Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,13

you put it that way,” Jack said. “You win.”

Nick clicked his tongue. “I’m glad I’m good for something,” he said dryly, a hint of something rough under his voice. If Gregor noticed it, he didn’t think it mattered enough to apologize.

Danny used his nail to scrape a porthole in the smear of ice on the windshield. There was an empty white bottle of pills clutched in the woman’s hand. He couldn’t read the label, but it was unlikely to be vitamins. It looked like Nick had been right.

“We should get going again,” Jack said as he looked up at the sky. “If we can, I want to get home before nightfall. The Wild’s gotten strange as it’s gotten stronger, and there were things in it that always liked the dark best.”

They all, even Gregor, looked at Nick.

He scowled at them. “My world was perfectly normal until you came into it,” he said.

Gregor laughed at him. “You cut up dead people to weigh their brains and read their past in their guts,” he said. “You love a wolf. What’s normal in that?”

“You love that wolf,” Danny corrected, with a jab of his chin toward Gregor.

Muscle memory made him shift his weight, ready to run. Clever had been an advantage, but his smart mouth had only ever gotten him into trouble. Gregor took a step forward, but Jack put an arm in front of his chest before Gregor committed to the chase.

“Enough,” Jack said. “If he hadn’t said it, I would.”

“You’re my brother, like it or not. He’s a dog,” Gregor said. “He should remember his place.”

“He does,” Jack said. He dropped his arm. “That’s always been Danny’s problem. Let it go.”

Gregor gave Danny a narrow, green-eyed stare warning, and Danny cowed as he hunched his shoulders and looked down. His chapped lips stung as he licked them in polite submission and gave Gregor enough of an excuse to back down.

“Fine. Let him run his mouth dry out here where there’s no one else to hear,” Gregor said. “He does it in front of the Pack, though, you won’t be able to save him from a beating.”

He turned and stalked away along the road. After a second, Nick coughed uncomfortably and followed him.

“He’s right,” Jack said. “You have to play the part.”

Danny crossed his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “I know,” he said as he walked away from the dead woman who he might have known if he’d bothered. “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good dog.”

There had been a time when Jack would have accepted that at face value. Now he knew enough to look resigned as he waited for Danny to catch up with him. He caught Danny’s arm and pulled him into a rough embrace, his lips rough with stubble as he grazed a kiss over Danny’s mouth.

“It won’t be that bad,” he said. “You’ve just been gone too long, but once you get back, you’ll get used to it again.”

Danny supposed it would. He almost had before—whole weeks of time where being a dog in a wolf pack had seemed worth it if he was Jack’s dog. Except he didn’t plan to stay that long. It was a Wolf Winter and, like Nick’s gran had told him as she collared him, the only place for a dog in it was skinned and butchered for meat.

There was no point telling Jack that, though, any more than there had been in his conviction that the dead dogs, whatever other use they had, had been left as a warning for him.

“Well, like you said,” he noted dryly as he leaned into Jack’s warmth, “at least they’ll hate Nick more.”

Jack chuckled his agreement as they walked. He didn’t get it. The wolves might distrust Nick for his gran’s sake or kill him because that’s what they’d done with everything else in Britain that wasn’t them. But he was too different to hate. People saved that for the things that were almost like them but not quite.

Like wolves hated dogs.

THEY DIDN’T quite make it before night. The faded winter sun didn’t seem to give much heat during the day, but in its absence, the cold chewed down to the bone. Every time Danny stopped to catch his breath from the wind, he could feel his clothes stiffen and crack as they froze. Overhead the moon was a fat wheel with a single bite taken out of it, and he could feel the dog tug at the back of his throat as