Wolf at the Door Read online

  Tom gave him a resentful look through his matted hair, his one eye faded blue. “Well, I ain’t a dog. The prophets told us the Winter was coming, and it did. They told us that the Old Man wouldn’t come back from the loch, and he didn’t. Now they told us that the gods got a special job just for dogs, that it’s why we were born like this… instead of like you. Why shouldn’t we believe ’em? They talk to the gods for us, don’t they?”

  A mutter of uncomfortable agreement ran around the room. Some of the dogs, like Tom, seemed entirely convinced, even seduced, by the new catechism. The rest, like Millie, who nodded uncertain agreement a second too late for conviction, wanted to believe, since they knew what the alternative was. Only the stranger, fingers pressed to his eyebrow to pinch the wound shut, openly rejected Tom’s faith with a sneer as he spat onto the floor.

  “We don’t believe them because the gods fucked us before,” Gregor snarled as he stepped forward to loom over Tom. “Or did you forget why we’re on this side of the Wall?”

  Instead of being intimidated, Tom lifted his chin and nervously licked his lips.

  “You, not us,” Tom said. His voice cracked as Gregor grabbed his shirt and hauled him roughly to his feet, but his words stayed steady. “Wolves, not dogs. The gods don’t need you anymore. They need us. That’s why they made us, to take your place now you’ve failed them.”

  There was something unsettlingly fervent in his face—almost religious, almost human. Sometimes, even with Danny in his bed, Jack forgot how tame some of the dogs were. Danny might claim it as a virtue, but there was too much wolf in him to thrive on a leash.

  Jack caught Gregor’s arm as it cocked back for a punch.

  “For what?” he asked.

  Tom opened his mouth, sure he knew the answer, and then nothing came out. He spluttered for a second and then rallied awkwardly. “To serve them,” he said. His eyes flicked up to Jack’s and then slid sidelong away. “To be loyal and stay by their side.”

  “Stay to heel, you mean,” Gregor said with contempt. He shoved Tom back against the wall and turned to Jack. “They promised me your throat and the Pack.”

  Jack gave Gregor a thin smile. “To me too,” he said. “And they gave Lach the Pack too, along with a promise they’d protect him.”

  “In Girvan they offered to save the children,” Gregor said. There was a bite to his voice as he glanced around the shadowy cell. “But the children still died, and I’m not the Numitor.”

  Or a wolf, but Jack held his tongue on that. If the threat of his brother’s fangs helped to keep people in line, Jack would use it for now.

  “And my brother’s still alive, and Lachlan might call himself Numitor, but the fuck he is,” Jack said. The steadiness of his voice made Tom squirm as he looked away and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “The prophets make a lot of promises, try to be all things to all people, but they can’t keep all of them. Once they don’t need to keep you in line anymore—”

  The stranger’s cracked voice interrupted him. “Then they’ll pull out your teeth, slice off your skin, and only when they’re done do they cut your throat.”

  Uneasy silence fell over the cell as the stranger’s voice cracked in a sob and he covered his face. The dogs shuffled their feet, and Jack turned away from the raw grief that squeezed through the man’s fingers. He couldn’t let himself see it, or feel pity for it, or it might seem real.

  It wasn’t—it wouldn’t be—Jack’s pain. He wouldn’t be left cracked open for his pain to leak out like blood in the water. He’d find Danny, whole and irritating and Jack’s, like he’d been since Jack first realized he wanted the lanky, older boy. Dog or not.

  “Lies,” Tom said, but his voice wasn’t quite so sure. “And if it did happen, the prophets had their reasons.”

  Without looking around, Gregor reached back and grabbed Tom’s jaw between thumb and forefinger. He squeezed down hard until the only sound Tom could get out was a whimper.

  “Their reasons, not ours,” Gregor said. “Since when do we trust the fucking prophets?”

  Millie pulled a crumpled square of old cotton out of her sleeve and awkwardly offered it to the stranger as he groaned against his palms. He ignored it, and the tattered handkerchief dangled pathetically from Millie’s finger. Maybe humans weren’t the only ones who clung to the ideas of the pre-Winter world.

