Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,47

of water and ice. He hoped he was right. Back in Lochwinnoch, with Kath’s expectations dropped back onto his shoulders, he’d felt a lot more confident.

He found the crick at the boundary of the Glenlough land when he stepped on it. The thin skin of ice cracked under his weight and the frigid water seeped in through the eyelets of his boots and soaked his socks.

“Shit,” he muttered between cold lips. “I’m going to lose a toe.”

Back in Durham he’d watched the end of the world a dozen times on TV and speculated with his ex and friends what they’d miss most.

The internet.

Music.

Thai food.

Socks hadn’t even made the list. Dry socks, spare socks, were something they’d taken for granted. Even Danny, who’d always privately assumed he was better prepared. After all, he hadn’t had Thai food until he was nineteen.

Wet wool rubbed against his heels and squelched with each step as he climbed up and struck out across the field. There were no roads to Glenlough, not anymore. The land had been sold off over the years, repurposed for crops or left for the moors to reclaim. On Danny’s old ordnance survey map it was a ghost-gray ribbon that wriggled across the hills. He found it under his boots, chunks of macadam and rock under the frozen heather, and the thought that it was close made him walk faster.

A sudden gust of wind hit Danny from the side and made him stagger. It parted the rain for a second and he saw the outline of the old building appear like a ghost ahead of him. It was closer than he’d thought.

It had been a grand house once. Gargoyles peered out from under the few intact sections of roof, ice frozen over spouted mouths like muzzles, and the remnants of stained glass glittered in the window frames. Someone had taken pride in it. Now wet blisters on the Virgin-Mary-blue front door bulged out of the grain of the wood and ice-crusted scaffolding had been erected to hold up the bowed old walls. No Trespassing signs rattled like tuneless wind chimes on the chain-link fence that marked out the boundaries of the property.

Danny stared at the building until he realized he was in plain sight of anyone inside. With a muttered curse he hunched over and loped into the shelter of the wind-twisted old ash. The trunk was lightning-scarred and blistered where the frozen sap had exploded out of the living wood. It creaked softly in the wind as Danny crouched down in the roots, the sound of something not quite dead yet.

He leaned his head back to rest against the tree and waited. The rain soaked his face and ran back into his hair and down under his collar. Danny strained to hear something, smell something, over the storm. If there was anything that he could have sensed—even with his nose and ears muted in this skin—it was lost under the storm. The clatter of the signs against the fence and the aggressive drumbeat of the rain against the old stone building drowned out everything. Any scent in the air was washed away before he could catch it.

Or had never been there.

Danny squeezed his eyes shut. He’d left Jack to be taken by the prophets and hiked miles across the frozen hills on a hunch he’d had as a nosy teenager. He had to be right.

He shrugged the duffel bag, now soaked and worse for wear, off his shoulders and fumbled it open. His stomach turned as he pulled out the frosted Tupperware box that his mam had brought up from the village. Something inside rattled like dice as he popped the lid.

It was an index finger, still gray and half-frozen despite being pressed against Danny’s sweaty back for the hike. The nail was broken down to the quick and the knuckle scuffed and torn from a fight. It jiggled like something still half-alive in the Tupperware as Danny’s hands shook.

Bile retched miserably up the back of Danny’s throat, and he closed his eyes to force it back down. He was a dog, the best thing you could be if you weren’t a wolf, and he could deal with this.

His brain disagreed. Maybe if he’d stayed here, it’d be different, but he was a professor at Durham University. The worst thing he’d seen for the last decade had been the rampant privilege of rich twenty-year-olds, and he liked it that way.

It wasn’t wrong.

“Yeah, well,” Danny muttered through chattering teeth as he