Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,48

opened his eyes. While they’d been closed, the rain had turned to snow. “Tough shit. Deal.”

Bron was his little sister. She hated him for that—no wolf wanted people to know that about their bloodline—and he’d resented her for… being everything he wasn’t. That wasn’t the point. She was irritating, prickly, and didn’t know nearly as much as she thought. She was also the tiny, bloody blob of a person his mam had let him hold after she was born, even when the midwives thought the dog would be jealous of the new baby.

Maybe Danny didn’t want to share a room with Bron again, but he couldn’t imagine a world that she wasn’t in, somewhere, being better than him. And if she was here, then Jack would be too soon enough. The Wild tolerated a lot, but it didn’t like prisons. Nothing that wanted free stayed caged in the Wild for long.

He wedged the Tupperware solidly between the roots of the tree and stood up to strip off. Goose pimples prickled his arms as the cold hit him, and his balls tried to squeeze back up inside him. The film of sweat and rain on his back and stomach froze thin and brittle against his skin.

He stuffed his jeans and T-shirt into the duffel. They’d still get soaked, but if he needed them later, there was a chance they’d be there. His coat he rolled up and put under the bag.

Then he crouched down, breathed out, and let his skin shift.

The dog sneezed, shook its head hard enough to make its ears flap, and hopped clumsily out of the boots Danny had left on. The cold made its feet ache, and a skitter of something nearby, under the snow, caught its ear and made its stomach grumble.

Other things to do, the core of Danny that survived the change prodded. The dog could eat after that.

It put its head down to the Tupperware box and nosed at the dead thing in the corner. The smell of half-frozen meat usually would have made it drool. It had pawed over the cold box in the old den often enough, choked down plastic and hard chunks of mince despite the not particularly convincing knowledge it would be sick when it changed back. But this smelled like pack.

The dog whined softly and nosed the finger again. Dead flesh, not quite turned, and the milky, almost-me smell of the wolf it had denned with. Complexities of emotion weren’t the dog’s strength—the conflict of resentment and affection that made Danny’s feelings murky—it just knew they were family.

And that she was hurt. Fear hadn’t stuck to the finger, the acrid gray flash of it picked apart by cold and time, but the black stickiness of pain was embedded in the splintered bone. The dog gave a soft, dangerous growl and pawed at the box until the finger fell out.

Bron smelled peppery, mixed with milk and sweetness. Caught under the broken nail there were shreds of dead flesh that smelled tainted, that made the dog want to bite. It remembered that smell from back in Durham, the stink of it on the monsters that came into its territory.

The dog pulled the smells apart and filed them in its brain so it would know them again. Then it assiduously scraped snow and dirt over the finger until it was hidden. Once it was satisfied, it lifted its head and cast about for a scent.

Snow. The brittle, translucent scent of the lightning-struck mountain ash, cooked sap, and singed wood. On the roots of the tree, under them, the ghost of rodent musk hung yellow and papery until the dog growled a warning at it. The urge to unearth the finger, to move it somewhere the rodent wouldn’t find it, plucked at its brain.

No.

It shook itself bristly, nose to tail, to shed the compulsion and a layer of snow. The scentscape here was bleak, just ice and see-through ghosts and not as familiar as home. Even the finger was preserved, the scents it picked up dry and powdery.

Houses always smelled. Scents lingered in corners and worked into carpets—old food and sweat, anger and happiness, sex and death. Humans did all that inside.

The dog growled at the rodent that might be under the tree—just so it knew—and headed off toward the house. It was too lanky and dark to go unnoticed, but it skulked through the trees and slunk up on its belly to the house. The long roll of chain-link was stapled to