Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,46

all the wolves Rose whelped had been sent away for being too weak, but Fiona got to keep her dog. She dressed it up with rants about purity and fate and the gods, but in the end, it was her spite. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Old Man killed her, and we buried her out in the moors.”

Danny rubbed his neck, the phantom bite of leather still there, and remembered the contemptuous bite in Rose’s voice as she booted him in the ribs. “You’ll wish your ma had been brave enough to put you in a sack.”

Dead and buried should have been good enough, but Danny had seen enough over the last few weeks that he didn’t think it was that simple. The prophets had kept secrets.

“What does that have to do with Bron?” he asked. “Why would Rose hold it against her?”

Kath looked away. “Because, until that morning when we found her at the loch, I’d agreed with her,” she said. “I thought Fiona should have gotten rid of the baby. I thought the Old Man should have gotten rid of Fiona. I didn’t know what Rose had planned, but I’d heard every word that came out of her mouth and nodded my approval. So when I turned on her, dragged her back to the Old Man with the others, she cursed us for it. If she had a chance to pay me back by killing my daughter, she would.”

Not her son, though, Danny thought, not the dog. That was why Rose hadn’t killed him in Girvan—she thought it was more of an insult to Kath to leave him alive.

“Check her bones,” Danny said. “Make sure they’re there. It’s the Wolf Winter, Mam, a lot of things are coming back.”

MAYBE SHE would. Danny hoped she did, but it was up to her.

This was up to him. He jogged into the storm, head down and shoulders up. The snow had finally let up but was replaced by an icy rain. It was full of splinters of ice sharp enough to draw blood when the wind found the right angle, and it froze in his hair and the scruff of stubble on his jaw. Danny clambered over a low stone fence and stopped in the shelter of a twisted ash tree, lightning-struck and charred, to pull the map out of his pocket. The rain quickly soaked the map, and he cursed as the paper tore under his fingers.

A wolf wouldn’t need a map. They knew every rock and piss-scented tree of the territory the Pack claimed. Sometimes that wasn’t an advantage. Wolves ran with the Wild at their heels, their paws sometimes on this world and sometimes on rocks that had been gone for centuries. That was the problem—sometimes the geography and the distances didn’t match.

Danny had spent his childhood on the long way around the moors and the old stone roads. He knew the lay of the land, the shortcuts and landmarks, in a way that only the footsore and irritated did.

And he liked to know things. The prophets left no trail to follow to their temple, no path worn through the heather, no scent trail on the rocks. The only way to get there was through the Wild, but no one had been able to find it there either.

That was because it didn’t exist there. Danny coughed cold water out of his mouth and ran his finger over the map to the blob of gray at the fold. There were some things in the real world that left a stain on the Wild, altered and odd as it would be to the people who knew the original. It was hard to tell what, though, the same way people could read a book but only remember a single extract twenty years on.

Some places, though, were just empty boxes with no soul. Like Glenlough—a folly built out here on an industrialist’s whim in the 1900s that was neither inhabited nor left for the weather to wear into dereliction. It was neither home nor ruin, like a shell on the beach a crab could move into to disguise itself.

Danny reoriented himself and struck out over the field to the east. The dog stirred in the back of his head, restless at being penned up in his skin. But Danny needed a human brain for this and human shoulders to carry the duffel.

At least he would if he was right. Danny wiped his hand down his face to scrape off the film