dress. They looked a week old already. “Your sister knows her own mind. If the baby makes it, they’ll thrive with the Pack. Most do.”
Not all, Danny thought, but fine.
Danny swallowed the old, prickly urge to defend the “normalcy” of the nonwolf world. It was Bron’s decision. Maybe she’d change her mind when she held the child. Or she wouldn’t. Danny imagined the look on Nick’s face when he realized he was going to have to raise his mate’s pup. It tried to be funny, but he was too tired to appreciate it.
“Did you check her bones?” he asked. “Rose?”
“Who?” Bron asked.
“No one,” Kath said. She ran her hand over her head and flicked water away from the nape of her neck. “Go and have a bath, Bron. You stink.”
Bron glanced between them and then curled her lip. She tossed her jerky onto the table and stalked to the stairs, past Kath.
“Fine,” she spat down at them. “You talk about your smart things. I’ll go upstairs and think about proper wolf things, like deer and biting.”
Kath sighed and waited until she heard the door slam upstairs. “She’s always been so jealous of you,” she said. “It’s childish.”
Of him? Danny gave Kath a dubious look. His sister wasn’t jealous. She was too cocky about her wolfskin to spare time on anything else. It probably wasn’t the time to disillusion his mam that she’d royally spoiled her youngest.
“Did you—”
“Yes,” Kath said sharply before he could finish the question. “She’s gone. Just old stones and rags where she was. It doesn’t mean she’s alive. The Wild could have claimed her.”
“It didn’t,” Danny said. “Do you have any idea what she wants with Bron?”
“Because I crossed her?” Kath asked as she hooked a stool out from under the table with one foot and sat down. “I could have worked that out myself.”
“It might not be about you,” Danny said. He leaned against the table and fastidiously poked Bron’s gnawed strip of meat to the side of the platter. A smaller bit did for him, old habits about taking the last pickings from the bone. It was only when he took a bite that he realized how hungry he was. Through the mouthful, he said, “Did she have a daughter?”
“Yes,” Kath said slowly. “Alice. We were… friends?”
“You aren’t sure?”
Kath shrugged and held her hands out toward the fire. The light of it shone through her fingers and picked out the shadows of thin bones.
“I admired Rose,” Kath said. Her mouth twisted as though the admission left a bad taste in her mouth. “Back then, I admired her. Alice never did.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
Kath shook her head. “She left the Pack and moved to the Lowlands. I thought she was weak. After I found out what Rose was, I thought she was smarter than I’d known. But we’re wolves. We don’t send letters. I’ve no idea what happened to her after she left here. You think she was this Nick’s mother?”
“Would she have let Rose take him?”
“I don’t think Rose would have given her the chance to say no,” Kath said wearily. She glanced upstairs, to where her daughter and the potential of her first grandchild splashed in the bath. “Could he just have been some child she found?”
That was a question. Danny wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and shrugged.
“Nick wasn’t a wolf or a dog, but Gregor said he never smelled human either,” he said. “And….”
The taste of venison turned sour in the back of his throat as he thought back to the days he’d spent collared. They weren’t his memories, although they lived in his head like they were, and the dog stirred as he poked at them. It still felt smug over its rescue of Bron and happy—in the simple, uncomplicated by human doubts and complexes way—to see Kath. The thought of Rose, her height exaggerated and her scent cut through with mean, wasn’t quite as scary in the familiar warmth of the kitchen.
“… she loved him. She killed him, or tried to kill him, and didn’t hesitate, but for what it was worth, she loved him.”
“Babies are meant to be loved,” Kath said. “They’re good at it. You can love a baby you don’t share blood with.”
“Could she?”
Kath acknowledged that with a grimace, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Why does it matter?”
Sometimes all it took was someone to ask the question to shame your brain into the answer. Danny hesitated. He could feel