Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,27

Six—Nick

THE DEAD girl bobbed in the storm, anchored to her corpse by an umbilical of old bones and slimy flesh. Fish had taken her eyes and her tongue—the bird envied them the tender tidbits—but it could still feel her accusation. Promises had been and were going unfulfilled.

With a flip of its wing, the tips of its feathers frost-painted, and a snap of its bone-white beak at her tether, the bird rejected the idea of a debt owed. It sheared a strip of rot-sweet tendon from its moorings and tossed it down, slick and slippery as a worm. The girl recoiled with a silent shriek of offense, her shed bones and old grudges caught up in her hands like a matron’s skirts, and the bird jeered after her.

It had hooked her out of the broth of skin and marrow she’d brewed in and as good as spat the wolf up into her hungry mouth. That she’d given him a chill in his liver and a shadow in his brain was not the bird’s fault.

In the back of his brain, Nick wondered if the wolf with the knife and the pale eyes had killed her. It was a mortal thing to think, a mortal thing to feel the sticky weight of pity and anger for the dead girl. The bird had no time for it as the storm buffeted it back and forth with no regard for its person or its calling.

A wolf killed her, it shrugged to Nick as it tried to orient itself in the storm. That one or another. The living all look the same to the dead.

The dead girl crawled back down her umbilical to the wolf she’d spat her death into her, fingers sunk in between the woven bones. The slick rope was plugged into his ear, gray tendrils of rot spread out from the root for those with eyes to see, and the wolf shuddered as the dead girl hung over his head.

Serve him right, the bird thought darkly. The aftertaste of Nick’s desperate fear was still on the back of its tongue, tight in its chest. Another mortal thing, but it still felt like it belonged to the bird. The same as Gregor.

Their wolf.

Nick grumbled at that, but the bird ignored him as it labored cold-stiffened wings to climb higher. A frustrated croak of annoyance creaked out of it as it felt the weight of the Wild push down. It wasn’t a thing of the Wild—it looked like a bird but had hatched from a… thought, a need for a thing with wings and hunger, not an egg—but it wasn’t an enemy of it either.

Not as far as it knew.

It finally burst out of the sullen bubble of the Wild that hung over the old farmhouse, tatters of it caught in the bird’s stiff feathers. The bite of winter was still harsh, bitter with generations of divine patience as it spread through the world, but the winds that battered the bird were impersonal.

After a moment the bird steadied itself, shook off the sour residue of the Wild, and drifted into a slow circle over the scattered collection of buildings. Through the veil of snow that blew sideways over the countryside, the bird’s sharp black eyes picked out the shadowy outlines of wolves on the ground as they slammed the door to a hole in the ground.

Discomfort crawled under the bird’s feathers and raised the ruff around its throat like a dog’s hackles. Once things went under the earth, they weren’t for it anymore. Corpses on battlefields or in ditches, strung from gallows or bloated in the street belonged to it. The slain, the murdered, the angry were its business. Maybe the occasional shallow grave could come under its remit, but tombs were its brothers’ to stalk out.

Gregor, Nick thought from where the bird had put him. He’s safe.

His relief was alien. The bird stitched it into his experience—wet beak, full craw—but it only mostly fit. Mortal things were a strange delight. It knew lust, the peacock preen of feathers and a well-chosen mating gift, but this?

Love. That was something it had only seen in the aftermath, when tears and blood had been shed.

Nick flinched at that thought. He believed it didn’t have to end badly. People could just be happy.

People could, the bird agreed as it stooped on wide, black wings to perch in the bare, brittle branches of a wild hawthorn. The thorns poked at its toes as it shuffled into a comfortable perch