Chapter 17: Seven Wolves

The hall stayed on its feet until the Council filed out.

Then everybody turned and looked at my father in the front row, with Josie on his arm.

He didn't know what to do with that. He held her higher, like a shield.

"Twelve days to the moon," she said. "Seven towns. I'll need the truck."

She took the truck.

She came back on the eleventh night with frost on her glasses and a list of seven names.

None of them were for me to say.

On the night of the December moon, the Hollow was lit with lanterns again.

Not candles. The Council said no candles.

Just the seven bone lanterns in a row on a bench of hunters' coats, pacing their small lights back and forth.

The Rendering Stone sat at the back of the cave, empty, with a Council wolf on either side of it.

All three packs lined the walls.

The hunters stood across the doors.

And down the middle of the Hollow, on folding chairs Dagny had borrowed from the grange hall, sat seven strangers.

A rancher in a clean shirt from up near Choteau. A girl of maybe twenty with her mother holding her hand.

A woman my father's age from a feed store in Hamilton.

She'd told everyone for eleven years that she'd just stopped shifting one spring.

A man who drove a snowplow.

A schoolteacher.

Two brothers who'd been cut on the same night.

Every one of them looked like I'd felt in my bed after the stone.

Like their chest was a room somebody had moved out of.

Behind them, along the back wall, stood the families of the twelve.

Old people, mostly. Parents and grandparents of the wolfless kids who'd bought a stolen wolf and gone feral with it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.