Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,69

right to try to shoot around her, but she grabbed it by the ear and pulled it like taffy up onto the top of its skull to haul it back. The ear ripped off and took a long patch of skull with it, revealing porous bone and oddly knit muscle, and Bron yelled her disgust and punched it in the eye.

It made a glottal, angry noise as it fell back and shook its head. Jack assumed it had been told that it could hurt, but not kill, the prisoners. Otherwise Bron would have been dead. She had a mean streak in a fight, like the rest of her family, but the monsters didn’t care for damage. The skin had already started to pinch together over the raw wound in its scalp.

Jack hit it before it could gather itself. He sank his fangs into its back leg, braced his feet, and dragged it backward. Overclocked strands of lean muscle pulsed like a heartbeat in his mouth as the thin bones cracked and flaked. Sour blood flooded his mouth and made his tongue squirm back in revulsion. The trickle that ran down his throat made his stomach cramp and try to retch it back up.

The longer the monsters lived, the worse they smelled, corruption like a layer of fat under their skin. Most of the ones that followed Rose didn’t even have enough of an identity left to pity.

Jack snapped his head from side to side. The monster’s leg snapped, and it staggered clumsily in the deep snow as it tried to get its balance. He dragged it back, one step after the other, while it clawed at the ground to try and drag itself back toward Bron and the kids. Five feet from them and it suddenly shifted its focus to him as it bent impossibly at the narrow waist to snap at him. The bony, nail-toothed snout struck out at him like a snake and laid his shoulder open in a raw mess.

Pain sliced hot down Jack’s leg, but he hung on. A muffled growl filtered through his mouthful of meat and bone, and he wrenched again. Flesh and tendons slid against bone, thick and slippery in Jack’s mouth. The monster made a strangled, nasal squeal of frustration and struck out again.

This time Jack let go and dodged back on three legs, his foreleg hitched up as he waited for the shoulder to knit.

“Danny said the Pack would come!” Bron yelled, frustration and disbelief in her voice. “Where are they?”

She reached up and grabbed one of the denuded branches from the tree that Jack had hit. It snapped off in her hands, frozen and heavy, and she swung it like a bat at the monster.

Jack snarled in frustrated reproof at her as the monster lost interest in him and turned back to her. He wanted to distract it from her. Bron showed him her teeth in unrepentant response and swung again. The monster grabbed the branch out of the air, sank its teeth into it, and shook it violently. Bron managed to hang on but ended up on her knees with a gash in her shoulder where the branch had caught her. One of the pups—Shauna—had changed her skin, and the lanky yearling wolf yapped shrill and angry as it bounced forward.

She, at least, had enough respect to back off when Jack growled at her, but her ears stayed pinned and her needle-sharp puppy teeth bared.

“Bron!” Danny yelled, his voice cracked as he pitched it to carry over the storm and the fight. He was in front of the house, lanky frame barely visible through the angry flurries of indignant snow. “Get over here.”

“What?” Bron yelled back as she let the monster have the branch and staggered back “Why?”

It was Shauna who listened. The young wolf shot between Bron’s legs, fluffy tail clamped between her legs, and made a beeline for Danny. Even from this distance, Jack could see Danny’s horror in the way his body flinched. The monster hesitated, pointy head swung between Bron and the pup. Then, like the sight hound it was built to resemble, it went after the prey in motion.

Jack snapped his teeth at Bron, growled a wordless command for her to stay, and went after the monster. He stripped chunks of flesh from its haunches, the splintered bone of its leg visible through its stitched-together skin, but he couldn’t catch it.

It strained its neck out and snapped a divot from Shauna’s back leg that