Chapter 80: Hollow
Chapter 80
White Stone Pack
Past two in the morning, the forest that cradles White Stone holds its breath. No patrols pass this way. No pups sneak out for dares. Tonight the trees themselves seem to lean closer, listening.
Deep under a rib of rock, a narrow slit in the hillside opens into a cavern—dry, echoing, old. Five elders of White Stone gather there, lanterns pooled at their boots, faces a map of months without sleep. They look gaunt. Clothes hang looser than they did a season ago. Knuckles are chapped. Eyes are ringed with the kind of darkness that never lifts, even at noon.
They wait in the low light, murmuring because to speak loudly feels like calling down another problem. They are waiting for someone—everyone knows who.
Footsteps scuff at the mouth of the cave. Aunt Linda appears first, thinner than she ought to be, shoulders tight from doing the work of three wolves for too long. Beside her, leaning an arm across Linda’s back, shuffles Nana.
The pack witch is smaller than memory lets her be, but when she lifts her head the room straightens. Aunt Linda helps her to a boulder smoothed by years. Nana sits. Her breath is shallow; her gaze is not.
The meeting begins the way these things always do now—in careful voices, as if saying any one thing too loudly will make ten more crack open.
They talk through shortages. Through rosters. Through every scrap of solution that has already been tried twice and failed three times. Voices overlap.
The calm fades away quickly.
"I can’t have him just—just come to fix electricity!" Elder Maren snaps, words tripping over his temper.
"Do you know how many places have holes in the walls?!" His palm slaps the ledger. Dust puffs up like breath.
Across from him, Elder Vane’s jaw works, the tendon standing out in his neck.
"We need more healthy young wolves with these recent vampire attacks," he bites off, each word measured because the head of security never wastes breath.
"Perimeter sightings are up. We’re repelling, but the pressure is constant. I can’t be everywhere, and I can’t split a guard three ways."
It rolls downhill from there. The cave fills with a knot of voices—hunger thinned, anger sharp. The few able-bodied wolves are stretched across ten problems, and every solution steals strength from somewhere else. The food stocks are thin. The fields go untended unless someone is dragged from a repair crew to hoe and harvest. Pups eat first, then the elderly, then everyone else argues over what’s left. Even wolves can grow hollow if the pack stays hollow too long.
"Enough," Nana says, and the word strikes like a staff on stone. The chorus breaks into single breaths.
"Quit acting like pups," Aunt Linda adds, voice clipped, tired, but iron.
"Act like the elders you are." Her gaze moves from face to face until shoulders drop and jaws unclench.
"Make a timetable," she continues. "Divide the young men. Rotate crews. If one post is overrun, you pull from another. We are not going to survive if each of you hoards your piece and lets the rest of the weave tear."
They grumble. Begrudging nods pass around like a cup of bitter medicine.
On the far wall, Elder Stellan has been silent. He leans back as if the stone behind him is the only thing keeping him upright, arms folded, eyes unfocused in that way that means he is past fury and now lives in its echo.
"Elder Stellan, you have not said anything all meeting," Mr. Kesari prompts, gentler than he intends.
Stellan exhales through his nose. He pushes off the wall and stands because sitting won’t hold the weight he is carrying.
"What do you want me to say?" he asks, each word wrenched, the tired in him loud.
"Alric is going to kill us all. Mr. Kesari there—" he points, not unkindly, "—almost all his equipment is sold off."
He lifts his hand and sweeps the circle.
"Our houses are falling apart because Aunt Linda is maxed out the pups are wreaking havoc in our homes, and Maren here can’t fix them because he lacks manpower. His manpower goes to Elder Vane because of the constant vampire attacks, but Vane can’t even defend because they’re being dragged to the fields by that bastard Lichen."
The name spits out like grit. Everyone knows Lichen is Alric’s shadow, the one who "organizes" labor with a smile that never reaches his eyes.
Stellan’s voice does not rise. That makes it worse.
"The younger pups can’t go to school because they’re forced to work to fill the shortage. And I can’t pay anyone scraps because I was the first to be run dry by Alric." He looks at Kesari again, and there is no blame in it—only bleak agreement.
He spreads his hands, palms up, nothing in them.
"The wolves are starving. They are broke. Our buildings are falling apart. And what’s the point?" His throat clicks.
"Alric brought in these bastards—this so-called mercenary pack—to ’fend off’ the vampires with outrageous prices. They walk our lands, take priority, demand whatever they want, and for what? We still find a dead wolf weekly." He swallows, jaw locking.
