They Called Me an Abomination and Ordered Me Killed, So I Came Back as the Wolf They Buried novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Tithe
Remy's POV
The church of St. Joseph has a loft above the nave, where the old bell-rope hangs and the sexton keeps his books.
I had been up there as a boy a hundred times.
It smelled of beeswax and damp plaster and mouse.
At midnight, Anselme was sitting at his little deal table with a kerosene lamp and an enormous black ledger, and a pair of spectacles on his nose.
He did not stand when we came up the ladder.
He pointed at two chairs.
Odalie sat.
I stood behind her.
I had not planned that.
I had simply found my feet there, and I stayed.
"I told Odalie I'd read it to her," the old man said.
"I'm going to read it to both of you.
"Then you'll decide what you do.
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Mr. Anselme," I said.
"What is this?"
"It's the Turning ledger.
"It's been kept in this tower since 1868."
He laid a gnarled hand on the black cover.
"Every Turning, every name, every pour.
"I've kept it fifty-five years.
"My father kept it before me."
He opened it.
The pages were stiff and brown, ruled in faded ink, in a hundred different hands, each page headed with a year.
He turned them slowly, and I watched his thumb.
"The common pages are what you'd expect.
"Name, date, how the wolf came.
"A gray, a brown, a black, a spotted."
He turned a page.
"And in the back, the other pages."
He drew a second book from under the first.
It was thinner, bound in oilcloth, and he opened it flat on the table.
The ink here was brown too, but the hand was tight and upright and furious.
"This is the Tithe," Anselme said.
I felt Odalie go still under my hands, where I had put them on the back of her chair.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of They Called Me an Abomination and Ordered Me Killed, So I Came Back as the Wolf They Buried are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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