Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,32

beak in the memory. It knew, they knew, how Gregor tasted—his mouth, his skin, his cock—but it wanted this bit of the wolf too.

“Salt and copper,” Nick told it shortly. “The same as a cow or a dog.”

The bird didn’t bother to argue. They both knew Nick was lying. Even before he’d had his feathered hitchhiker, warm blood had unsettled him with the sense of something potent and electric in it. That was why he’d been a pathologist, not a surgeon.

It had been easier to remember he wasn’t crazy when he avoided the crazy things.

Nick raised his hands and exhaled onto them. His breath made the cold skin sting, the web between his fingers pinched with pain, and thunder grumbled overhead.

He hadn’t been an outdoorsman either. The closest thing to the countryside he’d seen before he was twenty had been a scabby local park where the drug dealers—only a few years older than him, and then a few years younger—hogged the swings. If the bird wasn’t going to help, Nick wouldn’t find his way back to the wolves tonight. Not in the dark in a storm.

“He’ll be fine,” he told himself, the words stripped from his lips by the wind. “They don’t lock someone up if they’re going to kill them.”

The bird didn’t agree, but it wasn’t going to take flight either. Not now. Not here.

Nick tried to put the memory of bloody, frozen strips of skin out of his head as he stepped past the narrow towers. His feet found gravel under the snow, the curve of an old path, and slicked his feet as he edged toward the cairn.

Something howled. Or… didn’t, Nick realized as he spun to find the source of the noise. The back of his neck prickled in reaction to the almost-sound, and his heart pumped harder as adrenaline made him shudder. He licked dry lips and reached up mindlessly for his gran’s pendant, the twist of iron that had hid the truth from him for so long. He’d left it back in Girvan, but sometimes he missed being able to lie to himself.

A dog with no… dog in it—just the skin draped over something that remembered the shape it was meant to have—leaped between the stone towers and raced toward him. Snow flew up from under its paws, but it left no tracks behind it.

It howled a throaty bell of alarm as it headed for him. Nick stumbled to the side, out of the way, but it never reached him.

Something else—someone else, because it looked like a man even if it ran on all fours—burst out of the cairn and caught up with the skin dog before it got more than a few yards. A big hand scruffed the black skin, flayed hide pulled up in clumsy, fatty folds, and ripped it off the dog underneath. With nothing to animate it, the skin went limp in the man’s fist, blown backward in the wind while the dog faded away. Nick could still hear its aggrieved bark in his head, echoed as though it came from somewhere very far away.

The man sniffed the skin for a second and then tossed it away as he lost interest. He was massive, built like a bull with thick shoulders and layers of muscle under a dense fuzz of gray bristles. Salt-and-pepper hair hung around his face, tangled around chunks of ice and snow. Under the coat of fur, Nick could see thin red patches on the man’s hands and on his cramped legs, where the skin had frozen, peeled, and healed over torn muscles.

Nick stumbled back a step. The crunch of his foot against the ice brought the man’s head swinging around. Under the unruly bangs, his eyes were bright mindless yellow, and slaver dripped in wet, sticky strands from the corners of his mouth. The man peeled his lips back from broken shards of teeth, shreds of meat and hide caught between them, and growled.

That wasn’t what made Nick take another step backward, a whimper caught in his closed throat. It was the face.

The Run-Away Man.

His gran had told him a lot of scary stories when he was a child, and the Run-Away Man was the star of a lot of them. The stories had all ended the same way, as his gran pinched his arm or thigh and demanded, “And what do you do when you see the Run-Away Man?”

Nick licked cracked lips as he took another step back. Panic tasted like a split lip, blood