Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,36

one laughed this time.”

“Kath did,” Tom said. He seemed to have forgotten his conversion to the prophets’ cause. Kath had always been kind enough to him. “She called them frauds and fuckers and tore the skin right back off that one man. Then that night, the Wild came down from the hills at their order.”

“When?” Jack asked.

“A few weeks ago,” Millie said. She paused and rubbed her hand over her face. Without the makeup she used down in the town, she looked younger. Not the effect humans went for, as Jack understood it. “A week? I didn’t feel it. The Wild never spoke to me.”

Hector shifted from his lean against the wall. “I did. I was up in the hills wi’ the sheep. They’ll be dead now, without me, poor bastards.” He gave Gregor a dour look of accusation, and got an unapologetic, sharp grin back. “It didn’t feel right. It hasn’t felt right since.”

Jack was about to dismiss that but hesitated. Dogs weren’t attuned to the Wild like the wolves. Even Danny only really sensed it when the Wild reached out to him, and the Wild liked Danny better than most. Old stories let humans into the Wild if they were part of the warp and weft of fields or forests, absorbed them as though they were another part of the landscape. Hector had spent years in the hills with his flock and his frustration.

“Like what?” he asked. At his shoulder Gregor snorted in contempt.

Hector looked taken aback. He scratched his neck and took a second to think about the answer.

“Sorta sour,” he said. “Like the old Graveland estate or the old Sannock haunts. Places where the grass has gone bad.”

Jack thought of the beach in Girvan, the dead and the monsters laid out on the snowy shale. It hadn’t felt like somewhere anyone would enjoy a picnic again. The stench had sunk down into the bedrock.

“That’s bullshit,” Gregor said. The hair on the back of Jack’s neck prickled with familiar jealousy as Gregor reached for the Wild and it answered. He had to throttle back the urge to do the same, to prove he could. “I’d know if there was something wrong.”

Hector tucked his chin in submission, but muttered, “You don’t know everything.”

“He doesn’t,” Jack agreed.

Gregor curled his lip in a sneer to express his opinion. “So the Wild went sour, and what happened then?” he asked. “Bad dreams? What did the prophets do?”

There was a pause as the dogs looked at each other. Reluctance pinched at the corners of their mouths and tightened their eyes. In the end it was the strange dog who answered, too caught up in his own losses to care about delivering bad news. Or maybe he enjoyed evening the scales a little.

“Whatever the prophets wanted,” he said. “They walked in and out of your houses while you slept and took what they wanted. Flesh. Treasures. The bitch-goddess made the moon stand still in the sky to watch.”

“Children,” Millie interrupted sharply. This was pack news to share. “They took the children. Four of them, from their cots.”

Tom shifted against the wall. “And Bron,” he said, despite Millie’s glare. “They took Bron. When the next prophet came into town to tell us what the gods wanted, he had Bron’s finger with him. Kath didn’t laugh at them after that.”

No. If they had her wolf child, Jack didn’t suppose she would have. He heard Gregor make a soft noise behind him—surprise and a scrape of concern. Bron had never forgiven Jack for her brother. She hadn’t thought he should love Danny or that he should have let him leave. She’d run with Gregor and his friends once she was old enough to make her own decisions.

Bron was a grown woman, but if the others were young enough to be “taken from a cot,” then Jack could guess who the parents were. Pack hierarchy was decided by strength, but the point of the pack was their children. Higher-ranked wolves were expected to have children.

It was the reason Jack had been exiled—because he wouldn’t fuck a woman even to get her pregnant. Or, at least, that was why his da had picked Gregor to be the next Numitor. Jack had been exiled because no one believed he’d take the demotion well.

Back in Girvan, between the pain, he’d wondered if he should never have come down over the Wall. He could have picked a woman, closed his eyes, and thought of Danny. He hadn’t seen why he should