They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Candles

The old woman smiled for the first time since I'd known her.

"April," she said. "On the moon. We'll bring the candles."

They brought the candles.

On the night of the April full moon, I stood outside the Hollow doors in a plain white dress.

I wore boots, because there was still snow in the shade.

The last time I'd worn white in there, it was a shift for the stone.

The stone was gone.

The three packs had broken it up with sledgehammers in February.

They carried the pieces down to the river, a wolf to a stone, and dropped them in.

Dagny had labeled the spot on the floor where it used to sit with a strip of masking tape.

FORMERLY.

"Ready?" my father said beside me.

He was wearing a suit I'd never seen. It was too tight across the shoulders, and he kept pulling at the collar.

Josie rode on his shoulders in her knitted hat with the wolf-ear holes, one of his huge hands spread across her back.

She was six months old and she had a fistful of his hair, and she was not letting go.

"You look like a bear in a costume," I said.

"I look very handsome," my father said. "Your sister said so."

"Dagny said you looked like a bear in a costume."

"She said a handsome one."

The doors opened.

The Hollow was full of light.

Two hundred candles, on every rock shelf, all the way up the walls into the dark.

This time nobody had climbed up to light them alone.

Every guest had carried one in and lit it.

Blackfen wolves.

Cold Spring wolves.

The mountain pack.

The seven, with their wolves home, standing together near the front.

Families from all nine towns.

The woman from the ranch outside Darby.

The man from the hardware store.

The two old people from above Stevensville, with their fat dog on a string.

And along the back wall, every hunter who rides with us, in their good coats, hats in their hands.

Emmett was standing at the far end, in front of the spot labeled FORMERLY.

He'd gotten a haircut.

It was too short.

He looked terrified.

Rue sat up in my chest when she saw him and thumped her tail against my ribs.

My father walked me the length of the Hollow, the way he'd walked it the night he came home.

Nobody stepped back off the path this time. They leaned in.

At the end, he lifted Josie down off his shoulders and handed her to Dagny.

Then he took my hand and put it in Emmett's.

He held them both there a second, in his big rough hands.

"You signed," he said to Emmett.

"I signed."

"Good," my father said, and went and stood in the front row and cried into his beard without embarrassment.

Dagny married us. She'd been ordained online for the occasion.

She read it out of her notebook, of course.

"I've kept the record of this whole thing," she said to the Hollow. "From the stone to tonight. It's two notebooks and a half. I'm not reading it to you."

People laughed.

"I'll just read the last page," she said.

She turned to it and pushed her glasses up her nose.

"Calla Shrike, wolf-born, is home. Her wolf is home. Her daughter is home. The nine are home. The seven are home." She looked up at us. "And this one's signed. So go ahead."

Emmett said his vows first.

They were very short.

"I'll always ask first," he said. "And I'll always know what your family does."

I said mine.

"I'll always let you," I said. "And you'll always have a mug."

Somewhere in the front row, my father laughed out loud and then blew his nose.

Emmett kissed me in the Hollow, in front of three packs and the Hunt and two hundred candles.

He kissed me long enough that somebody whistled, and somebody else howled, and then the whole Hollow was howling, wolves and hunters both.

My father's howl was the loudest. It was terrible.

Josie howled too, a tiny furious yip.

Dagny wrote it down.

We left the party still going at midnight.

Emmett's log house was dark and cold. He lit the woodstove while I stood in the doorway in my white dress.

"Mrs. Ferrier," he said, kneeling at the stove.

"Still a Shrike," I said. "I kept it."

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