Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,31

the Sannock for their magic hadn’t left much of them, just butchered meat and blood. If they could make this real….

He stumbled to a halt as his skin crawled. Only the thought of what might take offense in the storm stopped him ripping the coat off his back. He breathed through the revulsion and reminded himself of how cold he’d been without it. His balls still tried to squash themselves back up inside him.

Nick couldn’t blame them. He pushed himself back into motion, but he had to take awkward, high-stepped strides to make progress, his body angled into the wind as it pushed him back and his thighs and ass tight and sore after a few yards.

Or a bit more than a few, he realized as he stumbled over the crest of a hill and into a low stone wall. Even if it wasn’t as the crow flew, he should have been back to the wolves’ town. The pitched roofs and matchstick chimneys he’d focused on resolved themselves into a rough-edged green hillock decorated with precariously stacked, narrow towers of slate and granite.

The bird shuddered, a feathery itch against his brain stem, and thought he was lucky that was all he saw. As they walked, it let Nick sneak a glimpse at what it saw—spires of old yellow bones stitched together with cords of dry sinew. A strung fence of unraveled tendons and nerves, brittle from the cold that silvered them, and inside it… something huge, damp, and moldered.

“What is it?” Nick asked as he drew closer. He was vaguely aware he shouldn’t want to approach it, that the smart thing to do was turn and run, but he still climbed up the hill.

The bird didn’t know what it was. It was also lying.

The stink of rotted flesh hung sour and sick in the air, and bile stung the back of Nick’s throat as the bird made him hungry.

Carrion, Nick supposed for a second, another dead thing.

Except corpses, even the wet, restless bones that crawled through the corners of Nick’s world, didn’t steam like an overworked horse in the cold. And corpses smelled of rot or nothing in the cold, not that sugary, yeasty stink of infection and fever.

Nick reached out toward the brittle wires of flesh, but he hesitated, his fingers trembling, and the bird closed its eyes. He was left flat-footed in the snow, hand outstretched to pluck thin air. Whatever had been caged in the center of the stones was gone. In its place was a long, carved stone mounted on top of a low, rocky cairn half-covered with dirt and grass under the snow. Someone had left a bright red coat draped over the stone, the thick wool stiff with ice and welded to the granite. If Nick went inside, he supposed he’d find a sweater as well, or a shed pair of shoes left where they’d fallen in the snow. Then, somewhere in the dark, a cold, naked body curled up in the snow where they’d dropped once delirium couldn’t take them any farther.

The cairn had probably seemed like shelter when the owner of the coat found it. Now it was serving double duty as a tomb.

“Enough,” he said as he turned away from the stones. He squinted into the snow that blew in flurries and tangles around him. The cottages, roofs humped high with snow, had been difficult to pick out from the landscape, but he should have been able to see the big farmhouse, at least. Nothing. He’d gone the wrong way. “Whatever point you wanted to make, it’s made. I need to get back to Gregor.”

He reached for wings, and they were pulled away from him again. There was no reason why, but there didn’t need to be. The wolves might change their skin at will, but Nick needed the bird’s help. It didn’t need his. Today it thought he needed to stay grounded, although it didn’t share why.

Panic scratched at the back of Nick’s throat. His head was full of the clammy memory of the first time he’d met Gregor, the bloody ruin that the prophets had left of him. Nick had felt Gregor’s wet flesh and the pulse of blood between his fingers as he tried to keep the wolf alive. He’d known he was going to fail. That had been hard enough then, before Gregor had a name and before Nick had fallen in love with him.

In the back of his head the bird got distracted—briefly—as it dipped its