They Never Wanted a Female Gamma, So I Built the Pack That Beat Theirs novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Burden

My father was in the grave.

He was standing in it, waist deep in the shale, with the shovel's blade in his hand and the haft against his chest.

He had dug another foot.

He wore his flannel robe over his pajamas, and his feet were bare, and the sun was just clearing the culm bank behind him.

I came over the lip of the hill at a dead run and stopped.

"Papa!"

"Don't come in," he said.

"I'm not finished."

I dropped to my knees on the edge and reached down.

He did not take my hand.

His gray face was wet with sweat, and he was shaking from head to foot.

He looked at me with something I had not seen in his eyes for fourteen years.

He looked afraid.

"Come out," I said.

"I'm going to tell you something," my father said.

"I should have told you at six.

"I should have told you at twelve.

"I can't die with it."

He leaned on the shovel.

"The Gamma's seat is not a rank," he said.

"The Burden is not a sickness.

"It's a duty."

I waited.

"A wolf dies, and his strength goes into the ground with the body," my father said.

"The pack gets thinner with every burying.

"It did that from the beginning, until somebody found a way.

"The Gamma takes it.

"The Gamma carries the last shift of every wolf the pack buries, in his own body, so the pack keeps what they were."

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