The internet.
Music.
Thai food.
Socks hadn’t even made the list. Dry socks,sparesocks, were something they’d taken for granted. Even Danny, who’d always privately assumed he was better prepared. After all, he hadn’t had Thai food until he was nineteen.
Wet wool rubbed against his heels and squelched with each step as he climbed up and struck out across the field. There were no roads to Glenlough, not anymore. The land had been sold off over the years, repurposed for crops or left for the moors to reclaim. On Danny’s old ordnance survey map it was a ghost-gray ribbon that wriggled across the hills. He found it under his boots, chunks of macadam and rock under the frozen heather, and the thought that it was close made him walk faster.
A sudden gust of wind hit Danny from the side and made him stagger. It parted the rain for a second and he saw the outline of the old building appear like a ghost ahead of him. It was closer than he’d thought.
It had been a grand house once. Gargoyles peered out from under the few intact sections of roof, ice frozen over spouted mouths like muzzles, and the remnants of stained glass glittered in the window frames. Someone had taken pride in it. Now wet blisters on the Virgin-Mary-blue front door bulged out of the grain of the wood and ice-crusted scaffolding had been erected to hold up the bowed old walls. No Trespassing signs rattled like tuneless wind chimes on the chain-link fence that marked out the boundaries of the property.
Danny stared at the building until he realized he was in plain sight of anyone inside. With a muttered curse he hunched over and loped into the shelter of the wind-twisted old ash. The trunk was lightning-scarred and blistered where the frozen sap had exploded out of the living wood. It creaked softly in the wind as Danny crouched down in the roots, the sound of something not quite dead yet.
He leaned his head back to rest against the tree and waited. The rain soaked his face and ran back into his hair and down under his collar. Danny strained to hear something,smellsomething, over the storm. If there was anything that he could have sensed—even with his nose and ears muted in this skin—it was lost under the storm. The clatter of the signs against the fence and the aggressive drumbeat of the rain against the old stone building drowned out everything. Any scent in the air was washed away before he could catch it.
Or had never been there.
Danny squeezed his eyes shut. He’d left Jack to be taken by the prophets and hiked miles across the frozen hills on a hunch he’d had as a nosy teenager. He had to be right.
He shrugged the duffel bag, now soaked and worse for wear, off his shoulders and fumbled it open. His stomach turned as he pulled out the frosted Tupperware box that his mam had brought up from the village. Something inside rattled like dice as he popped the lid.
It was an index finger, still gray and half-frozen despite being pressed against Danny’s sweaty back for the hike. The nail was broken down to the quick and the knuckle scuffed and torn from a fight. It jiggled like something still half-alive in the Tupperware as Danny’s hands shook.
Bile retched miserably up the back of Danny’s throat, and he closed his eyes to force it back down. He was a dog, the best thing you could be if you weren’t a wolf, and he could deal with this.
His brain disagreed. Maybe if he’d stayed here, it’d be different, but he was a professor at Durham University. The worst thing he’d seen for the last decade had been the rampant privilege of rich twenty-year-olds, and he liked it that way.
It wasn’t wrong.
“Yeah, well,” Danny muttered through chattering teeth as he opened his eyes. While they’d been closed, the rain had turned to snow. “Tough shit. Deal.”
Bron was his little sister. She hated him for that—no wolf wanted people to know that about their bloodline—and he’d resented her for… being everything he wasn’t. That wasn’t the point. She was irritating, prickly, and didn’t know nearly as much as she thought. She was also the tiny, bloody blob of a person his mam had let him hold after she was born, even when the midwivesthoughtthe dog would be jealous of the new baby.
Maybe Danny didn’t want to share a room with Bron again, but he couldn’t imagine a world that she wasn’t in, somewhere, being better than him. And if she was here, then Jack would be too soon enough. The Wild tolerated a lot, but it didn’t like prisons. Nothing that wanted free stayed caged in the Wild for long.
He wedged the Tupperware solidly between the roots of the tree and stood up to strip off. Goose pimples prickled his arms as the cold hit him, and his balls tried to squeeze back up inside him. The film of sweat and rain on his back and stomach froze thin and brittle against his skin.
He stuffed his jeans and T-shirt into the duffel. They’d still get soaked, but if he needed them later, there was a chance they’d be there. His coat he rolled up and put under the bag.
Then he crouched down, breathed out, and let his skin shift.
The dog sneezed, shook its head hard enough to make its ears flap, and hopped clumsily out of the boots Danny had left on. The cold made its feet ache, and a skitter of something nearby, under the snow, caught its ear and made its stomach grumble.
Other things to do, the core of Danny that survived the change prodded. The dog could eat after that.
It put its head down to the Tupperware box and nosed at the dead thing in the corner. The smell of half-frozen meat usually would have made it drool. It had pawed over the cold box in the old den often enough, choked down plastic and hard chunks of mince despite the not particularly convincing knowledge it would be sick when it changed back. But this smelled like pack.
The dog whined softly and nosed the finger again. Dead flesh, not quite turned, and the milky, almost-me smell of the wolf it had denned with. Complexities of emotion weren’t the dog’s strength—the conflict of resentment and affection that made Danny’s feelings murky—it just knew they were family.
And that she was hurt. Fear hadn’t stuck to the finger, the acrid gray flash of it picked apart by cold and time, but the black stickiness of pain was embedded in the splintered bone. The dog gave a soft, dangerous growl and pawed at the box until the finger fell out.
Bron smelled peppery, mixed with milk and sweetness. Caught under the broken nail there were shreds of dead flesh that smelled tainted, that made the dog want to bite. It remembered that smell from back in Durham, the stink of it on the monsters that came intoitsterritory.
The dog pulled the smells apart and filed them in its brain so it would know them again. Then it assiduously scraped snow and dirt over the finger until it was hidden. Once it was satisfied, it lifted its head and cast about for a scent.
Snow. The brittle, translucent scent of the lightning-struck mountain ash, cooked sap, and singed wood. On the roots of the tree, under them, the ghost of rodent musk hung yellow and papery until the dog growled a warning at it. The urge to unearth the finger, to move it somewhere the rodent wouldn’t find it, plucked at its brain.
