Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,28

and fluffed its feathers out against the cold. It tucked its beak in and preened at its breast feathers, flakes of snow cold on its tongue, around the knot of scar tissue that ran down its chest. But you already ended badly.

There was no answer to that. The bird chuckled to himself, smug that he’d won, and plucked a stray black feather from its breast to drop into the snow. It lay there for a second, like an arrow pointed to the wolves’ den. Nick wondered, with a flicker of suspicion, why it had done that. The bird yawned, tucked its feather back under its skin, and croaked with laughter as Nick fell off the branch.

Fuck!

Thin branches whipped against Nick’s thighs and back as he tumbled gracelessly out of the tree. With a jolt of pain and shock that ran from his tailbone to the back of his skull, he hit the ground backside-first and sucked in a shocked mouthful of air and iced needles. His chest cramped painfully, and his hips ached as he dragged himself to his feet.

The bird chuckled hoarsely at him as it nested down into his… soul, he supposed. Nick thought about that for a second, but it was too long, and he shied away from the idea as he felt his composure start to slip. He’d built his whole life, his surgical career, on the rock-solid foundation that his grandmother had been crazy, and he was nothing like that. The world made sense in a way that could be taken apart and pinned down, like an autopsy of reality.

Then he found out his grandmother was not only sane but right about the world, and that somehow made all her old cruelties worse. Superstition and fear were what stitched the world together against the monsters—the bird clicked its beak at him and he amended the thought—and gods outside, and the stitches had started to fray.

And he had died.

His life had fallen apart under him, the history he thought he knew snagged on gran’s secrets and her murder of his mother, and he’d accepted that. In a way it was easier to stop his decades-long resistance to the fairy-tale reality his gran had constructed for him when he was a child. It was only when he poked at the edges—when he tried to find the logic—that he tasted panic in the back of his throat.

He would have to deal with it one day, let his new reality sink down into his bones, but not yet. Nick grimaced to himself as he chafed cold hands over his pale forearms—naked in the storm wasn’t a good time to do anything.

We should go. He poked at the bird. It wasn’t a bird exactly in his head, just a sense of something dark that was all hunger and wickedness. Despite that, it still managed to convey that it had tucked its head under its wing and wasn’t paying him any attention.

The wind shoved at Nick to dislodge him from the sad shelter of the wind-blown hawthorn’s bent trunk. It poked snow in his ears and pinched at his thighs and between his legs as he hunched over on himself. The old scar on his stomach—nearly the same age as him, where his gran had sliced him open—itched and flushed red against his pale skin.

Thirty minutes. That’s how long it took hypothermia to set in. Less if you were stupid enough to go out naked in the snow. In the back of his head, the echo of his own calm, clinical voice diagnosed the cause of death in too many cold, stiff bodies back in Girvan. “Reddening of the extremities due to frost erythema, damage to the extremities from frostbite, in the gastric lining, evidence of Wischnewski spots….”

Nick exhaled, smoke on his lips, and pushed the nag of a voice to the back of his head. His body was used to being alarmed by the signs of extreme cold. It pulled the blood from his fingers and toes to make his heart race and make him shiver. But he’d already died, bled out on a beach in Gregor’s arms, and the bird had brought him back. It wasn’t going to lose him to a bad chill.

The bird chuckled darkly in his head. He ignored it too.

He gritted his teeth, pushed himself off the tree, and froze as the snow picked out the outline of one of the Sannock Dead. It looked tenuous as frost and shadows, but it was solid enough