Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,65

dragged his fingers over his collarbone, but there was nothing there. The old nail pendant had been left behind in Girvan, and it had never been meant to help him. Not really.

Nick squeezed his hands into fists until he felt his nails slice into his palm. The pain cut through the fuzz of panic like a razor and let in clarity.

He couldn’t do this.

The first time he’d stood over a corpse in medical school, with a scalpel in his hand and his voice still Glasgie-thick, he’d realized the same thing. Then he sliced that cold body from sternum to pubis, because that’s what he had to do to get what he wanted.

This was the same. Whether he could or not, he had to.

“Goddammit, Gregor,” Nick muttered as he pushed himself upright. “You’ve got to learn to time your rescues better.”

Because he knew Gregor would find him. All he had to do was not die or get turned into a monster by his gran until then. Nick shoved the sleeves of the stolen hoodie up his arms and turned to grab the scalpel. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror hung on the back of the door as he did so. It didn’t look… right.

Nick wiped the scalpel on his jeans and walked over to the door. He had to crouch down slightly to see. The mirror had been hung at the right height for the doctor whose too-short trousers Nick wore. When he saw his face, he flinched in surprise. Hectic red stained his cheekbones, stark against his pale skin, and his eyes were pink and sticky. He leaned in closer to the glass and pulled his eyelid down with one finger. Strings of the discharge stretched between the white of his eye and the lashes. The skin exposed was tender red and splattered with hard, white blisters. It stung as the air touched it.

That Malloy had looked at that and still wanted to feel Nick up was testament on its own that there was something wrong going on here.

It looked like an allergic reaction or—Nick drew back from the mirror as it occurred to him—like a reaction to a caustic agent.

Nick let go of his eye and scrambled around the bed. There was a puddle of saline on the floor, pinkish with diluted blood. Most of the liquid had drained out of the bag and it dangled flaccid from the hook. Nick reeled up the tube and licked the needle. It tasted like blood—salt and metals, nothing that made his stomach twist or the bird in his head ruffle—and something sharp and ethanol sweet. Nick spat it out on the ground, twice, to clear it off his tongue and wrenched the tainted bag off the hook. He threw the bag against the wall, where it hit with a wet slap and flopped down onto the floor.

Gran had said it made wolves see farther, not that it blinded them. But his gran said more than her prayers, and whatever Nick might have been born, he wasn’t a wolf now.

He roughly rubbed his knuckles over his eyes until they smeared oily color across the backs of his lids. It wasn’t likely to help, but Nick couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t help but imagine what he’d see if he weren’t half blinded.

It would wear off, Nick reminded himself. He’d seen that in the people his gran had poisoned before.

Eventually. Mostly.

Nick shuddered that thought away before it could root. Most of his life, he’d wanted to stop seeing things that weren’t there, but now the thought of being blind to them made him flinch. Without the carrion bird, what would he be to Gregor? Not that he’d had much time to spend with the wolves so far, but they didn’t seem like they needed a pathologist or even a surgeon, if he could remember what it was like to work on living people.

Worry about that later, he told himself. Blind was better than dead. Maybe.

He padded over to the door and pressed his ear against it. All he could hear was the panicked rush of blood in his ears.

Shit.

He rolled the dice and opened the door. There was no one outside. Nick let his breath out between his teeth and stepped out the door. He hesitated in the starkly lit hall as he weighed up his choices. Left or right? The flip of a coin in his head made him turn right. The soles of his sneakers squeaked on the