They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Run Home

"Yes," I said.

I said it before I'd thought about it.

Rue said it first, really.

I just let her use my mouth.

Emmett nodded.

Then he went a little red around the ears and drank his tea too fast.

Three weeks later, on the night of the January moon, I handed Josie to my father at the kitchen door.

She was three months old. She had opinions now.

She grabbed his beard in both fists and yelled at it.

"She'll want her bottle at ten," I said. "She hates the blue one."

"I know she hates the blue one. Dagny rated it."

"Two out of ten," Dagny said from the table. "She threw it."

"Go on," my father said. "Go run."

He didn't say anything else.

But when I got to the truck, I looked back.

He was still standing in the kitchen doorway with my daughter on his arm, watching me go.

Emmett's log house sat behind the Cold Spring clinic, up against the trees.

The clinic's back room was empty now.

Mira had gone west after Christmas.

She hadn't said goodbye, and I hadn't wanted her to.

Emmett had a fire going in the woodstove.

"Clothes stay here," he said. "Unless you want to run home in a ripped sweater."

"I've done that."

"Everybody's done that." He pointed. "Bedroom's yours. I'll go out back."

I undressed in his bedroom with the door shut.

It smelled like him. Cedar and woodsmoke and the soap from the clinic.

I folded my jeans on his chair, which I had never once in my life done for Ransom.

Then I went out the front door barefoot into the snow, and I let her come.

It hurt.

It always hurts the first time after a long while. The spine goes first, then the hands, then everything all at once.

Then it didn't hurt anymore, and I was on four feet in the snow, and the moon was so bright it rang.

Rue shook herself all over, nose to tail.

She'd been in me since October. She hadn't been out since before the stone.

She stood in the snow in front of Emmett's porch and smelled everything at once.

Pine.

River.

Cold.

Woodsmoke.

And him.

He came around the side of the house on four feet.

I'd never seen his wolf.

He was big, bigger than Ransom's, and tawny all over, with a dark stripe down his spine.

He stopped a few yards off and lowered his head and waited.

Asking. Same as in the barn.

Rue ran straight at him and knocked him flat in the snow.

He rolled up laughing.

Then we ran.

We ran up the creek and over the ridge and down the long open slope where the snow was knee-deep and blue under the moon.

We ran until my lungs burned and kept going.

He let me lead. He let me lead the whole way.

At the top of the last ridge Rue stopped and looked down at the valley.

The river, black and silver. The Hollow, a dark mouth in the rock on the east bank.

And on the valley floor between, every light on in one farmhouse, the way they'd been on the night my father carried me home.

Rue put her head back and howled.

For the first time in my life, a wolf howled with me, close, right beside me in the snow.

We came back to the log house after midnight, wet to the skin of our fur.

I shifted on the rug in front of the woodstove.

When I looked up, he was already on two feet, holding out a gray wool blanket.

He wrapped it around my shoulders without looking anywhere but my face.

Then he stood there with his hands still on the edges of it.

"Calla," he said.

I could feel the heat of the stove on one side and him on the other.

"I said not in a barn," I said. "This isn't a barn."

"No."

"And my body's mine again. All of it. I checked."

He didn't move. His thumbs moved, just barely, on the wool at my collarbones.

← Chapter 19 · All chapters · Chapter 21 →

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