They all, even Gregor, looked at Nick.
He scowled at them. “My world was perfectly normal until you came into it,” he said.
Gregor laughed at him. “You cut up dead people to weigh their brains and read their past in their guts,” he said. “You love a wolf. What’s normal in that?”
“You lovethatwolf,” Danny corrected, with a jab of his chin toward Gregor.
Muscle memory made him shift his weight, ready to run. Clever had been an advantage, but his smart mouth had only ever gotten him into trouble. Gregor took a step forward, but Jack put an arm in front of his chest before Gregor committed to the chase.
“Enough,” Jack said. “If he hadn’t said it, I would.”
“You’re my brother, like it or not. He’s a dog,” Gregor said. “He should remember his place.”
“He does,” Jack said. He dropped his arm. “That’s always been Danny’s problem. Let it go.”
Gregor gave Danny a narrow, green-eyed stare warning, and Danny cowed as he hunched his shoulders and looked down. His chapped lips stung as he licked them in polite submission and gave Gregor enough of an excuse to back down.
“Fine. Let him run his mouth dry out here where there’s no one else to hear,” Gregor said. “He does it in front of the Pack, though, you won’t be able to save him from a beating.”
He turned and stalked away along the road. After a second, Nick coughed uncomfortably and followed him.
“He’s right,” Jack said. “You have to play the part.”
Danny crossed his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits. “I know,” he said as he walked away from the dead woman who he might have known if he’d bothered. “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good dog.”
There had been a time when Jack would have accepted that at face value. Now he knew enough to look resigned as he waited for Danny to catch up with him. He caught Danny’s arm and pulled him into a rough embrace, his lips rough with stubble as he grazed a kiss over Danny’s mouth.
“It won’t be that bad,” he said. “You’ve just been gone too long, but once you get back, you’ll get used to it again.”
Danny supposed it would. He almost had before—whole weeks of time where being a dog in a wolf pack had seemed worth it if he was Jack’s dog. Except he didn’t plan to stay that long. It was a Wolf Winter and, like Nick’s gran had told him as she collared him, the only place for a dog in it was skinned and butchered for meat.
There was no point telling Jack that, though, any more than there had been in his conviction that the dead dogs, whatever other use they had, had been left as a warning for him.
“Well, like you said,” he noted dryly as he leaned into Jack’s warmth, “at least they’ll hate Nick more.”
Jack chuckled his agreement as they walked. He didn’t get it. The wolves might distrust Nick for his gran’s sake or kill him because that’s what they’d done with everything else in Britain that wasn’t them. But he was too different tohate. People saved that for the things that were almost like them but not quite.
Like wolves hated dogs.
THEY DIDN’Tquite make it before night. The faded winter sun didn’t seem to give much heat during the day, but in its absence, the cold chewed down to the bone. Every time Danny stopped to catch his breath from the wind, he could feel his clothes stiffen and crack as they froze. Overhead the moon was a fat wheel with a single bite taken out of it, and he could feel the dog tug at the back of his throat as it wanted to howl.
Not yet.
He swallowed the sound as he stopped at the shore of the loch and stared over the dark, half-frozen water. Even without his glasses, he probably couldn’t have picked out the landmarks he’d known. Under the snow, even the cottage he’d grown up in was lost among the crags and drifts. If he squinted, he could see the Old Man’s run-down farmhouse, where it squatted halfway up the hill—gray walls and corrugated iron roof stark against all that white, the smell of generations of wolves worn thick and musty under the wood and mortar.
Old stones, mortared together in the old way. It was drafty as a barn, plagued with damp and vermin. Squirrels had given the stink of old predator a wide berth, but rats and mice, as it turned out, were no respecters of the Numitor’s dignity. It had been Danny’s job to set traps in the rafters and basements, his fingers blistered from the springs and bloody from the teeth of not-quite-dead rats when he cleared them.
Back then, Danny thought it stacked up poorly against the houses of his friends from school, with their hot-water boilers, radiators, and microwaves. Now….
Danny snorted to himself, breath white as hoarfrost as it smoked out of his body. If someone could offer him on-demand hot water and a pot of coffee, he’d still trade every hand-carved old block of granite from under the Old Man’s nose for it.
The farmhouse would weather the Wolf Winter. The frost might crack the mortar or burst the old pipes—probably still lead, Danny had always darkly suspected—but the structure would be left intact. There was nothing there that the Wild objected to. In fact, rumor had it among the wolves that the Old Man’s den stood unchanged in the Wild itself. If you could find it, of course.
Danny had never wanted to. He never planned to come back at all. The pipe dreams that other kids at university had—of going home in a BMW with a beautiful wife or handsome husband to rub their bullies’ noses in it—had never worked for him. Wolves didn’t value any of that.
Yet now he was here, and as he squinted across black water at the place he’d grown up, it didn’t feel like home.
Danny was surprised to discover he didn’t know how he felt about that.
