They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 10

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 10

They took him out of me at 4:06 in the morning on a stone slab under arc lights.

Three pounds, one ounce: Two months early, with four claw wounds a half inch from his spine.

He lived.

They told me three days later at the Ashgrave house, my father on one side of the bed and my sister rigid at the window with her back to me. He was in an incubator in the next room, furious about existing, and he had my mother’s eyes.

“Wren,” I said.

Because a wren is the smallest bird in the woods, and it sings loudest in winter.

Then I said, “And Sable?”

Nobody said anything.

Elara Voss went into Concord custody at six that morning and collapsed at nine. They cut my wolf out of her on a hospital gurney in a room full of strangers.

She lived four minutes outside a body.

She was eighteen years old. She was the one who taught me to run on four legs when I was eleven and couldn’t stop crying about my mother. She went quiet for six years when I gave up my name, and she came back for one night, and she spent it holding another woman’s hands off my son.

They brought me a jar of grey ash in a cedar box.

I didn’t scream. I lay there and looked at the ceiling for eleven hours and let something inside me quietly close like a fist.

And somewhere in the eleventh hour I understood what I actually was now.

Hollow. Wolfless. The thing Elara had been her whole life and hated me for not being. No shift, no moon, no second heartbeat, ever again.

Good, I thought.

Then there’s nothing left in me that can be taken.

I stayed in that house eleven weeks.

My father moved his entire operation into the east wing so he’d never have to leave the building. He learned to warm bottles. He made me soup every day, badly, and I ate all of it. He told me stories about my mother I’d never heard, and every one of them started with your mother would have killed him in the kitchen, so don’t feel bad about the delay.

Nyx put away her files and her jars. She walked the frozen garden with

me at dawn every morning with one hand hovering behind my back without ever touching, and told me jokes she had/ clearly researched, and they were terrible, and in week six I laughed at one and she had to go and stand behind a hedge for

while.

The mate bond didn’t break. That’s the part nobody warns you about.

It thinned to a wire, but it held, and through it I felt Kael Draven every single night – the panic, the terror, the sick lurching grief. Twice I woke gasping with the taste of his despair in my mouth.

Once, at 3 a.m., I felt him groping down the bond like a drowning man.

Vess. Vess, please. I know you can hear me.

I lay in the dark and let him feel exactly one thing back:

The eleven seconds when the hook went in.

The bond stayed quiet a long time after that.

Then, in the twelfth week, a courier came up the drive in Concord livery with a sealed envelope on a black tray.

My father read it and set it down on the breakfast table with a strange expression.

“Tribunal’s set,” he said. “Draven, the Voss woman, the mother, the Beta. Full Concord, open floor, human press admitted.” He looked up. “They’ve called you as the injured party. You don’t have to go, Vess. Not one soul in that room would blame

you.”

I looked out at the lawn, at the blanket spread in the pale sun with a very small boy shouting at a cloud.

“Get my mother’s coat out of the box,” I said.