Wolf at the Door Page 20

“Next time you disrespect me or my brother,” he rasped, “I’ll put you on your back. If you ever touch Danny? I’ll put you in your grave.”

  He waited for James to lick his lips and bend his neck to the side in submission, weather-tanned skin pulled taut from collarbone to jaw, then he dragged him back to his feet.

  “Go home and clean up,” he said gruffly as he turned James toward the door and gave him a shove. “The sooner we put the prophets down, the sooner we get your son back. All of you. Go. Get some rest.”

  James looked away from Kath and Bron in apology as he limped toward the door. His mate went with him, and with that, the meeting dissolved without fuss. Danny let out a slow breath and felt his muscles quiver with aftershocks of adrenaline.

  “As for you,” Jack said. He walked over and put his hand on the barrel of the shotgun to pull it down. Danny resisted for a second, but only because he’d forgotten he still had it raised. Jack took the shotgun off him and then wrapped his free hand around Danny’s neck. His thumb pushed Danny’s chin up until his throat was exposed and Danny swallowed nervously. “Don’t shoot my guests with my gun.”

  Danny nervously licked his lips and glanced down. “It’s actually your da’s,” he said.

  “Da’s not here,” Jack said. He leaned in to sniff the soft skin under the line of Danny’s jaw, skin that still smelled of Jack. “And I don’t need a guard dog.”

  “Fuck you,” Danny said roughly.

  On the floor, where he’d forgotten her, Ellie choked in surprise. Jack leaned back from Danny and glanced at her.

  “Spend too much time with humans and you pick up their bad habits,” he said as he let go of Danny’s throat. He dropped his hand, possessive and familiar, to Danny’s shoulder instead. “Although Danny’s always had enough of his own.”

  Ellie’s attention shifted from Jack to Danny and then down to Danny’s collar where it pulled down enough to expose his bite-bruised throat. Her mouth twitched awkwardly in an attempt at a smile. “It’s hard to love a dog,” she said. “So close to us, but—never enough for us.”

  She trailed off with a shrug as she glanced down at her scuffed knees. Her scent had the dull, dust-and-ash smokiness of regret and loss. Maybe she expected someone to be sorry for her. It wasn’t going to be Danny. He didn’t need any reminders of what he was and wasn’t.

  “Maybe you just didn’t try hard enough,” Danny said as he ducked out from under Jack’s hand. He ignored Jack’s “stay” gesture, because he might be a dog, but he wasn’t trained. “I should go and check on Bron.”

  “GREGOR?”

  Bron wrinkled her nose at Danny as she chewed on a hunk of dry venison, her cheeks puffed and her hands greasy with it. They were in the kitchen of the house they’d grown up, in clothes pulled from wardrobes in their old rooms. It was probably less strange for Bron, who’d never left. The fire was stoked, and the embers burned a dull, stubborn red. An old copper kettle sat on the tiles in front of it, burnished with the flames, and the air around the uneven stone chimney rippled as the heat sank into it.

  “Jack?” Bron parroted back, with a pointed nod at his shoulder. Danny flushed from the pit of his stomach and pulled his collar up uncomfortably. It wasn’t the sex. In the Pack, everyone knew when someone had sex. The tangled smells stuck to your skin like honey. A bite was possession, a claim that Jack knew couldn’t count for anything.

  “That’s different,” he said as Bron finally ripped a chunk of venison free to chew.

  She boggled at him, mouth too full to speak, then spat the half-chewed cud of meat back into her hand to demand “How?”

  “That’s disgusting!” Danny said.

  “I’m pregnant,” Bron snapped back at him. “You can’t call me that.”

  “I saw you eat your own boogers once. I can call you what I like.” True but, Danny supposed, off-topic. He stepped back and took a deep breath as he tried to find the years he’d been away and grown up. “I’m just saying that… Jack is Jack.”

  “Oh, well, I see why the world couldn’t get on without your wits at their university,” Bron said. She tossed the wet bite of venison into the fire and chewed on the edge of the rest with sharp, white teeth. “Jack is Jack, and Gregor is Gregor. Congratulations, you explained twins.”

