Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,67
was meant to keep people out, though, not in. He supposed most people wouldn’t want to go back into the storm. He yanked it up with both hands and shouldered the door open against the drift of snow that had formed outside.
An alarm went off as the door opened, flickering red against the walls for a second before a siren kicked in. No going back now. He pulled the hood up with one hand and squeezed out through the crack of the door.
The wind caught him and shoved him forward as he stumbled outside, as though it thought he needed to get away too. The snow was so thick it was like fog. Nick stretched his hands out in front of him and lost sight of them. When he drew them back, they were blanched white and frost rimmed his cuticles.
He clumsily shoved his already numb fingers into his pockets and pushed himself into a shuffling jog through the snow. The direction didn’t matter. He didn’t know where he was or where he should be going, so “away” was the best he could plan.
Voices yelled through the snow behind him, almost lost under the mournful drone of the wind.
“… how’d he get….”
“… go and freeze….”
The stutter of gunfire made him flinch and fold his arms over his head. Bullets zipped past him and slammed into the thick-packed snow on the ground. One hit a tree and took a frozen chunk of bark with it.
“Shit,” he muttered between his elbows.
Weeks of being a sort of god thing and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be afraid. That had reminded him.
“Stop! Damn you, hold fire!” a thickly Scottish voice roared, sharply audible. “Don’t shoot him. We need to get him back.”
“… not your call… make,” Malloy said, voice muffled by the snow. “… in charge here, Ewan.”
There was a pause, and then, even with half his brain still tranquilized, Nick felt the world shift around him. It felt like the tide.
“Not anymore,” Ewan said, his voice still eerily clear. “Find him. Bring him back. In one piece.”
There was a pause and then easy mutters of agreement. Nick dropped his hands from over his head, exhaled raggedly through his teeth, and veered to the left away from the noise behind him. He scrambled over a low wall and, almost on his hands and knees, up an unexpectedly steep field.
The air was like splinters when he breathed, and it made his lungs cramp painfully. But at least the wind, unruly as it shoved him back and forth, filled the tracks he left behind with soft snow.
A shadow in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he stopped in place, shivering, to track it through the snow. He managed for a few steps, and then the snow thickened, and he lost sight of whatever it was.
The Sannock?
Nick creaked out a stiff laugh at the madness that he hoped to see one of them. He still turned and headed toward the last place he’d seen it. The muscles in his legs ached as he kicked his way through the snow and then nearly tripped over what he had to assume was the shadow he’d chased.
A weathered stone bench was perched on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. He leaned on it to catch his breath, and something snarled—a high, thin noise from somewhere in the storm. Nick turned, hands raised, and a heavy, cold body crashed into him. The impact knocked him off his feet, the air shocked out of his lungs, and he pitched backward down the hill. A rock caught him on the hip and dug into the small of his back, and rough ice scraped across his back where the coat rode up.
They tumbled to a stop at the bottom of the hill, the other man on top of him with his arm cocked back for a punch. Nick swung first in a wild arc that cracked his knuckles against the sharp line of a heavy jaw, and he twisted his hip to try and throw the other man off. It didn’t work. He was slammed back into the ground hard, and the man leaned down to scowl at him.
“How come every time I lose track of you?” Gregor asked in a rough voice. He curled his lip as he sniffed the air. “You turn up smelling like shit?”
Nick didn’t have the air in his lungs to laugh. He grabbed the back of Gregor’s neck instead,