of bloody snow off Gregor’s shirt in an oddly polite gesture.

  “Where is she?” Lach asked.

  “Busy.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “When she ain’t busy.”

  Jack clenched his hand around the collar at his throat. Blood was slick against his fingers as it dripped down his wrist. “Where’s the Old Man?” he asked. “What did you do with my da?”

  The question pulled the air out of the day. Everyone caught their breath as they waited for the answer. Even gone—even assumed dead—the Old Man had to have a story, right? The prophet felt it too. He glanced around and then gave Jack a thin smile that acknowledged the move.

  “Run off,” he said. “Dead in a ditch. Lost in the Wild. Who knows? He was an old man, and now he’s gone. Are you going to weep that you’re an orphan?”

  Jack’s temper flared, and his anger pulled at the Wild for fuel the way he took a deep breath before exhaling. For the first time, he felt what Hector had meant about it being “sour.” It was there, but when he reached for it, all he got was a slime of grease and reluctance. For the first time in his life, the Wild didn’t want anything to do with him.

  The prophet must have read that realization in Jack’s face, because he smirked wide enough to show the withered gap in his gums where his eye teeth had been bedded. Jack let the Wild squirm away from his touch. He could destroy the prophets without it—or at least, he conceded to the skeptical undercurrent that welled up, hurt them—but let them think the Wild had rejected him thoroughly.

  “When I kill you, any bastards you had before Da cut your balls off will dance in the streets,” Jack said. The prophet behind him yanked on his collar, and he staggered before he caught himself. He braced his feet and looked around at the Pack. Da’s best and Lach’s dregs weren’t going to shift yet, but there were wolves between those two poles. The prophets might have dismissed them, but even a middling wolf in the Scottish Pack was better than most. “Is this the fucking Winter we’ve been promised? On our knees to the prophets? Harnessed like sled dogs so they can keep pace with Fenrir?”

  People listened. No one thought kindly of the boot on their neck, never mind a wolf. The ginger prophet scowled as he caught the taste of resentment on the air, and he gestured sharply to the man with Jack’s collar. “Shut him up,” Ginger ordered. “And hobble them both. Bring the dogs.”

  The other prophets dragged the dogs up from the cage, chains wrapped around rot-rashed hands. Protests and questions were silenced with backhands and kicks. Even Tom’s attempts to testify to his faith were smacked out of him. He went on his knees with the rest.

  The strange dog—Heath, Jack reminded himself, from Stirling—just kept his head down and did as he was told. He only glanced up once, to fire a bitter glance toward Lach.

  “I’m coming as well,” Lach blurted as he stepped forward. He hunched his shoulders like a whipped cur when the prophet growled at him, but he stood his ground. He scratched at the side of his face, where the skin was already raw and welted from being worried at. “I want to speak to her. I want to hear her tell what it will be like when they come back. For us. For me, for the Numitor. I need to hear her say it.”

  Ginger looked at him with contempt but gave in with a curl of his lip.

  “Fine,” he said dismissively. “You can walk the dogs.”

  Behind him Ellie stepped forward. She looked like Kath, if she’d been left to fade in the sun. The same haircut, the same loose dress that most of the female wolves wore, and an attempt at the same confidence. It was all a little too blurred around the edges to convince.

  “I’ll go as well,” she said. When both men glared at her, she ducked her chin quickly. Her hands were twisted in her dress, bony knuckles almost lost in the folds. “You’re the Numitor, Lachlan, you need an honor guard. Even when you go to pay your respects to the gods. After last night… I need to prove myself again. Let me?”

  It took a second as Lachlan was torn between paranoia and pride. It was Ginger who decided in the end.

  “Let her tag along if that’s what she wants,” he said. “If she isn’t happy to see you, maybe your guard will have the honor of being the next Numitor. And the rest of you… we only took some of the children last time. Don’t think you could stop us, or hide, if we wanted to take the rest.”

  He turned and limped away, clumsy in the snow and his heavy, winter-weather garb.

  “Like dogs,” Jack said as the prophet behind him dragged at the collar. “When they whelp an unwanted litter, the owner just drowns them. Nothing they can do to stop it.”

  The prophet punched him in the kidneys until he gave in and let them drag him away. He locked eyes with Kath as he went, a quietly grim threat that was only for her. Jack didn’t blame her for what she’d done to him or that she’d shown belly to the prophets. But if she’d traded her son for her daughter, that he wouldn’t forgive.

  At the edge of the lake, they punched holes through his wrists and ankles and strung them through with thick wire shackles so he couldn’t run and if he changed, he’d cut his paws off. Da had preferred the collars, since people got to choose to change back or die. The hobbles maimed before they killed.

