Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,56

escaped.

“I deserved better,” she spat. “I deserved my wolf. The boy was only human anyhow, what business was it of the Old Man’s—”

“Shut up, Ailsa,” a prophet ordered. “It’s bad enough to have to know you, without being reminded what you are.”

She rolled her lips back to snarl at them. Not satisfied with the wolf’s fangs when she changed her skin, Ailsa had pulled two eye teeth from something and jammed them in her gums. They were gray and chipped, dead-looking and full of infection.

“What we all are,” she spat back at him. “Whatever we did, they made us all prophets the same. Now we’ll make ourselves gods.”

She pulled her hand off the ring and left shreds of skin frozen to the metal. Her frost-burned hand didn’t bleed, not yet, as she scrambled out of sight down the sharp curve of gray stone steps.

“Some of us,” said a prophet behind Gregor, his voice indistinct but thick with disgust. “Not all.”

He was told to shut up, and then it was Gregor and Jack’s turn to go down into the ground.

“What’s going to happen to the others?” Jack asked as he struggled down the narrow steps on hobbled feet. It hadn’t occurred to Gregor to care. He supposed that whatever Jack’s plan was, it wouldn’t work if the dogs died first.

“The dogs?” Ailsa asked with a snort. “You would be the one to care about them.”

She lifted her foot and kicked him down the stairs. An odd, breathy laugh escaped her as he tumbled down into the dark. Gregor lunged for her with a snarl, but the collar pulled him up short as the prophet yanked the chain tight with a laugh. Gregor gagged and stumbled back a step.

“The dogs are kenneled out back where they belong,” Ailsa said. She stepped forward, ignoring the other prophet’s hiss of warning, and stroked his face with a soft, fever-hot hand. The stink of her—rot and misery stitched to whatever sickness had sent her for a prophet—sweated out of her skin, and Gregor gagged. She smiled at him with those stolen fangs. “But you keep the breeding stock away from the curs. Someone should have told your brother that years ago—”

She was mean, but she wasn’t smart. Gregor grinned at her and then snapped his head around to sink his teeth into her hand. Hot blood filled his mouth, the familiar taste cut through with the bitter sweetness of rot as he bore down. Ailsa squealed and tried to wrench her hand away, but her flesh tore between Gregor’s teeth.

Human teeth weren’t as efficient as a wolf’s, but they could do the job if you put your mind to it. Greg ground his jaw, tearing her skin, and jerked his head viciously from side to side. Bone cracked and tendons stretched, caught between his teeth like gristle. Ailsa punched at his head with her free hand and finally got away from him as the prophets dragged him back. She clutched her bleeding hand to her chest and glared at him.

“When it’s time,” she said, “I want to be the one who kills him.”

He grinned at her, hard and bloody-toothed, and spat her little finger out onto the stones. She whined in her throat and checked her mutilated hand as though she hadn’t realized she was short one.

“You get what you’re given,” the other prophet said. He dragged Gregor over to the trap door and roughly shoved him through. “Like the rest of us.”

Gregor pitched down the stairs headfirst. Instinct made him try to break his fall, but with his hands and feet tethered, that just made it worse. He gritted his teeth, raised his arms to cover his head as best he could, and tried to go limp. Shoulder and hip bashed against the hard, stone edge of the step until he landed in a heap at the bottom, half on top of his brother.

He rolled over onto his back, legs still propped up the stairs, and stared up at the dim square of the trap door.

“Don’t bother,” a familiar woman’s voice said. “Even if you crawl up there, the door won’t budge. I’ve tried. And they have those things stand guard.”

“Their monsters,” Gregor said. “I’ve killed them before.”

Jack grunted as he shoved Gregor off him. “Not easily.”

“We just need practice.”

Gregor got his elbow under him and scrambled awkwardly to his feet. The taste of Ailsa’s blood lingered like sour grease in his mouth, and he glanced around the cellar. It had been a larder