Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,162

spasmodically as it tried to catch itself. All it managed to do was shovel snow over itself.

Gregor tasted his own heart, but he couldn’t leave the fight yet. His son lay on the stone, bloody and blue, and for the first time, Gregor realized what it was like to love two things at once.

It hurt. He wasn’t a fan.

Bron snarled as she raced by him, her ears pinned flat to her skull and teeth bared. She’d caught up with him in the snow, with what was left of the Pack shamed and silent at her heels. Only Ellie and James had refused to come to their senses, lost somewhere out there in the Wild or the Winter.

They’d live or they’d die. Gregor flicked a thin bone knife he’d taken from one of the fallen Sannock and opened a prophet from groin to collarbone. The wolf peeled back to expose slack, fish-belly skin, and Bron knocked the man down to rip his guts out through the hole. Two of the half-seen dogs piled in, teeth set in his ankles and wrists as they held him down.

Gregor leaped over them and raced for the altar. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tawny blur of his brother as he arrowed across the hill toward Fenrir. Frustration scraped at the inside of Gregor’s skin at the unfairness of it, but he ignored the pulse of bile and spite in his gut. He couldn’t fight Fenrir, not for long enough to be useful, and they weren’t here for his pride.

He ducked around a monster, not quite quick enough to avoid a blow that numbed his already torn shoulder, and left the dogs to distract it behind him. Rose sneered at him and wiped the bloody fang on her breast before she lifted it, ready to bring it down onto the baby’s chest. Bron screamed, a human sound in a wolf’s throat, as Rose tightened her grip. Behind her, Danny sagged down so the prophet had to hold him up, and he swung up both legs to kick Rose in the back. She lurched forward, stomach split open against the carved edge of the altar, and screeched with absolute, unreasonable fury.

That was Danny-dog for you, Gregor thought with a flash of almost affection. He might not be a wolf, but he had never known when to quit. Gregor fully expected that, if it came to it, Danny would spit in Odin’s only eye just to make a point.

Rose clutched her stomach closed with one hand as she pushed herself up off the stone. She swung around and grabbed Danny’s face with her free hand. The raw meat that Lachlan had left of his face earlier split open as she squeezed.

“Your mother should have drowned you, the Old Man should have killed you, and Job should have torn out your throat,” she snarled as she lifted him up. “But I am surrounded by incompetents and have to do everything myself.”

Her hand tightened, knuckles white through leathery skin, and Danny’s eyes bulged at the pain. He moaned, but the sound was muffled against her palm.

Gregor vaulted up onto the altar. Two babies lay on it, identical except for the blood, and he hesitated for a breath in surprise.

The smell of heather and blood was the first thing he’d smelled and the glimmer of the moon above the first thing he’d seen. That he should have been alone and that he wasn’t—that was the first thing he’d known. The first irritant awareness of “the other” that would stay inside him, like grit that never made a pearl, for the rest of his life.

For the first time, Gregor wondered what his father had thought when he’d seen them, whether they’d been a curse or a blessing. He’d loved them well enough, but they were doomed to be at odds.

These two would be lucky enough to live that long, he supposed. He shelved the next question for later—how he felt—as he reached around and slit Rose’s throat in one sure, practiced slash. He twisted the blade as it reached her ear and dragged it down, to be sure he got the big vein.

Blood gouted out of the wound and dripped from her stomach. Gregor pulled the knife back and punched it neatly into the base of her neck. He felt the blade snick through bone and the thick, grainy length of her spinal column. He yanked it back out and a pink, greasy-looking liquid seeped out and