They Called Me an Abomination and Ordered Me Killed, So I Came Back as the Wolf They Buried novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Flag
A black pack truck backs onto Odalie's gravel with twelve wolves in the bed and Remy says she is to come home by Sunday sundown; she drops his flag in the parts-wash drum and he looks at her son.
The black truck backed across my gravel lot at ten past four, and twelve wolves rode in the bed.
I was under the hood of a customer's outboard with a socket in my teeth.
I heard the tires first, then the tailgate, and then nothing, which is how you can tell a lot of people are standing very still.
I pulled my head out of the cowling and looked.
The truck was a black crew cab with a black flag whipping from its antenna.
Twelve men and women stood in the bed in work clothes, and every one of them was gray in the face.
Two of them held the rail with both hands because they needed it.
I knew that flag.
It had flown over the Bayou Bœuf pack house when I was a kid, and over the levee on the night I turned eighteen.
I set the socket down on the cowling very carefully.
The driver's door opened and Remy Thibodeaux got out.
He was bigger than I remembered, six-three and heavy through the shoulders, with his dark-blond hair cut short and a levee-district windbreaker hanging open over a work shirt.
He kept one hand on the top of the door and he did not say hello.
"Odalie Broussard," he said.
He said it loud, so the whole lot could hear.
My two hired hands had stopped working in the bay.
The crawfisherman whose boat I was fixing had come around the stern with a Coke in his hand and his mouth open.
"I'm the Alpha of the Bayou Bœuf pack," Remy said.
"My father is dead, and the elders who sat the council are dead or gone.
"You're to come home by sundown Sunday.
"I've come to claim what's mine."
I had paid my own rent since I was eighteen, and nobody had ever once asked me for anything in that voice.
He looked past me into the open bay behind my shoulder.
I did not turn around, because I knew what was in the doorway.
My son, Bastien, was seven and a half, and he was sitting cross-legged on the concrete with a socket set in his lap and a lab-mix dog leaning on his knee.
"That's a lot of people in a truck," I heard him tell the dog.
I did not let my face move.
I wiped my hands on a shop rag, one finger at a time.
Then I reached into the outboard, pulled the cotter pin from the tilt-lock, and held it out to the crawfisherman.
"Take your boat home, Mr. Alcide," I said.
"I'll finish it Monday, no charge for today."
"Miss Odalie," he said, "who are those people?"
"Customers.
"Go on."
He went, with his Coke in one hand and the cowling under his arm, and his truck spat gravel pulling out of the lot.
"Take the rest of the day," I told my hired hands.
They looked at the twelve wolves and then at me, and they went.
I walked across the gravel.
Nobody in that truck bed moved.
A man near the tailgate had a white scar down his jaw, and he could not meet my eyes.
A woman beside him had her hand pressed flat against her ribs and was breathing short.
None of them looked like they had come to fight.
They looked like people in a clinic waiting room.
Remy's hand was still on the door.
I put my own hand flat on the same door, a hand's width from his, with the solvent still wet on my fingers.
The metal was warm from the sun.
I had not stood this close to him in eight years.
I smelled cane smoke and pump oil and river water on him, and my wolf, asleep so long I had stopped listening for it, turned over once in my ribs.
I felt it and I did not look down.
His thumb moved a quarter inch on the door, and he did not touch me.
"You've got a nice shop," he said.
His voice had dropped, and it was not the voice he had used for the crowd.
"You've got a nice truck," I said.
"Take your wolves off my gravel."
"I can't," Remy said.
"Why not?"
"Because I need you to come home."
He said it plainly, like a man reading off a gauge.
It made me angrier than the claim had.
"I came home once," I said.
"I turned eighteen on your levee, and I was home."
I reached past him, took hold of the black flag, and pulled it off the antenna mount.
The cloth was heavier than I expected.
I carried it across the lot with twelve wolves watching, to the fifty-five-gallon drum by the bay door where I wash parts.
The drum was half full of solvent, brown and cold and stinking of kerosene.
I held the flag over it.
"You claimed me eight years ago by standing there," I said.
"Tell your wolves to get off my gravel."
I let go.
The black cloth opened out in the brown and sank under.
Nobody in that truck bed breathed.
A woman put her hand over her mouth.
I turned around to face him.
I expected a fight.
I had a wrench in my back pocket and a boy behind me and a plan that ended with the wrench.
None of the wolves moved.
Remy did not look at the flag, and he did not look at me.
He was looking past my shoulder, through the open bay door, at a seven-year-old boy with a socket set and a white-rooted cowlick.
The boy looked back at him and tipped his head to one side, the way Remy used to before he asked a stupid question.
Remy's face went slack.
It was the face of a man who had counted wrong for eight years.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend