Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,42
of the lake, they punched holes through his wrists and ankles and strung them through with thick wire shackles so he couldn’t run and if he changed, he’d cut his paws off. Da had preferred the collars, since people got to choose to change back or die. The hobbles maimed before they killed.
“Rose is looking forward to seeing you,” Ginger said as he pulled Jack to his feet. His breath had the same sour stink as Lach’s as he leaned in to mutter in Jack’s ear. “You should have killed her while you had the chance. Whatever happens now, it’s on you. We’d have never gone this far, never even dreamed we could.”
Jack took a breath to ask, but before he could, Ginger pushed him into the Wild. It didn’t want him. At least, it didn’t want the metal locked around his throat and stitched through his joints. Jack retched with the rejection, hands and feet numb as he felt the metal vibrate like a plucked string. The slash on his throat flared with fresh pain, cold and electric as it spiked his nerves, and the collar choked him as it tried to anchor him to the world.
The Wild felt thin and slimy against his skin as it tried to kill him, like the membrane of an onion or the freshly peeled skin of a fish. It clung and resisted.
The prophets forced him, ripped at the Wild with the fetid wrong of their stolen wolves, until it let him through. He coughed and tasted the poison in the back of his throat as though it had been pressed out of his wound like juice. Behind him the dogs whined and begged, shocked by something they never imagined. Jack tried not to groan and locked his knees. Next to him Gregor gagged and then swore thickly through a mouthful of bile.
“It’s sour,” he said as he spat onto the snow. “I couldn’t tell before.”
Long strands of faded, frayed grass stuck up through the snow, which was churned up into hummocks and humps and frozen solid. The ice was pitted and gray, discolored and deformed.
Jack smelled something wrong first, and then he looked around….
It wasn’t a whole place. Bits of it had been sliced up, grafted over the familiar highland Wild he’d grown up with. Gray sea waves, crested with a half-frozen scum of slush, spilled in over the dark, still waters of the loch. The high sea cliffs where the Sannock had been butchered faded in and out on the far side of the loch.
Old blood still stained the sand. It always would. It never had.
The whole landscape felt strained. It was pulled taut, drawn back like an elastic band used as a sling. Gregor had left Rose alive in the tied-off end of the Wild that Da had hidden the Sannock behind. Not for lack of trying, but prophets were harder to kill than they’d ever believed. They hoped she might end up trapped there, but expected she’d find her way out.
Instead she’d brought the Sannock’s dead pocket of Wild north with her, dragged it at her heels like a cape. And the air was ripe with the smell of stagnant seawater and the sickly, poisoned stink of the prophets’ monsters.
As though the recognition of them had called it, a monster appeared over the gray rocks of the Highlands, purple-gray skin pulled taut over great deformed sheets of muscle, and the blue lace band of a bra stretched over the barrel chest and strained ribs. Swollen yellow eyes popped from their sockets like a pug, oozed yellow gunge down its bony checks and into the loose jowls that flapped under its jaw. It snarled through a too-broad mouth—scar tissue stitched up both cheeks where flesh had torn to accommodate the new, undershot jaw—as it slid down onto the beach.
Legs that were too thin for its bulk sank into the loose shale and sand.
She came next, one hand on the knife-sharp shoulder blades of a lean monster with the hooked, whistling nose of a borzoi. She looked sickly smug at the sight of her prisoners.
Chapter Nine—Danny
“YOU SAID you’d warn them,” Danny said. It wanted to be an accusation, but the tone caught in his throat and wouldn’t come out. He was a grown man, an adult who’d had a job and paid his bills and answered to nobody. Never around her, though, and that left him the old habits of childhood to fall back on. “That they wouldn’t walk into—”