“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 smelledhumaneither,” 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 withmean, 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 the answer. It was on the tip of his brain, but it didn’t conveniently spill over.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But she took, or tried to take, three children. Three pups. It’s her signature.”
“She’s a wolf,” Kath said as she got up from the stool. She leaned over the fire, wrapped her skirt around her hand, and lifted the hot kettle. “Not a human-sickness killer.”
Steam rose from the spout as Kath filled a cup and then tossed a tea bag in. She gave Danny an inquisitive look and lifted the kettle slightly in question. Danny shook his head.
“She’s a prophet stitched into a dead wolf,” he said. “She broke into the Sannocks’ cairn—”
Kath nearly dropped the kettle. She caught it with her bare hand and hissed as her skin blistered. The smell of burned skin was a sharp note against the smoke of the peat in the fire. She shoved the kettle back onto the hearth and shook her hand as though she could shed the pain through her fingertips.
“She what?” she asked. “Did they escape? Wolves or Sannock?”
“No,” Danny said… maybe lied. He’d seen Nick’s bird-bead black eyes flick toward shadows and linger in the gaps between trees. And even if that was the normal dead the carrion god saw, if Rose had found her way out of the old prison, then surely the Sannock had followed. “We closed it again. We hope. But she kills, and there’s something sick in her, something that’s made the Wild lay… strange.”
Blisters spotted the palms of Kath’s hands and in long welts on her fingers, full of serum so they stood out tight. Danny scratched his palm as he glanced at them.
“Like blisters,” he said. Then he rubbed his eyes. “But whatever she is, three times she’s tried to steal someone else’s pups. That has to mean something.”
Kath pierced the blister on her palm with the edge of her nail and blotted it against her thigh before she picked up her cup. She curled both hands around the heavy china and studied him through the steam.
“Maybe just that she’s wicked,” Kath said gravely. “And something my dog son should leave to wolves.”
She loved him. It had never been enough, but she did. Danny hugged her awkwardly, mindful of her bruises, and was surprised when her wiry arms squeezed him tight. She got tired of it first, though, and shoved him away with a snort at his softness.
“You’re the one who taught me that if someone hurt me, I hurt them back more,” he said over his shoulder as he grabbed his coat and headed for the door. “Besides, this is my world too.”
Kath waited until he’d opened the door and banished the illusion of warmth. The cold sucked the breath out of him and made his eardrums ache, a sharp shock to the system as snow blew in between his legs.
“It’s the Wolf Winter,” Kath said. “And sleeping under a wolf doesn’t make you one.”