  “Gregor’s a nutcase,” Danny snapped. “He saved my life, and I’ve travelled with him, and I still think he’s an unpredictable lunatic. Why would you want to tie yourself to him?”

  Bron shrugged. “It wasn’t a plan. I just screwed him and then realized I was pregnant with this one.” She poked the high, distended curve of her belly. “Why not? Get it over with early, prove to them all that I’m not going to throw a dog.”

  It could have been cruel, but Bron was too blunt for that. It was the difference between a cut and a body blow. Danny grimaced anyhow.

  “At least you’ll get to sit out the end of the world,” he said.

  Bron rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “I was never going to raise it, you numpty. Gregor would have while I went to Glasgow or somewhere, took a pack and proved I wasn’t just my mother’s daughter. I’d have come back, but I’m not sitting out the Winter to babysit some wean.”

  “Your wean,” Danny said. “It’s not babysitting when it’s your baby.”

  Bron gave him a sharp sideways smile. “Modern women don’t stay home, Danny. They join Fenris’s Pack and winnow the world. Didn’t your fancy education teach you that?”

  He glared at her. She looked smug as she ripped a bite from her venison. Her jaw moved as she chewed noisily just to annoy him.

  “Leave her alone,” Kath said as she came downstairs. Her hair was wet, slick to her head like a seal, and a mosaic of green and blue bruises ran from her cheekbone down under her dress. They looked a week old already. “Your sister knows her own mind. If the baby makes it, they’ll thrive with the Pack. Most do.”

  Not all, Danny thought, but fine.

  Danny swallowed the old, prickly urge to defend the “normalcy” of the nonwolf world. It was Bron’s decision. Maybe she’d change her mind when she held the child. Or she wouldn’t. Danny imagined the look on Nick’s face when he realized he was going to have to raise his mate’s pup. It tried to be funny, but he was too tired to appreciate it.

  “Did you check her bones?” he asked. “Rose?”

  “Who?” Bron asked.

  “No one,” Kath said. She ran her hand over her head and flicked water away from the nape of her neck. “Go and have a bath, Bron. You stink.”

  Bron glanced between them and then curled her lip. She tossed her jerky onto the table and stalked to the stairs, past Kath.

  “Fine,” she spat down at them. “You talk about your smart things. I’ll go upstairs and think about proper wolf things, like deer and biting.”

  Kath sighed and waited until she heard the door slam upstairs. “She’s always been so jealous of you,” she said. “It’s childish.”

  Of him? Danny gave Kath a dubious look. His sister wasn’t jealous. She was too cocky about her wolfskin to spare time on anything else. It probably wasn’t the time to disillusion his mam that she’d royally spoiled her youngest.

  “Did you—”

  “Yes,” Kath said sharply before he could finish the question. “She’s gone. Just old stones and rags where she was. It doesn’t mean she’s alive. The Wild could have claimed her.”

  “It didn’t,” Danny said. “Do you have any idea what she wants with Bron?”

  “Because I crossed her?” Kath asked as she hooked a stool out from under the table with one foot and sat down. “I could have worked that out myself.”

  “It might not be about you,” Danny said. He leaned against the table and fastidiously poked Bron’s gnawed strip of meat to the side of the platter. A smaller bit did for him, old habits about taking the last pickings from the bone. It was only when he took a bite that he realized how hungry he was. Through the mouthful, he said, “Did she have a daughter?”
>
  “Yes,” Kath said slowly. “Alice. We were… friends?”

  “You aren’t sure?”

  Kath shrugged and held her hands out toward the fire. The light of it shone through her fingers and picked out the shadows of thin bones.

  “I admired Rose,” Kath said. Her mouth twisted as though the admission left a bad taste in her mouth. “Back then, I admired her. Alice never did.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  Kath shook her head. “She left the Pack and moved to the Lowlands. I thought she was weak. After I found out what Rose was, I thought she was smarter than I’d known. But we’re wolves. We don’t send letters. I’ve no idea what happened to her after she left here. You think she was this Nick’s mother?”

  “Would she have let Rose take him?”

