Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,112
too-big sweater. But her hair was still neat, and her lips were primly pressed together.
“It was our fault. The dogs,” she said. One of the wolves snarled, a low, ripped-from-his-throat sound, and she flinched. Jack didn’t bother to look, he held up his hand to shut the wolf up.
“Go on.”
Millie swallowed hard. “Tom, our Tom,” her voice cracked as she said his name with the hardness that only came from betrayed love. The cowed dog from the pen, with the milk-glazed eye—as though the gods had thought being a dog wouldn’t be hard enough for him. Jack felt the old, lazy stir of pity, but it flickered out as it faced what Tom was involved with. “He went to talk to Kath. She was always… kind to him, you know. After Danny left, he’d do odd jobs for her that she couldn’t be bothered with. Or she’d send him down to town for errands, to me. Kath could never abide Lochwinnoch.”
“Does that matter now?”
Millie had to think about it. Then she shook her head. “No, I suppose not,” she said. “She let him in. I saw him going in, but I didn’t think anything of it. He loved Kath. He followed Bron around like a lost puppy. If anything, I thought he’d finally spit the prophets’ poison out of his gut, once he had the chance. He wasn’t a bad lad, you know. He was angry, resentful of the gods, but we are, us dogs. We know what else we could have been.”
It wasn’t an excuse. She sounded baffled.
“What. Happened?”
This time Millie pressed her lips together so hard they turned white.
“He poisoned them,” Ellie said instead. “From the smell. Something mixed in their tea. It smelled like the potions the prophets gave their favorite wolves.”
“That wouldn’t kill them,” Jack said. It would make them sick. It might have twisted Bron’s baby out of her—pregnancies could be fragile even if the wolf wasn’t. They would have been sick and weak, but not dead.
“No,” Ellie admitted. “He used a knife for that.”
He finally turned to look at her. It stung. She’d made herself over in Kath’s image, just younger and weaker. She was like a shadow… or a ghost.
“Who else?”
Her mouth opened, but the name didn’t come out at first. When it did, her voice was weak and thin.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There was too much blood. It drowned out any other scents.”
“Did it? She turned her coat once,” someone muttered under their breath but loud enough to hear. Ellie flushed, but she kept her eyes on Jack. “Maybe she helped.”
“I didn’t,” Ellie swore. “But there was a wolf. Or a prophet. They left by the Wild. I wouldn’t do this, Numitor, and I’ll kill whoever did.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll kill you myself and make sure your wolf never finds the Wild,” Jack told her. He glanced over at Danny, who had twisted his fingers into his hair while the wolves didn’t look at him. “And if you didn’t, then you don’t have first claim to the killer’s throat.”
Gregor put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “If you want an answer, ask Bron,” he said.
“What?” Jack said as he jerked around in surprise. “I thought she was… that she died.”
“No,” Gregor said. His voice was thick and rough in his throat, the way it had always gone when he needed the wolf to hide from something. But he was alone in this, the only one of the Pack who was really alone. “Not yet.”
Without really thinking about it, Jack reached up and gripped Gregor’s hand in sympathy. The fingers were cold and stiff under Jack’s, and it took a second before he pulled away.
“I don’t need your pity. Save it for your dog,” he said flatly as he jerked his head toward the barn. “Or for Bron.”
Chapter Twenty—Jack
BRON LAY on the roughly swept boards, sliced open from one hip bone to the other, like a bizarre zipper. There was an apron of blood that dripped down to her thighs, the rags of her nightgown shredded and plastered to the floor. She was unconscious, her face slack and tear-stained.
The silence was the shock. Bron was so rarely quiet, even as a wolf on the hunt.
Jack grabbed a pair of jeans from the basket by the door and pulled them on. The cuffs folded under his heels and the waistband sagged around his hips.
Nothing should have been funny right then, but part of Jack’s brain insisted that he register how ludicrous it was.