The Alpha's Birthday Wish Came True No More Noise and No More Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Loud Old Man

Hedda reaches her grandfather at the Elder Den, where noise does not hurt, and meets Torin Hask. The four Saltclaw sentries arrive at the gate.

I ran the last of the climb on four legs, with my coat knotted around my neck.

My wolf had been asleep under the tea for ten years.

She ran the whole way without being asked twice.

By dawn I smelled woodsmoke, wet pine and frying bacon.

Then I heard Bjorn Bostrom, a mile before I could see him.

He was banging a pan with a wooden spoon and bellowing a sea song at the sunrise.

He had never been able to carry a tune.

I came out of the trees into a yard full of chickens and a dozen old wolves in blankets.

A long timber lodge stood behind them with a porch.

My grandfather stood at the top of the steps in his cardigan.

His white beard hung to his chest, and a hearing horn hung from his neck.

I shifted back behind the woodpile and pulled my coat on.

When I stepped out, he stopped singing.

"Hedda?" he shouted.

He shouted everything, because he could not hear himself.

"Hedda Bostrom! Somebody tell the cook my granddaughter has come up the road in her coat!"

Forty old wolves banged forty spoons on forty plates.

I stood in the yard and waited for the pain.

It was what I had been taught to expect from noise: the white heat behind my eyes, the ringing, the floor tilting.

It did not come.

The clatter went through me and out the other side, and all I felt was the sound.

"It doesn't hurt," I said.

"What doesn't?" Bjorn shouted.

"The noise."

"Of course it doesn't, girl! It's pans!"

He came down the steps, slower than he used to, and wrapped both arms around me.

He smelled of tobacco and bacon grease.

I had not been hugged by anybody who was talking in ten years.

"Did you drink the tea last night?" he said into my hair.

"I poured it in a ditch."

"Good." He leaned back and looked at me with those bright blue eyes.

"Good girl. I'll tell you why in a few days. Not today."

"Why not today?"

"Because you've come forty miles," my grandfather said.

"I want you to have breakfast before you have a war."

Behind me, a man laughed.

It was the same laugh I had heard from the road, big and low, from the chest.

A cart had pulled into the yard behind a grey horse, loaded with egg crates.

A man climbed down from it with a toddler under one arm.

He was tall and broad and about thirty, with dark hair and a beard he had trimmed badly.

He was laughing at something the toddler had said.

"Torin!" Bjorn shouted. "This is her! This is the one I told you!"

The man set the child down on the porch.

He looked at me, and then at the coat knotted wrong over my shoulders, and the bare feet I had forgotten about.

"Hedda Bostrom," he said. "Arne's girl."

"I was," I said.

I did not know I was going to say it until it was out.

"Torin Hask," he said. "I run the Ridge."

"Anybody who comes up my road gets a bed, a hot meal and a line in the book."

"What's in the book?"

"Your name, your pack, who vouches for you and why you came."

Bjorn thumped his chest.

"I vouch."

Torin pulled a thick ledger from under the egg crates and opened it on the cart bed.

He licked a pencil.

"Why did you come?"

"My father wished me gone," I said. "Over his birthday candle, in front of the pack. So I went."

He did not write anything.

The laugh was gone from his face, and what replaced it was slow.

I did not like how much I wanted to look at it.

"That's the first line of a lot of things," he said at last. "I'll put 'family matter.' Is it all right if I put that?"

"It's all right."

He wrote it.

"Here's how the Ridge works," Torin said, and handed me the pencil to sign.

"Thirty days under Ridge Law, as a guest of the Elder Den."

"And after that?"

"After that you stay or you go, and it's your choice."

"Fine."

"You eat in my hall, three meals, and nobody whispers in it."

"That's a rule?"

"I have eleven nieces and nephews, so it's a survival rule."

"Good."

"And you don't leave the Ridge without telling me first. People get lost on the back roads."

I signed my name in the book.

"I have one rule," I said.

"Go on."

"You don't call my father."

He looked at the page for a moment.

"I won't call him to take you anywhere," he said.

That was not what I had asked.

But the toddler had grabbed my hand, and I was already walking toward the porch.

I should have listened harder.

At the steps I glanced back across the yard.

Torin was hauling egg crates onto the porch one-handed.

He was arguing with his nephew about who got to carry the bacon.

I could hear his heart from forty feet away.

It was slow and strong, and every fifth beat it came down a little harder than the others.

I listened until I made myself stop.

"You're listening to him," a very old woman in a blanket said at my elbow.

"I'm listening to the whole yard," I said.

"Mm," she said, and went back to her tea.

The cook rang the breakfast bell, and the whole lodge cheered.

I had a plate of eggs in my hands when the Den's dogs began to bark at the gate.

Torin's head turned at the same moment mine did.

Four wolves in Saltclaw grey stood on the road below the lodge, hats in their hands.

One of them was the sentry who had taught me to swim.

"Hedda," he called up the hill, and his voice cracked. "We don't know why we walked. We just couldn't stay."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

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