Wolf at the Door (Wolf Winter #3) - T.A. Moore Page 0,8
Wild giveth, and Winter taketh, he supposed as he sat up and shook chunks of ice and grass out of his hair.
“Show-off,” Danny accused as he offered a hand.
Jack grabbed it even though he could have gotten to his feet on his own. He kept a grip on cold fingers as he dragged Danny away from the tracks and along the high-walled gardens that backed onto it. Halfhearted gunfire chased them, stuttered across the ground and bounced off the trees behind the same way they’d chased off the dogs. Even though he knew it was stupid, Jack found himself vaguely offended. He was a wolf, and definitely more of a threat than a feral mongrel who used to feed from a dish and wore boots when it went for a walk.
He ignored the brief urge to prove that to the soldiers and instead thumped ice-locked garage doors and rattled padlocks on the way past until they finally fell through a broken blue gate into someone’s abandoned garden.
“Leave it!” one of the soldiers ordered behind them. “Crazy bastards didn’t have anything with them, and they’ll freeze soon enough. Get back to work. We need to get moving again.”
Danny swore breathlessly and bent over, hands braced on his thighs. Steam wreathed his face as he panted, the smell of spent adrenaline thick and musty on his skin.
“All that time I was gone,” he muttered as he wiped his sleeve over his mouth. “Not one person tried to kill me.”
Jack laughed and grabbed Danny’s jacket to drag him up into a quick, cold kiss.
“I always knew the south was fucking boring,” he growled against Danny’s mouth and tasted the reluctant tilt of a smile. For the first time in days, he felt like himself again.
HE SHOULD have known it wouldn’t last.
“Fuck,” Nick muttered, and his voice slid thickly Glaswegian as all those practiced vowels deserted him. He turned and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth as he gagged. The hunch of his shoulders tried to conjure disgust, but Jack would smell the sharp nutty sweetness of hunger off his skin. “Are those…?”
“Dogs,” Danny said flatly. “They’re all dogs.”
The soldiers on the train wouldn’t have trouble with any feral packs for a few miles from the look of it. The streets of Glengarnock were full of dead dogs. They’d been slaughtered in the streets, blood spray left to dry on the churned-up snow and the gray walls of abandoned houses. Skinned carcasses were hung from street signs and splayed out over cars.
“Your grandma left us a message,” Jack said, the words rough as he dragged them up out of a dry throat. “Or maybe it was a packed lunch for her darlin’ boy?”
Gregor glared at him, green eyes cold behind frost-flecked lashes. Whatever fragile ceasefire they’d cobbled together since Durham, it was still tainted by years of resentment and competition. If it came to a choice between Jack and the bird, Jack wouldn’t win.
Not that Jack would pick Gregor over Danny, if it came to that, but that was different. Danny had been Jack’s since the first time he saw him, and Danny wasn’t a carrion god in a bony man’s skin.
The crack of Nick’s laugh, more tension in it that humor, broke the silence. “If it was for me, she’d have left the eyes.”
Danny made a wet sound in the back of his throat. “That’s disgusting.”
Nick hunched his shoulders up to his ears and grimaced. His voice was dry as bones as he admitted, “I know.”
The body of something that, in life, had been a mastiff of some sort was lying curled neatly in the middle of the road. As though it was asleep. Jack walked over and crouched down, cold jeans pulled tight over his knees.
“Careful,” Gregor said as Jack reached out of the dog.
It should have been ridiculous, but after the last few months, Jack supposed Gregor had a point. Every wolf pup in the Scottish Pack had been raised with the Wolf Winter as the bloody golden ring at the end of their long exile. Hadrian had sent the wolves he found in his legions up over his Wall, and Fenrir would lead them back down again. It had always sounded simple enough, but now the Wolf Winter was here, nothing had gone as Jack expected. Nothing that had come out of a prophet’s mouth could be trusted as fact, and even a dead dog couldn’t entirely be taken at face value anymore.