  “What else can we do?” Millie asked. She balled up the handkerchief in her hand, her knuckles white against chapped skin as she squeezed. “Do you think no one said those things when the prophets came down from the hills and started to make demands? That none of the wolves told them to fuck off? The Old Man sent them away with a flea in their ear. Laughed them back into the storm. Maybe that’s—”

  She stopped, her mouth pursed around the words that wanted to get out.

  “Killed him,” Jack said for her.

  An unhappy growl creaked out of Gregor’s chest at the blunt statement, but he didn’t argue. The idea that Da was dead and they hadn’t known, not felt it echo through their blood like a drum, seemed impossible. Except no one had thought someone could find the Sannock Dead or that a prophet could stitch a dead wolf to their back and run in their skin.

  It was the Wolf Winter, and a lot of things were possible. Jack didn’t believe it, not yet, but Da could be dead. He didn’t know how he felt about that. It was his da. He’d spent his whole life on the hunt for the Old Man’s approval—and the flip-side disapproval of Gregor—but he also knew that one day he might have to kill his da. On some level he’d always accepted that.

  Yet it still felt wrong to admit that his da’s death would grieve him, but that Danny’s would destroy him.

  It was a weakness, and Da had always said the Numitor couldn’t afford weakness.

  “Maybe they just locked him somewhere,” Hector said. It was obviously an attempt at kindness, not something he believed. “We don’t know.”

  “Dead or trapped,” Millie said. “Either way, the Old Man was gone, and that’s when the prophets came back. They had dogs on leashes—”

  “And empty leashes too,” the stranger said without looking up from his knees. “Bloody ones. Plenty of those.”

  “They told them to round us up,” Millie said. “That the gods wanted us. No one laughed this time.”

  “Kath did,” Tom said. He seemed to have forgotten his conversion to the prophets’ cause. Kath had always been kind enough to him. “She called them frauds and fuckers and tore the skin right back off that one man. Then that night, the Wild came down from the hills at their order.”

  “When?” Jack asked.

  “A few weeks ago,” Millie said. She paused and rubbed her hand over her face. Without the makeup she used down in the town, she looked younger. Not the effect humans went for, as Jack understood it. “A week? I didn’t feel it. The Wild never spoke to me.”

  Hector shifted from his lean against the wall. “I did. I was up in the hills wi’ the sheep. They’ll be dead now, without me, poor bastards.” He gave Gregor a dour look of accusation, and got an unapologetic, sharp grin back. “It didn’t feel right. It hasn’t felt right since.”

  Jack was about to dismiss that but hesitated. Dogs weren’t attuned to the Wild like the wolves. Even Danny only really sensed it when the Wild reached out to him, and the Wild liked Danny better than most. Old stories let humans into the Wild if they were part of the warp and weft of fields or forests, absorbed them as though they were another part of the landscape. Hector had spent years in the hills with his flock and his frustration.

  “Like what?” he asked. At his shoulder Gregor snorted in contempt.

  Hector looked taken aback. He scratched his neck and took a second to think about the answer.

  “Sorta sour,” he said. “Like the old Graveland estate or the old Sannock haunts. Places where the grass has gone bad.”

  Jack thought of the beach in Girvan, the dead and the monsters laid out on the snowy shale. It hadn’t felt like somewhere anyone would enjoy
a picnic again. The stench had sunk down into the bedrock.

  “That’s bullshit,” Gregor said. The hair on the back of Jack’s neck prickled with familiar jealousy as Gregor reached for the Wild and it answered. He had to throttle back the urge to do the same, to prove he could. “I’d know if there was something wrong.”

  Hector tucked his chin in submission, but muttered, “You don’t know everything.”

  “He doesn’t,” Jack agreed.

  Gregor curled his lip in a sneer to express his opinion. “So the Wild went sour, and what happened then?” he asked. “Bad dreams? What did the prophets do?”

  There was a pause as the dogs looked at each other. Reluctance pinched at the corners of their mouths and tightened their eyes. In the end it was the strange dog who answered, too caught up in his own losses to care about delivering bad news. Or maybe he enjoyed evening the scales a little.

