Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,108
voice—not Danny—but somewhere between the cell and the fight, his brain had fit them in as pack. The sound rippled back across the landscape—call and response—until something to the north, near the storm, squalled a coarse gargle of sound into the mix. It was an old, ruined voice, cut through with other voices. It was dissonant, with a pus-thick edge of sickness that made it glottal. Other ruined voices picked it up—the shades of dead friends stitched to coarse throats—in mockery and challenge.
Prophets didn’t raise their voices to the pack. They held their tongues except to howl the catechism. Or they had.
Unnerved, the Pack fell silent. Jack waited until Rose’s distant voice raggedly trailed off.
He snorted to himself, twitched his ears, and headed back along the rucked-up trail he’d left on his hare hunt. The Pack already knew the prophets were out there. Now they knew where and how many were left.
The sense of being watched dug into his shoulders again. He froze, his hackles raised, and growled low and scratchy in his throat. All he could smell was frost and empty air, a hint of icy heather and oak. When he twitched his ears, he could hear the creak of the snow as it settled and the distant crackle of frozen trees.
On the wind the echoes of the wolves’ voices drew back together and stitched into a stale exhalation from the wild.
Little wolf, little wolf…
It was barely there, a breathy whisper that faded when he tried to actually listen to it. Cold, bone-hard fingers pinched the end of his tail and yanked. Jack pinned his ear and spun around. He snapped his teeth at the empty air and felt cold bite up into his nose as something laughed.
…run away home….
The cold fingers shoved and jabbed at him. Jack stumbled and spun, teeth bared, as he was buffeted and pinched. They stretched out his lips, wet and tight, and flicked the end of his nose.
Through the thin huffs of laughter, his assailants found their words again. The voice was clearer now, but not louder. It was a dozen voices layered, not quite perfectly, on top of each other as they singsonged,
Your father is gone…on…on…
The fingers pinched his ear and bore down, suddenly hot as the skin split under the force.
…and your brother soon too!
A yank made Jack stagger as a quick rip of pain jabbed down into the corner of his eye, and then the itch at the base of his neck was gone.
He was alone. Blood dripped down onto the snow in fat red drops from his split ear and crystalized on the snow. Habit made him reach for the Wild and then recoil from the cramped muscle tightness of it. It felt like a sprain did under your skin, the rubber-band tension and soft, inflamed tenderness of infection.
If he needed to, he could still drag it to heel, rip it open and see what spilled out, but not easily and with no guarantee that the infected grafts wouldn’t slow him down. So he’d wait until he needed it. The Wild always took a kinder view of need than it did of pride. Even with the Wolves.
Jack snarled at the emptiness, hair still bristled down his spine like a hog, and wrinkled his lips back until he could feel the cold on his gums. Sannock Dead or just dead, he didn’t care for his new visitors.
Harbingers never helped anyone.
He pushed himself into a ground-eating lope. The familiar singsong rhythm of the song carried the stand-in words around his head on a loop. Worry ate at his bones like acid and released a cold broth of anger into his blood.
They might never know what happened to the Old Man, but the prophets had been behind it, behind everything. It had been Job’s poison in Da’s ear that saw Jack stripped of position and exiled. They’d taken his da, his tattoos, and—accidentally or not—given him Danny only so they could take him away too.
It was enough. Jack would be damned if they got the satisfaction of killing Gregor too.
He barreled back into the wolves’ settlement on ice-raw paws, his breath hot as it smoked over his tongue and between his lips. Sweat matted his fur down from his shoulders to his tail. He stripped it off like a sodden coat. The slap of cold air against his spine and between his legs felt good against his overheated skin, even as his balls tightened and goose pimples pricked his arms and legs.