"Sometimes at the far edges. Sometimes closer."
The words land like stones in shallow water. No one argues. There is nothing to argue. The silence that follows is heavy as wet cloth.
It is Vane who breaks it. He never pleads, and yet his voice does now.
"Nana... is there anything? Ask the ancestors. The spirits. Anything." He looks at his shaking hands as if surprised to see them tremble.
"My daughter is expecting a couple of pups soon. I can’t do this to them.Bring them into this life."
Other voices join—quieter fears, practical questions. How long can the perimeter hold on this rotation? How many sacks of grain are actually left? Who can be spared and from what?
"Enough," Nana says again, softer, and the cave leans toward her.
"Remember," she says, looking into the lantern light as if it threads through time, "the goddess never not gives us a way out. I told Eamon this would happen if he stepped down." Tired breath leaves her; the conviction remains.
"I am older now," she goes on. "The vampires are attacking because my wards are not as strong as they used to be."
No one contradicts that; they have all felt the edges thinning.
"I have an apprentice, but she’s not yet ready."
She lays her palm on the rock beside her as though feeling the pulse of the land through it.
"There is only one solution here. Bring home the true alpha of the pack—not the spineless idiot currently cosplaying as one."
The word spineless rings off the walls like a slap. Even Aunt Linda’s mouth twitches.
"True alpha?" Elder Maren asks, blinking as if the idea is a shape he recognizes but hasn’t looked at straight on. The lines in his forehead deepen.
Nana turns her head and pins him.
"Seriously, are you idiots?"
The insult is flat as a fact.
"Do you think it’s a coincidence that Eamon had a daughter? An omega daughter? And her mate is an alpha—an alpha wolf who coincidentally has no pack?" She taps the boulder twice, the rhythm of an old lesson.
"These are all pieces of a larger picture."
Silence again. Not empty—bristling. The elders glance at one another, each seeing the same truth assemble from scraps they have been ignoring because hope is a dangerous thing to hold.
"But are they not in the human world?" Aunt Linda asks at last, voice low, cautious.
"My daughter showed me an article about them. That’s miles and miles away."
"Yeah," Stellan adds, hands cutting the air once.
"Not to mention, my son and daughter-in-law tried to escape, but they couldn’t. We’re trapped. They patrol the woods all the time."
"And who’s to say they’ll agree to come back here?" Mr. Kesari asks, and his fingers tighten around the ledger as if it could shield him from the answer. "Comfort there. This here."
"I know I wouldn’t," Stellan mutters, and a few tired chuckles slip out because gallows humor is still humor. It lifts nothing and yet it helps.
Nana does not smile. "I don’t know if they will," she says simply. "But this is the only way out."
The cave breathes in as one and holds it.
"I’ll ask my son," Stellan says first.
"He’s fast. Cunning." He looks at Vane.
"I’ll ask my son too," Vane answers, the decision settling onto him like armor he knows well. "In case they bump into vampires." He keeps the word clean and unemotional, a problem to be met, not a nightmare to be named.
"And one of my teachers is a human," Mrs. Greer adds, speaking up from the quiet she has kept until now. The head of the college looks pale, but her eyes are steady.
"He often left to the human world when he was younger. He would be needed as a guide."
"We need a distraction," Vane says, already inside the shape of the operation, eyes narrowing at routes only he can see.
"Leave that to me," Maren replies without bravado, only grim competence. "If I have to pull boards off every house I just patched to make enough noise at the south break, I will."
"Do it without putting pups in harm’s way," Aunt Linda says, and that is the only line no one will cross.
Nana shifts, and Aunt Linda steadies her. The witch looks smaller again now that the course is chosen. "The goddess opens paths," she murmurs. "She does not drag us through them."
They fall into logistics—who leaves when, which trailheads still have cover, where Nana’s thinning wards are thickest and where they are only a skin over bone. They speak in present tense because there is no room anymore for futures that never come.
When there is nothing left to say that can be said inside a cave, the elders begin to rise. Boots scrape. Lanterns lift. The circle loosens but does not break.
They file out into the dark, each elder swallowed by the same trees, to carry the same fragile plan along different paths.
Behind them, the cave goes quiet, holding the echo of a future spoken aloud for the first time.
Far away, under a different sky, an omega with white curls turns in her sleep beside the alpha who hasn’t yet chosen a crown. The goddess, if she is watching, does not blink.