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

smiled wryly and shoved his hand through his crest of dark hair. It had gotten darker since they jumped the train in Girvan, a stain that spread down the strands like reverse aging.

“That’s what he says,” he said. Jack glanced automatically at Gregor, his brother’s body sprawled out as though, even in sleep, he was too arrogant to worry about anything. In disagreement, Nick clicked his tongue behind his teeth and, when Jack looked back at him, tapped his finger against his forehead. “The bird. He wants to roost.”

“But you want to watch me sleep?”

When Nick smiled, Jack could see the old bitch from Girvan in his face. It was in the slightly crooked cant of his mouth, the long crease of a dimple that slashed from cheek to nearly his jaw. The family resemblance wasn’t strong, but it was there. Sometimes Jack wasn’t sure what bothered him more, when he saw Nick’s god or when he saw his grandmother.

“You aren’t sleeping,” Nick pointed out.

Jack grimaced and pushed himself up off the floor in one smooth movement. He wanted to turn his skin and run on four legs, track the slow crawl of the train through the white countryside. Life was always easier in the wolf’s heart, the chaff of regret and doubt shed like a baby tooth. Except he didn’t trust Danny to Nick’s care, not after the old bitch had collared and leashed Danny, bound him into a dog’s skin against his will when even Jack—the Numitor’s own get—hadn’t known that could be done.

The prophets had known. It turned out that the prophets knew a lot of things wolves didn’t—a fact that made Jack even more uneasy than the current company.

“What did your gran tell you about us?” Jack asked.

Nick shifted. “Nothing,” he said. “Before Girvan, I thought she was dead. I hadn’t spoken to her since I was taken into care.”

For a second the horror of the ruined old wolf with the knife and Nick’s smile on her face was cut through with contempt. Every wolf in the Old Man’s territory knew to stay under the radar of the authorities. They went to school enough not to raise alarm in their neighbors, and when they had to go into town, they behaved themselves… more or less.

None of the Scottish wolves cared that much for humans, but only a fool ignored that they could be dangerous if they had the numbers. A fool or a prophet, he supposed.

“She never talked of the wolves before that? Of the prophets? Her plans?”

The bird-bead glitter went out of Nick’s eyes, and he looked simply human again as he hunched down into his coat. He pulled the cuffs down over his hands.

“Nothing useful,” he said. “Children’s stories, about the Wolf Winter and the wolves who’d come down over the Wall.”

“Is that why you can’t sleep?” Jack asked. “You think we’re going to kill you?”

Nick glanced past him, into the shadows. His eyes flickered as though whatever he could see had moved. “Wolves weren’t the only monsters in her stories.”

Something cold tickled the back of Jack’s neck, a thread from his T-shirt, a rough tag, or a single ragged nail. Jack tried to ignore the itch. He couldn’t stomach it for long and snarled in frustration to himself as he spun around to see what Nick saw behind him. Nothing. Even when he tugged at the Wild, the smell of cold heather sharp in his nose, there was nothing there, just a faint stink of old meat and old milk that clung to the tarred oak walls.

The smell hadn’t been there before. After a few days in the car, doors pulled shut against the sporadic inspections of the armed escorts, Jack knew what every corner and board smelled like. The faded stink of human sweat, fresh—or it had been yesterday—blood from the man who’d tried to catch a ride on the train and went under the wheels instead.

Nothing like milk.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Nick said. His eyes still looked human, unusually dark but without the obsidian glitter of an animal. There was something sad in the set of his mouth, and there wasn’t anything of his grandmother in that. “An old grudge.”

Jack shook himself. He was a wolf. The strangest thing he’d ever met was himself, but the Wolf Winter had brought more than snow and blood out of the Wild. Maybe the prophets knew what. Nick’s grandmother had certainly known how to open the way across… even if they had stopped