They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 13

They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. Chapter 13

He was dying.

The mine’s healer was very apologetic about calling. Severance sickness, he said. One in forty cases. The wolf simply refuses – refuses to eat, refuses to shift, refuses. Kael Draven had been on a feeding tube for six weeks and his wolf had

gone quiet in the way they only see at the end.

“He’s asked to see you,” the healer said. “I told him it was inappropriate. He’s asked eleven times since.”

“Is there a request in writing?”

“There is. He wants to make a statement first. Under witness.”

I looked out the window. Wren was upside down over my father’s shoulder on the lawn, shrieking with laughter, while Nyx

filmed it.

“I’ll come Thursday,” I said.

I went alone. My father put up a fight about that and lost, which almost never happens.

They’d put him in a chair by the window because he couldn’t hold himself up in a bed. He was thirty–eight and he looked seventy. The silver had eaten the color out of his hair and the muscle off his frame, and his hands lay in his lap like things washed up on a beach.

He didn’t know me for a second.

Then he did, and he tried to stand, and couldn’t, and started to cry.

“You came,” he whispered.

I sat down across from him. I didn’t take off my coat.

“Say what you called me for.”

He looked at me a long time. And whatever he had rehearsed for two years, he didn’t use any of it.

“I knew,” he said.

“Knew what?”

“About the girl in the woods. I checked the field logs in the first year.” His mouth twisted. “I knew by our second summer that it was you and not her. I kept her anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because you knew who I’d been,” he said. “You pulled me out of that trap. You paid for the valley. You saw every ugly thing in me and you stayed, and every time you looked at me I saw the boy in the trap.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “And she looked at me like I was a god. That’s all it was, Vess. I burned your life down and killed my own son for it and that is the entire reason. There isn’t

a better one underneath.”

sat with that.

Six years. A wolf. An altar, Because a man preferred the version of himself that was a lie.

“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” he said. “I know what I did. I’ve had seven hundred nights alone with it. Every one of them I’m on that stone and I hear you say he hasn’t moved since one, and I walk out, and I can’t stop myself, and I get to do it again tomorrow.”

He pushed a folder across the table with a shaking hand.

Everything left in his name. Two mineral patents from the early days that had survived the bankruptcy – the good ones, worth more now than the pack had ever been – assigned in full to my son, in an irrevocable trust, with a clause barring him and any relative of his from ever making contact.

He’d written the no–contact clause himself. Made the lawyer put it in first.

“He never has to know my name,” he said. “I’m not asking to be his father. I’m not asking to be anything. I just-

His voice came apart.

“I want him to have one thing from me that isn’t harm.”

I read every page. Twice. Then I signed as trustee and slid it back.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Kael.”

He looked up.

“Her name was Sable,” I said.

He made a sound like something tearing.

“You never asked. Six years, and you gave her away without ever once asking what she was called.” I stood and buttoned my coat. “She spent the last four minutes of her life keeping another woman’s hands off your son. Now you know her name, and you can be alone with that too.”

I got to the door.

“Vess.”

I stopped, but I didn’t turn.

“You were never dull,” he said. “You were the whole sky. I just wanted to be looked at by someone who didn’t know what I really was.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the part I’ll never understand.”

I walked out.

He died nine days later, in the night, alone.

They asked if I wanted the body.

I thought about the man who fenced two hundred acres so I’d have somewhere safe to run. And the man who lit two hundred candles for a woman he was about to open.

“Bury him next to his mother,” I said. “Not on my ridge. Never near my ridge.”

Then I hung up, went out onto the lawn, and let a two–year–old bury me in leaves until the sun went down.