  “Whatever the prophets wanted,” he said. “They walked in and out of your houses while you slept and took what they wanted. Flesh. Treasures. The bitch-goddess made the moon stand still in the sky to watch.”

  “Children,” Millie interrupted sharply. This was pack news to share. “They took the children. Four of them, from their cots.”

  Tom shifted against the wall. “And Bron,” he said, despite Millie’s glare. “They took Bron. When the next prophet came into town to tell us what the gods wanted, he had Bron’s finger with him. Kath didn’t laugh at them after that.”

  No. If they had her wolf child, Jack didn’t suppose she would have. He heard Gregor make a soft noise behind him—surprise and a scrape of concern. Bron had never forgiven Jack for her brother. She hadn’t thought he should love Danny or that he should have let him leave. She’d run with Gregor and his friends once she was old enough to make her own decisions.

  Bron was a grown woman, but if the others were young enough to be “taken from a cot,” then Jack could guess who the parents were. Pack hierarchy was decided by strength, but the point of the pack was their children. Higher-ranked wolves were expected to have children.

  It was the reason Jack had been exiled—because he wouldn’t fuck a woman even to get her pregnant. Or, at least, that was why his da had picked Gregor to be the next Numitor. Jack had been exiled because no one believed he’d take the demotion well.

  Back in Girvan, between the pain, he’d wondered if he should never have come down over the Wall. He could have picked a woman, closed his eyes, and thought of Danny. He hadn’t seen why he should have to.

  If it was the children that Jack thought it was—two named for him, one for Gregor, and the last after their dear, dead ma—the prophets had pulled the fangs of Da’s loyalists. Kath was the only one who had what it took to lead, but the others would have backed her.

  Would have.

  So the kids had been taken to sideline them while Lach and his pack had been seduced by empty promises from the gods, filtered through a prophet’s scarred lips.

  “Fuck,” Jack said.

  Millie gave him a thin, tired smile. “If the wolves don’t know how to fight,” she said, “what’s a dog to do but what they’re told, and hope for the best?”

  She gave him the courtesy of a pause to give him a chance to answer, but she didn’t look surprised when he had nothing to say. Along with the other dogs, she turned away, either to curl up against the wall or pace the length of her chain.

  “There’s a plan,” Tom said. He’d found his faith in the prophets again as they talked, plastered desperately over that hollow center of doubt. “There’s always been a plan. Who were wolves to think they could deny it?”

  While Gregor cursed Tom out, anger and frustration raw in his voice, Jack pulled impatiently at his new collar. He could taste the Wild in the back of his throat—sour, Hector had said, but it was grease and smoke on Jack’s tongue—but he let it fade away again. The Wild could do a lot of things, but it could no more unlock a padlock than it could start a car.

  The Old Man had said that if he came back, he’d end up here, caged for the prophets. Jack should have listened.

  He found a spot on the wall and crouched down on the balls of his feet. The wolf itched under his skin, eager to shift, and he let it. If it came down to it, Jack thought bleakly as he rubbed his fingers over the cold metal, he’d rather strangle his wolf himself than go under a prophet’s knife again.

  He was afraid, and all the shame in the world couldn’t shift it from his bones.

  Chapter Eight—Jack

  “HERE,” GREGOR said as he slid down the wall to sit next to Jack. He handed Jack the battered, now-empty mug. It had taken him a while to work out his black, caustic mood on Tom and the walls. His voice was tattered, and his hands bruised, skin split and shredded over the bony jut of his knuckles. Careless. Even a dog would realize there was something wrong when the Numitor’s son’s knuckles scabbed over instead of healed. “Recognize it?”

  Jack turned the mug in his hand. There was a fresh chip on the rim, and the cup was greasy with the residue of spilled coffee and dirty, sweaty hands. But even in the dim light of the cell, Jack could make out the bright, aggressive green of the glazed paint.

  “It’s Da’s,” Jack said. Coffee in the morning or whiskey in the evening, his da had drunk it out of this mug. A sour laugh squeezed out of his chest as he leaned his head back against the cold stones. “That’s fucking pathetic.”

  Gregor snorted his agreement.