  “I don’t think Rose would have given her the chance to say no,” Kath said wearily. She glanced upstairs, to where her daughter and the potential of her first grandchild splashed in the bath. “Could he just have been some child she found?”

  That was a question. Danny wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and shrugged.

  “Nick wasn’t a wolf or a dog, but Gregor said he never smelled human either,” he said. “And….”

  The taste of venison turned sour in the back of his throat as he thought back to the days he’d spent collared. They weren’t his memories, although they lived in his head like they were, and the dog stirred as he poked at them. It still felt smug over its rescue of Bron and happy—in the simple, uncomplicated by human doubts and complexes way—to see Kath. The thought of Rose, her height exaggerated and her scent cut through with mean, wasn’t quite as scary in the familiar warmth of the kitchen.

  “… she loved him. She killed him, or tried to kill him, and didn’t hesitate, but for what it was worth, she loved him.”

  “Babies are meant to be loved,” Kath said. “They’re good at it. You can love a baby you don’t share blood with.”

  “Could she?”

  Kath acknowledged that with a grimace, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Why does it matter?”

  Sometimes all it took was someone to ask the question to shame your brain into the answer. Danny hesitated. He could feel the answer. It was on the tip of his brain, but it didn’t conveniently spill over.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But she took, or tried to take, three children. Three pups. It’s her signature.”

  “She’s a wolf,” Kath said as she got up from the stool. She leaned over the fire, wrapped her skirt around her hand, and lifted the hot kettle. “Not a human-sickness killer.”

  Steam rose from the spout as Kath filled a cup and then tossed a tea bag in. She gave Danny an inquisitive look and lifted the kettle slightly in question. Danny shook his head.

  “She’s a prophet stitched into a dead wolf,” he said. “She broke into the Sannocks’ cairn—”

  Kath nearly dropped the kettle. She caught it with her bare hand and hissed as her skin blistered. The smell of burned skin was a sharp note against the smoke of the peat in the fire. She shoved the kettle back onto the hearth and shook her hand as though she could shed the pain through her fingertips.

  “She what?” she asked. “Did they escape? Wolves or Sannock?”

  “No,” Danny said… maybe lied. He’d seen Nick’s bird-bead black eyes flick toward shadows and linger in the gaps between trees. And even if that was the normal dead the carrion god saw, if Rose had found her way out of the old prison, then surely the Sannock had followed. “We closed it again. We hope. But she kills, and there’s something sick in her, something that’s made the Wild lay… strange.”

  Blisters spotted the palms of Kath’s hands and in long welts on her fingers, full of serum so they stood out tight. Danny scratched his palm as he glanced at them.

  “Like blisters,” he said. Then he rubbed his eyes. “But whatever she is, three times she’s tried to steal someone else’s pups. That has to mean something.”

  Kath pierced the blister on her palm with the edge of her nail and blotted it against her thigh before she picked up her cup. She curled both hands around the heavy china and studied him through the steam.

  “Maybe just that she’s wicked,” Kath said gravely. “And something my dog son should leave to wolves.”

  She loved him. It had never been enough, but she did. Danny hugged her awkwardly, mindful of her bruises, and was surprised when her wiry arms squeezed him tight. She got tired of it first, though, and shoved him away with a snort at his softness.

  “You’re the one who taught me that if someone hurt me, I hurt them back more,” he said over his shoulder as he grabbed his coat and headed for the door. “Besides, this is my world too.”

  Kath waited until he’d opened the door and banished the illusion of warmth. The cold sucked the breath out of him and made his eardrums ache, a sharp shock to the system as snow blew in between his legs.

  “It’s the Wolf Winter,” Kath said. “And sleeping under a wolf doesn’t make you one.”

  Chapter Sixteen—Gregor

  “THERE WAS a time when I would have asked for this on prescription,” Nick said dryly as he tilted his head back for Gregor. His mouth twisted into a wry grin that didn’t hide the nerves underneath. “Even with the itch.”

  Nick was perched on the side of an overturned kayak, the man-made fiberglass hull crazed and cracked from the cold, in the boathouse on the edge of the water. The wind outside whistled through the tarred cracks in the hut, thin streams of snowflakes scattered over the floor, and irregularly timed waves came up the gravel shore to batter at the door. His eyes were blistered and scabbed along the lashes, red where it should have been white, and lightly clouded like mist on a window.