  “Rose is looking forward to seeing you,” Ginger said as he pulled Jack to his feet. His breath had the same sour stink as Lach’s as he leaned in to mutter in Jack’s ear. “You should have killed her while you had the chance. Whatever happens now, it’s on you. We’d have never gone this far, never even dreamed we could.”

  Jack took a breath to ask, but before he could, Ginger pushed him into the Wild. It didn’t want him. At least, it didn’t want the metal locked around his throat and stitched through his joints. Jack retched with the rejection, hands and feet numb as he felt the metal vibrate like a plucked string. The slash on his throat flared with fresh pain, cold and electric as it spiked his nerves, and the collar choked him as it tried to anchor him to the world.

  The Wild felt thin and slimy against his skin as it tried to kill him, like the membrane of an onion or the freshly peeled skin of a fish. It clung and resisted.

  The prophets forced him, ripped at the Wild with the fetid wrong of their stolen wolves, until it let him through. He coughed and tasted the poison in the back of his throat as though it had been pressed out of his wound like juice. Behind him the dogs whined and begged, shocked by something they never imagined. Jack tried not to groan and locked his knees. Next to him Gregor gagged and then swore thickly through a mouthful of bile.

  “It’s sour,” he said as he spat onto the snow. “I couldn’t tell before.”

  Long strands of faded, frayed grass stuck up through the snow, which was churned up into hummocks and humps and frozen solid. The ice was pitted and gray, discolored and deformed.

  Jack smelled something wrong first, and then he looked around….

  It wasn’t a whole place. Bits of it had been sliced up, grafted over the familiar highland Wild he’d grown up with. Gray sea waves, crested with a half-frozen scum of slush, spilled in over the dark, still waters of the loch. The high sea cliffs where the Sannock had been butchered faded in and out on the far side of the loch.

  Old blood still stained the sand. It always would. It never had.

  The whole landscape felt strained. It was pulled taut, drawn back like an elastic band used as a sling. Gregor had left Rose alive in the tied-off end of the Wild that Da had hidden the Sannock behind. Not for lack of trying, but prophets were harder to kill than they’d ever believed. They hoped she might end up trapped there, but expected she’d find her way out.

  Instead she’d brought the Sannock’s dead pocket of Wild north with her, dragged it at her heels like a cape. And the air was ripe with the smell of stagnant seawater and the sickly, poisoned stink of the prophets’ monsters.

  As though the recognition of them had called it, a monster appeared over the gray rocks of the Highlands, purple-gray skin pulled taut over great deformed sheets of muscle, and
the blue lace band of a bra stretched over the barrel chest and strained ribs. Swollen yellow eyes popped from their sockets like a pug, oozed yellow gunge down its bony checks and into the loose jowls that flapped under its jaw. It snarled through a too-broad mouth—scar tissue stitched up both cheeks where flesh had torn to accommodate the new, undershot jaw—as it slid down onto the beach.

  Legs that were too thin for its bulk sank into the loose shale and sand.

  She came next, one hand on the knife-sharp shoulder blades of a lean monster with the hooked, whistling nose of a borzoi. She looked sickly smug at the sight of her prisoners.

  Chapter Nine—Danny

  “YOU SAID you’d warn them,” Danny said. It wanted to be an accusation, but the tone caught in his throat and wouldn’t come out. He was a grown man, an adult who’d had a job and paid his bills and answered to nobody. Never around her, though, and that left him the old habits of childhood to fall back on. “That they wouldn’t walk into—”

  Kath scowled at him from the door of the old shepherd’s hut—four walls and a roof to keep out the storm if they were stuck up there overnight—and tossed the duffel bag she’d carried up the hill. He fumbled it out of the air before it hit him in the face, and he grumbled under his breath in irritation. It looked like he wasn’t the only one to fall into old habits. Random objects thrown at his face had always been one of her tricks to make sure he was paying attention, hadn’t dropped his guard.

  Wolves can afford trust. You can’t.

  “Mind your tongue,” Kath warned him bluntly as he dropped the duffel to dangle from his hand. “You’re home now. No one here cares that you’ve got a bank account or that you’re a teacher.”

  “Professor,” he corrected her stiffly.

  The ridiculousness of that occurred to him the minute the words left his tongue. Even if he could convince Kath the difference mattered, and he couldn’t, that was all gone now. All those years he’d spent away—his almost perfect human act, the office that smelled of him and books, the comfortable life he’d made—felt like a pit stop. The first of the Wolf Winter’s snow had only fallen a few months ago, but he’d already let go of the fantasy that he’d ever go back.