Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,30

stored the long-dead Sannock’s body heat for all these years. Nick hesitated for a second, the garment held at arm’s length like roadkill he’d just picked up, but he could still feel the weight of the Sannock’s attention on him.

He could do this. Nick pulled the coat on. His skin crawled at the rough, greasy touch of the wool, but the heat sank down into him.

“Don’t suppose you have any shoes?” he joked nervously.

For a second, as the Sannock swung that heavy, horned head around to stare directly at him, Nick thought he’d misstepped. Then a smile cracked slowly across the Sannock’s face, dry and stiff as its muscles and flesh tried to remember how it was done. The Sannock shook his head, the spread of horns tangled through the dry, rattled branches of the hawthorn, and stamped a hoof three times against the ground to make its point.

“I don’t know what you want,” Nick said.

The Sannock ducked his head and bent at the knees to untangle himself from the tree. Once he was loose, he turned his back on Nick and faded into the storm, the bloodless lines of him lost in the snow. After a thoughtful beat, the other Sannock faded away too, the taut expectation that strung the moment gone with them.

Last to leave was the dog and a golem of burned sticks and moss in the shape of a child. Two sets of empty eyes—one full of guttered candles and the other scraped down to green sap—studied him. The golem lifted a small hand—someone had gone to the trouble to craft it knucklebones, neat and stitched together with moss tendons—and pointed into the storm.

You will.

It wasn’t a voice. There weren’t even words, just an understanding that washed over Nick. He stumbled, shuddered, and looked away. When he looked back, they were gone.

In his soul the bird clicked in its throat and filled Nick with the affronted urge to preen. He caught himself as he pulled the coat straight over his shoulders and adjusted the worn cuffs. The buttons, he realized as he grazed his fingers over them, were dry bone. Glimpses of an old, old life flickered through his head, sucked up through the rough surface.

Dirt. A woman’s ass. Dirt. A smile on rich red lips the bones would follow anywhere.

And he had, Nick supposed as he pulled his hand away from the button. Or at least he’d followed them to his end….

The bird didn’t like it. It didn’t like the gift or the smell of the Sannock that lingered in the air or that they wanted something from… one of them. The doctor or the bird. Neither option felt good.

“I thought the dead were what you were for,” Nick said. Despite the greasy feel of the coat—and the idea he refused to dwell on that the layered, scratchy weave might not be from a sheep—he pulled it closed across his chest. He made a sour face at the thought he couldn’t quite shift or the memory of some of the things he’d eaten since the bird brought him back. “I know corpses don’t trouble you.”

The bird was sullen, bleak, and blackly unresponsive, like a stone jammed uncomfortably into him. He started to walk, and his feet hurt. By this point they probably shouldn’t if he was going to die of the cold.

What was it Gregor had told him?

“You feel the cold,” he heard Gregor’s harsh voice for a second, brusque, as though he resented being pushed to explain something so simple. But he’d pulled Nick close to keep him warm, rubbed his back with strong, warm hands. “You just don’t have to mind it.”

It was easier said than done. The bird could do it, but Nick didn’t have the knack. His feet stung with each step, the bones sore as they stiffened and ached. Despite how soft the snow looked, it was rough under his soles, gritty and full of sharp, frozen chunks.

Halfway down the hill, the sharp, feathery anger that shared his head faded away into the dregs of something uncomfortable. Or unhappy.

Some things, Nick’s brain thought without any instruction from him as his hitchhiker gave in, aren’t meant to be dead. They don’t have the knack for it, the staying power to stick to it.

Nick glanced down at the stiff, strange coat that still felt warm against his back. The real version of it, the original, had probably been buried or burned with its owner hundreds of years before. The wolves who’d slaughtered