Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,14

it wanted to howl.

Not yet.

He swallowed the sound as he stopped at the shore of the loch and stared over the dark, half-frozen water. Even without his glasses, he probably couldn’t have picked out the landmarks he’d known. Under the snow, even the cottage he’d grown up in was lost among the crags and drifts. If he squinted, he could see the Old Man’s run-down farmhouse, where it squatted halfway up the hill—gray walls and corrugated iron roof stark against all that white, the smell of generations of wolves worn thick and musty under the wood and mortar.

Old stones, mortared together in the old way. It was drafty as a barn, plagued with damp and vermin. Squirrels had given the stink of old predator a wide berth, but rats and mice, as it turned out, were no respecters of the Numitor’s dignity. It had been Danny’s job to set traps in the rafters and basements, his fingers blistered from the springs and bloody from the teeth of not-quite-dead rats when he cleared them.

Back then, Danny thought it stacked up poorly against the houses of his friends from school, with their hot-water boilers, radiators, and microwaves. Now….

Danny snorted to himself, breath white as hoarfrost as it smoked out of his body. If someone could offer him on-demand hot water and a pot of coffee, he’d still trade every hand-carved old block of granite from under the Old Man’s nose for it.

The farmhouse would weather the Wolf Winter. The frost might crack the mortar or burst the old pipes—probably still lead, Danny had always darkly suspected—but the structure would be left intact. There was nothing there that the Wild objected to. In fact, rumor had it among the wolves that the Old Man’s den stood unchanged in the Wild itself. If you could find it, of course.

Danny had never wanted to. He never planned to come back at all. The pipe dreams that other kids at university had—of going home in a BMW with a beautiful wife or handsome husband to rub their bullies’ noses in it—had never worked for him. Wolves didn’t value any of that.

Yet now he was here, and as he squinted across black water at the place he’d grown up, it didn’t feel like home.

Danny was surprised to discover he didn’t know how he felt about that.

“I should go,” he said as he turned back to the others. “Alone.”

“No,” Jack and Gregor snapped at the same moment.

It made Danny blink uncomfortably. He’d never had trouble telling Jack from Gregor. Even though they had the same face, they wore it differently. It was moments like this, when who they were ran in lockstep, that caught him off-balance. Even if they’d reached that stop from different directions.

“What if Rose is there?” Jack asked. “Or the prophets are there to stop you from reaching the Old Man.”

“So you can put Jack’s side first?” Gregor said. “Get Da to back him?”

“Why?” Nick asked. He brushed snow off a rock and sat down with a sigh of relief. Once they left the road, he’d limped most of the last few miles. Birds and pathologists didn’t do much hiking. He tucked his hands between his knees and looked curious. “I’d think this Numitor would want to see his sons first?”

Danny’s cheeks hurt from the cold as he smiled grimly. “I forgot that you don’t know him,” he said. “Jack was told to leave, and now he’s come back. Gregor was told to stay, and he left. No one told me to leave or asked me to stay. The Numitor probably won’t be happy to see me, but he won’t be angry either.”

“That’s what you think,” Jack corrected as he stalked over to poke a finger against Danny’s forehead. “You think he won’t be angry. You think the prophets won’t be ready for you. But thinking isn’t knowing, Danny-dog.”

Danny moved his head away with a flicker of annoyance. “What I know is that the Old Man doesn’t like to be defied. He’ll at least hear me out, long enough for me to convince him he needs to listen to what you and Gregor have to say.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Sometimes Danny could still feel the choke of the prophets’ collar on his throat, so tight that every time he swallowed it made him retch and strangle. The prophets had never cared one way or the other about him when he was a boy, but either that indifference had been an act or they’d coarsened themselves with