  Gregor took Nick’s chin in his hand and tilted his head to the side. He felt Nick’s affronted grumble against his palm at being manhandled. The inside of Nick’s ears was irritated as well, wet and red, as though the skin had been scalded. Gregor leaned in for a sniff and caught the bitter scent of the prophets’ drink under the sweaty musk of whoever had owned the coat.

  “Gross,” Nick protested as he shoved Gregor away from his ear. He stuck his finger in to scratch at the inflamed skin. “Did you see anything? Is there anything in there?”

  “Not now,” Gregor said. He grabbed Nick’s wrist and pulled his hand down. “Don’t scratch it.”

  Nick sighed. “Easier advice to give than take,” he said as he wiped his hands on his jeans and then hugged himself. He tucked his fingers under his armpits and hunched his shoulders up toward his chin. Despite his pink rabbit eyes and restless knees, he still looked like a bird, just an ill one. “Do you… how long do you think it will last?”

  “Does it matter?” Gregor asked.

  Nick huffed out a laugh and then sniffed. “I’m not exactly much use like this,” he pointed out. “Human again.”

  “You were never human,” Gregor corrected him.

  Not that it mattered. Human, bird, or whatever slice of wolf his gran had made of Nick, Gregor loved him. He liked Nick’s restless hands and dry humor, his beaky, stern face, and the ridiculous way it creased around his sudden, delighted smiles. He liked Nick, the ability to turn into a giant bird or work out how someone died from their liver wasn’t anything to do with that.

  “Human-ish,” Nick said. “Human-adjacent. I’m useless.”

  Words worked better for Jack. He knew how to put things to make people follow him, cheer for him, fight for him. To make them love him. That had never come easily to Gregor. Most of the time, he didn’t care—except for the expected irritation that his brother existed to be good at anything—but Nick made him wish for a clever tongue.

  “Fuck that,” Gregor said.

  He cupped Nick’s face in his hands and leaned in to kiss him. The faint sourness that stuck to his skin—humans, sickness, and fear—faded as the familiar popcorn scent that was Nick thickened and sweetened. Cold lips warmed under the kiss. Nick reached up to grab
Gregor’s shirt and pull him down. His long, lean body sprawled out under Gregor’s, all bones and wiry muscle like a stoat, and he moaned around Gregor’s tongue.

  Gregor thought about it. It would make him feel better, remind him that Nick was his and there and the old bitch hadn’t managed to take him away again. He twisted his fingers in Nick’s hair and dragged his head back to kiss him deeper.

  His cock thickened to a tender ache under his jeans, and then a muffled, distant retort cut through the drone of the wind. Nick went still under him, and Gregor lifted his head to listen. His breath silvered cold around his lips as he breathed heavily.

  Sometimes Gregor thought he was used to the loss of his wolf, that he’d accepted the castration. Then he’d try to do something as simple as listen and it split the crusted scar back open.

  “They’re still looking for you,” he said as he pushed his weight up off Nick. “The Old Bitch wants you back.”

  “She won’t find us here,” Nick protested as he tried to pull Gregor back down. “Let them look.”

  Gregor snorted. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “The snow covered our tracks, but this is the only shelter for miles. If they’re willing to keep looking, they’ll find us.”

  “Me,” Nick said. “They’re not looking for you, Gregor.”

  There was a smell to martyrdom, a light, sickly smell of righteous determination and fear. Gregor had smelled it before—off his brother and his dog for each other, from the woman in Girvan that the monsters had taken. He’d always felt an itch of resentment for it—no one had ever wanted to die for him—but now it turned his stomach in a sour roil.

  Gregor pulled Nick to his feet. He leaned in close enough to feel the scrape of Nick’s stumble against his jaw and growled, “No.”

  “They’ll stop looking,” Nick pointed out, uncowed by the thrum of danger against his skull. “Once they take me back, I can find out what Gran wants with them.”

  Gregor hissed out a sigh. He didn’t want Nick to be afraid of him, but wary might be useful sometimes.