They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Rendering Stone
Seven months pregnant and chained in the Hollow, Calla has her wolf cut out for her mate's assistant, refuses to call off her family's blood pact and says the old words instead, and the doors open on her father and sister.
In six years, Ransom Ardell never once asked me what my family does for a living.
He should have.
My father hunts wolves.
My sister keeps the skulls in the back room of our farmhouse, on pine shelves she built herself, each one with a little typed card.
When I begged them to let me mate an Alpha, my father said one thing.
"He signs."
So Ransom sat at our kitchen table and pricked his thumb and signed the old pact in the Shrike family book.
Spill one drop of her blood, and the Hunt comes home.
He laughed when he did it. He thought it was a joke for the in-laws.
Tonight I was seven months pregnant, and he had me chained to the Rendering Stone.
The Hollow was full of candles.
That was the part I couldn't stop looking at.
Someone had climbed the rock shelves of the cave and lit two hundred candles, one by one, for this.
The silver cuffs on my wrists had been burning for an hour.
They'd eaten through the skin. I could smell it.
"Ransom," I said. "Look at me."
He was standing by the mouth of the cave with his arms crossed, watching the Renderer lay out her tools on a cloth.
"Look at what's under this shift," I said. "Then tell me again."
He didn't look.
He hadn't really looked at me since my belly started to show.
"She's done this before," he said. "You'll live."
"She's Mira's mother, Ransom."
Mira stood next to the old woman in an oversized flannel shirt, hugging her elbows.
Mira had been Ransom's assistant for two years. She did his calendar. She did his coffee.
She was born without a wolf, in a pack full of them.
She wouldn't meet my eyes either.
Ransom came over finally and crouched by the stone.
My body still turned toward his warmth. The bond doesn't care what you know.
"Calla," he said, in his patient voice, the one he used on new pack members. "You got twenty-nine years with Rue. Mira got none. She's sat on the porch every full moon of her life while the rest of us ran. You have no idea what that's like."
"I'm due in three weeks," I said. "Cut out my wolf now and the baby dies. Ask any healer in this valley. You already know."
"It's a loan." He put his hand on my knee. "Half a year. She gets one real moon. Then Rue comes back to you and nothing changes."
"And the baby?"
The Alpha of Blackfen looked at the floor.
"We can have another one," he said. "After."
Behind him Mira made a small sound, like she might be sorry.
Then she stepped closer to the stone.
The Renderer picked up her knife. It was made of bone, yellow and thin and old.
"Hold her still," she said.
Two of Ransom's wolves took my shoulders.
I didn't scream when she cut.
I want that written down somewhere.
I didn't scream.
The knife didn't go into my skin. It went somewhere under it, behind my ribs, where Rue lives.
Rue fought.
I felt her claws in me from the inside, digging in, holding on.
Then I felt her torn loose.
The cave went quiet in my head.
For twenty-nine years there had been a second heartbeat under mine. A warm gray weight. A nose in my palm when I was scared.
Gone.
Across the stone, Mira gasped and grabbed her chest.
Her eyes flashed pale gray. My wolf's color.
The baby kicked once, hard, and then went still.
"Okay," Ransom said, standing up. "Okay. It's done."
He looked down at me and frowned.
There was blood on the stone under my wrists. A lot of it now, from the cuffs.
"Calla. Listen to me."
He crouched again and spoke low, so the pack couldn't hear.
"That pact. The thing your dad made me sign. It's a bond, right? You can call it off."
"I can."
"Then do it. Tell them the blood was an accident. The cuffs. Nobody meant it."
I looked at him for a long time.
At the man I'd begged my family for.
At the candles. Two hundred of them.
"Calla," he said. "Do it, or I'll have to explain to the elders why a bunch of humans with rifles think they can cross my river."
I turned my face to the stone where my blood was pooling.
I put my mouth close to it.
When I was six years old, my father taught me the words, sitting on the porch steps, in case I ever needed them.
I'd never said them out loud in my life.
"Come home," I said.
Ransom stood up and laughed.
"That's it? That's the big hunter curse?" He turned to his wolves. "Somebody get her off the stone. Mira, sit down before you fall down."
The candles nearest the doors went out.
All of them at once.
Then the next row.
Every wolf in the Hollow went silent. I heard ears flatten. I heard someone whine.
Ransom turned toward the doors.
The two heavy oak doors at the mouth of the Hollow swung open.
My father was standing in them, gray-bearded and enormous, his barn coat dusted with frost and his rifle on its sling.
My sister stood beside him with her reading glasses on a cord around her neck.
She looked at the stone. At my wrists. At Mira's gray eyes.
She took a small notebook out of her coat pocket.
"Hi, Calla," Dagny said. "Who goes first?"
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