Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,10

the wolf’s hackles behind human words, but he made do. “I know you’re a dog, but even a cur’ll bite a hand raised to it eventually.”

“Jesus, Gregor,” Nick blurted in surprise, the divinity offended right out of him. His eyes were dark and indignant as he dropped them down from the skyline to glare. “That was—”

Danny interrupted him with a harsh laugh. “Thicken your skin, Dr. Blake,” he said. “If you want to run with the wolves, you’ll hear worse than that out of them. And it doesn’t matter who did this, Gregor, because it doesn’t change anything. If Rose dragged her mangy hide out of the Wild or a madman with a butcher’s knife decided to play dogcatcher, we’ll still need to get over the loch to tell the Numitor the prophets have turned on him… if they were ever for him. And we’ll never get there if we stand here all day, playing Columbo over a dead dog.”

“Who?” Gregor asked blankly.

Danny rolled his eyes and stalked away. He picked his way through the corpses, careful of where he stepped, but he couldn’t avoid the bloody snow. It caked his boots in heavy, stained clumps and soaked the lower legs of his jeans.

“Sometimes I wish I’d left you back in Durham,” Jack said flatly. “Danny’s right.”

“No surprise you think so,” Gregor said, contrary out of habit as he stood up and brushed the snow off his knees. “That dog’s nearly been the death of you already, and you didn’t even learn anything.”

“I learned I’m not a prophet,” Jack snapped. He could still taste the sour bite of the prophets’ brew as they poured it into him, feel the burn of shackles that pinned him out in human form like a sacrificial goat. The stink of the prophets’ monsters, only enough of them left to suffer, still woke him gagging at nights. Children’s stories and myths. That was what the Wolf Winter had always been, but somehow he’d expected the advantage to belong to the wolves. “I learned my catechism, I hated the gods, but I never talked to the prophets or went to their rituals. None of us did. That’s how they managed to betray us with nobody any the wiser. Maybe Da will know what this means. Or not. Either way, a dead prophet can’t plot anything.”

There was a pause, and then Gregor smiled at him—a hard, humorless slant of his mouth. He inclined his head slightly. “That, little brother, is one thing we can agree on.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Jack told him.

Gregor laugh was a bark of amusement that disturbed a handful of crows from the rooftops. They flew away, shadows cruciform and gray on the snow, and Jack hoped it was coincidence they were headed for the loch. He looked at Nick, whose attention clung to the tails of the birds until they disappeared behind the tree line.

If his face could be trusted, he hoped the same thing. But it couldn’t, so that didn’t help.

Jack shook himself. He missed… the wolf who’d come down from the Wall, he supposed. Back then, he’d been sure of his place in the world, sure of his da even after exile, and he’d never woken up with the taste of fear and his own blood in the back of his throat.

He’d trade a lot to have the wolf back.

“Start walking, Gregor,” he said grimly. “The prophets won’t kill themselves.”

“You don’t know that,” Gregor said. There were knives in his voice. “They’re supposed to be able to see the future. Maybe they’ll take the easy way out.”

Jack hoped not. Maybe if he killed enough prophets, he’d find the certainty they’d carved out of him. He gave the dogs one last hard look, in case there was a chance Da would know a cause for the butchery, and loped down the street after Danny.

Behind him he heard Gregor question Nick, “Columbo?”

Chapter Three—Danny

DANNY CLENCHED his jaw, the ache in his teeth from the cold a new constant as he struggled through the knee-deep snow that drifted across the road to Lochwinnoch. His jeans were crusted with slush and the wet denim chafed against his cold skin. His breath had frozen against the collar of his coat, a thin skin of frost where he tucked his chin down behind the zipper.

It only took a couple of hours to walk to Lochwinnoch from Glengarnock. It had taken Danny less when he’d left home with a backpack and an acceptance offer to the university, even with how