They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hunt Comes Home

Josiah walks the Hollow without a wolf moving and carries Calla out past the pack, then the midwife hears the pup's heart slowing.

Nobody answered her.

Forty wolves stood in that cave, and not one of them said a word.

My father stepped over the threshold.

His boots were loud on the stone. It was the only sound in the Hollow.

He didn't look at Ransom. He didn't look at the Renderer.

He looked at me.

Then he started walking.

The Hollow is long, and the stone sits at the very back of it, where the cave narrows and the candles crowd in close.

He walked the whole length of it.

Wolves who had stood around me ten minutes earlier, laughing, holding cups of coffee, stepped back off the path to let him by.

A big Blackfen enforcer I'd fed at my own table every Sunday for six years dropped his eyes to his boots.

Dagny came behind him with her notebook open, writing as she went.

Ransom stepped into the aisle and squared his shoulders.

The Alpha came up in his voice, deep and rough and everywhere at once.

"Hold them."

Every wolf in the Hollow felt that order in their spine. I knew, because I'd felt it in mine for six years.

Nobody moved.

Ransom's face went red, then white.

"You're on Blackfen land," he told my father. "You're a guest. Humans don't walk in here."

My father stopped in front of him.

He was a head taller than Ransom, and Ransom is not a small man.

"Son," my father said, very gently, "you signed in my kitchen."

"That was a joke."

"Not anymore," my father said. "This is the family."

He walked around Ransom.

The two wolves holding my shoulders let go so fast I nearly fell off the stone.

My father knelt.

He looked at my wrists for a long moment, and his jaw moved under his beard.

Then he took a pair of bolt cutters off his belt and cut the chain.

The cuffs stayed on. Silver doesn't come off a wolf-born girl easy, even one with no wolf left in her.

"I've got you," he said. "Calla girl. I've got you."

"Dad, she took Rue."

"I know."

"She cut her out. Mira has her. Look at her eyes."

"I saw."

He slid one arm under my knees and one behind my back.

He lifted me off the stone.

Behind us, Dagny walked up to the Renderer.

The old woman had the bone knife held low against her skirt, point out.

My sister didn't even look at it.

"I'll take that," Dagny said.

"You'll take nothing from me in my own cave, girl."

"It isn't your cave. It's Blackfen's. You're the help."

Dagny held out her hand.

The Renderer looked past her, at my father's back, at the rifle on his shoulder.

She put the knife in my sister's palm.

Dagny wrapped it in a clean white handkerchief, wrote something on a little paper tag, and tied the tag to it with string.

"Evidence," she said to no one, and put it in her coat.

Mira was sitting on the floor of the cave now, both arms wrapped around herself.

Her gray eyes were huge. My eyes, in her face.

She was shaking so hard her teeth clicked.

"She doesn't like it in there," I said, as my father carried me past. "She's going to tear you up, Mira."

"Shut up," Mira whispered. "Shut up, shut up."

Ransom got in front of us one more time at the doors.

"You walk out with her and it's war," he said. "Every hunter you've got against every wolf on this bank."

"Count the rifles," Dagny said.

He looked past us, out into the dark.

Then he looked again.

The meadow outside the Hollow was full of trucks with their headlights off. Men and women stood in the frost beside them.

Every one of them had a long gun.

None of them had raised it. They didn't need to.

"You don't get to touch her again," my father said. "Not one hair. Move."

Ransom reached for my arm anyway.

My father caught his wrist in one hand.

He didn't twist it. He just closed his fingers.

The Alpha of Blackfen went down on one knee in the doorway of his own Hollow, in front of his whole pack.

"Not one hair," my father said again, and let go, and walked out.

They laid me across the back seat of the old farm truck with my head in Dagny's lap.

She sawed through the silver cuffs with a tool I didn't know the name of while we bumped down the river road.

It took twenty minutes.

I didn't scream for that one either.

When we got to the farm, every light in the house was on.

The midwife was waiting in the old rocking chair by the stove, a woman so old she'd delivered half the valley, wolf and human both.

She'd brought her bag and a wooden listening horn I remembered from when I was little.

"Put her on the couch," she said. "Shoes off. Somebody get her water."

My father got her water.

She pressed the horn to my belly and bent her white head down to it.

She listened for a long time.

Then she sat back, and she didn't look at me. She looked at my father.

"That pup's heart is slowing," she said. "It's looking for its mother's wolf and it can't find her."

"How long?" my father asked.

"She's due in three weeks."

"That's not what I asked."

The midwife put the horn back in her bag.

"Three weeks is too long," she said.

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