They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 04

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 04

At 3:04 in the morning, the door opened and my own wolf walked in wearing another woman.

Elara Voss came up the aisle barefoot in Kael’s shirt, holding a candle, and her eyes were Sable’s gold – and she was grinning, and Sable’s eyes had never in eighteen years looked at me like that.

“Don’t get up,” she said.

She set the candle on the stone by my head. Close enough that I could feel it.

“I’ve been practicing,” she said, and held up her hand, and let the claws come out one by one. “God, it’s easy. Everyone made it sound hard.”

“Elara.” Every contraction was ripping me open around an empty place where my wolf used to be. “Get a healer. Not for me. The pup’s not moving. If he’s still alive he has minutes.”

“Mm,” she said. “Here’s the thing.”

She sat on the edge of the stone and swung her feet like a girl on a dock.

“Kael says we’re keeping it,” she said. “It’s still my blood, Ell.‘ He got sentimental about it. And I thought – a pup by you? Walking around my Hollow with your face on it, for eighteen years, reminding him?” She tipped her head. “No. I don’t think

so.”

I understood, finally, that the woman I’d taught to drive, whose rent I’d paid for two years, whose mother I’d hired, had never once liked me.

“You have my wolf,” I said. “You have my mate. You have my house. You’ve won.”

“I know,” she said happily. “But you’ve still got that thing where people look at you first when you walk into a room. So.”

She put one hand flat on my stomach.

And she pushed the claws in.

I don’t remember the sound I made. I remember the ceiling. I remember thinking, very clearly, those are Sable’s claws, she’s using Sable’s claws on Sable’s baby, and then something in me went past pain and out the other side into a place that was quiet and white.

“Stop squirming,” Elara said, laughing. “Honestly, women are so dramatic about-”

And then her own arm ripped backward out of my body and slammed her across the Hollow.

She hit the wall eleven feet away and we

nt down on her hands and knees, staring at her own hand like it belonged to a stranger.

“No,” she said. “No stop it get back in-”

Her fingers curled. Her spine bowed. Gold flooded her eyes and something that was not Elara Voss dragged her, screaming, backward across the flagstones away from me – and for one second, one single second, my wolf looked at me

out of another woman’s face.

Vess, Sable said.

Then Elara’s hands closed around her own throat, and I realized they were fighting for the body, and that my wolf was

losing.

“SABLE!” I fought the chains until the silver cut to bone. “SABLE, COME BACK, COME BACK-” 

The east wall of the Hollow came apart.

Not the door. The wall – two hundred years of stone blowing inward in a wave of noise and dust that put out every candle at once, and through the gap came a white light so cold it turned the smoke blue.

Hunt–light. Silver arc lamps. The thing wolves see once.

A silhouette stood in the hole with the moon behind him and a rifle broken open over his forearm.

“VESPER.”

Dust and freezing air poured over the stone, and I started to laugh, and the laugh turned into a sob.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad, she’s in someone-” 

Boots. A lot of boots, moving in the dark, no voices at all. That’s the part people never believe about the Pale Hunt. They

don’t shout.

And from the far doorway, shrill and cracking with panic, came my mate’s voice:

“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING IN MY HOLLOW?”