Chapter 12: The Ledger

The elders searched all day.

They found the Renderer's shawl caught on a fence at the north end of Blackfen land, and Ransom's truck gone from the lodge.

That was all.

"They'll come back," Dagny said. "People who run always leave something they want."

My father hung up the phone and didn't say anything.

He went to the hall closet instead and took down a box I'd never seen him open.

Inside it was a book.

It was the Shrike family book. The one Ransom had pricked his thumb and signed six years ago, laughing.

I'd only ever seen the first page, where the pacts are.

My father opened it from the back.

The back half was the Hunt's ledger. Every wolf the family had killed under the Accord for sixty years, in three different handwritings.

Date. Place. What it did.

And at the end of most lines, a name.

"You wrote down their names?" I said.

"I always ask," my father said. "Before. It's the one thing I do."

He turned the pages slowly.

Dagny sat down next to him with Josie asleep against her chest and found the nine dates from the skull cards.

There was something written next to all nine.

Mostly first names. One just said "Pup" in my father's writing, and next to it, "wouldn't say."

My father read them out loud.

All nine.

He read them. He didn't skip one.

When he finished, he closed the book and put his big hand flat on the cover.

"I asked their names," he said. "I never asked where they came from."

Nobody said anything for a while.

Josie made a small sound in her sleep and Dagny shifted her higher.

"We find their families," I said.

My father looked up.

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