  Da had smashed enough cups against the wall or floor from carelessness or temper. Or he used to catch rusty brown water from a drip in the pipes under the toilet or filled it with white spirit and vinegar to get rust off something. Once he’d used it to brew the mountain ash gall to ink a new wolf into the Pack, then sent Danny to buy a new one because his coffee gave him the shits after.

  Only an idiot would think that the Old Man—dead or gone—would give a damn what anyone did with a cup he didn’t have to drink out of. That was Lach, though.

  “He broke your dog’s ankle once,” Gregor said. “Left him to crawl down from the hills on his own.”

  Jack paused for a second as a mixture of anger and jealousy twisted sickly in his stomach. He’d never fought Danny’s battles for him. Da wouldn’t have stood for that. Even dogs had to be able to stand up for themselves to stay in the Pack, but what Gregor had said sounded more like torture than a fight.

  “He never told me that,” Jack said once he’d swallowed the sour bubble of bile back down. “I would have—”

  “Made it worse,” Gregor said. “Lach threatened Bron if Danny told anyone, told him that ‘things happened to reckless girls’ who don’t have people to look out for them. I guess he convinced Danny he should hold his tongue, because your dog didn’t say anything to anyone.”

  Jack set the cup down and wiped his hands on his jeans. He gave his brother a cold look. “Then how do you know?”

  Gregor shrugged unrepentantly. “Lach thought I’d be grateful he fucked with what was yours,” he said. The corner of his mouth tilted with old contempt. “I wasn’t. It just proved that he wasn’t just a bully, he was a coward. He couldn’t even beat up a dog without a girl to hide behind.”

  “And you didn’t do anything?”

  Gregor glanced at him in surprise, eyebrows raised. “He was your dog, not mine. Why should I care?”

  Jack supposed he should have expected that, but sometimes…. Sometimes he thought this fragile alliance with his brother could work. It had always seemed like the world had only made enough room for one of them, that they had to shove and snarl to claim it for their own. With everything the Wolf Winter had carved out of them, Jack wondered if maybe there was enough left between them.

  But then Gregor would open his mouth and remind Jack they still hated each other.

  “I might have warned him off Bron, made sure he knew that wolves didn’t have accidents, but I didn’t need to,” Gregor said. “Next time Lach got dragged over the loch to go to school, one of the town girls he�
�d been screwing threw coffee on him and accused him of putting something in her drink. When the teachers looked into it, they found a bag of drugs in his bag.”

  Jack frowned as a flicker of memory cut through his anger at Gregor. He’d been there when the local police arrived—sweaty-nervous as they ventured onto Da’s land even if they didn’t know why—and when his da dragged Lach out and beat him in front of the whole Pack, Danny had been there too, and Jack had thought it was a dog’s weak stomach that made Danny look away from the beating despite the fact he hated Lach.

  “You think he set that up?” Jack asked skeptically. “If Da found out that Danny had deliberately brought the cops up here, into pack business, he’d have exiled the whole family over the Wall. Hell, Da believed that the drugs weren’t Lach’s, and he still nearly sent him away just for being stupid enough to get into that situation. Why would Danny take that risk? It wasn’t like he was scared of starting a fight.”

  Or losing one. Danny had never fought to win. He knew that most of the time he wouldn’t. He aimed to hurt the other person enough to make them think the win wasn’t worth it—dislocated knees, gouged eyes, and the humiliation that everyone knew a dog had made them yelp. But that had been a fight he hadn’t wanted to lose.

  Danny and Bron had never been close. Neither were Jack and Gregor, though, and they only made it back to Lochwinnoch because they weren’t about to let someone else kill their brother. There were times Danny forgot he was a dog—sometimes even Jack did—but it was when he didn’t that he was most dangerous.

  Because a dog didn’t have to play by the rules.

  “A coward and a bully wouldn’t risk exile to get payback,” Jack said. “And Danny’s always been stupid where his sister was concerned. So if he’s not here, we know why. Why tell me this, Gregor?”

  Gregor folded one arm over his chest to rub his shoulder. He didn’t smell of fresh blood anymore, but under the hot, metallic tang of his temper, there was a murky hint of pain. It had started to heal, but it hadn’t stopped hurting.