Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77952 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77952 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 390(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
“You’re giving me the muffin basket? I thought I was only getting that in your will.”
“Someone has to fill it with muffins,” she laughs. “Sugar isn’t my friend these days.” A pause. “When are you coming back?”
“After… some things settle here.” My voice dips. I don’t tell her about the battle or the danger I was in. I’d never hear the end of it. I can’t tell her about Nixon, Reed, and Finn and their true nature yet. There will come a time when I’ll have to if I want her to be a grandmother to Ahya, but that’ll be up to my wolves to decide. I won’t do anything to put their lives at risk. “Maybe next week? Finn offered to drive me. He’s the artistic one. You’ll like him.”
“I’ll like all of them,” she says dryly, “if they keep my girl safe and treat her right.”
“They do.”
“And they understand I’ll have questions,” she adds. “Pointed ones. Over coffee.”
I smile into the dark. “Deal.”
“And Scarlet?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t care if it’s one or three or a whole basketball team as long as you sound like this.” Her voice goes slow and sure. “Happy. You sound happy, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted for you.”
I press my hand flat over my sternum, where a new kind of warmth blooms. “I am.”
“Then call me when you have dates. Will you bring the baby?”
“Maybe not this time. She’s still small,” I say.
“Okay, tell me their names again?”
“Nixon. Reed. Finn.”
“Okay,” she says. In the background, pen scratches against paper. My mother, making a list of my big, good wolves. “It’s late, baby. You should sleep. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
When I end the call, the house seems different, like I opened a window and allowed two worlds touch for the first time. I tuck the phone under my pillow and inhale a new calm. Downstairs, the water runs again. Somewhere outside, an owl calls.
“This is our home,” I whisper. “This is our home.”
48
REED
I run through the forest like it belongs to me, my paws sinking to its moss-soft floor and jumping its ancient roots. The ache in my side is dulled now, a shadow of the pain that nearly ended me. Cami’s potions were bitter as sin, but I drank them without flinching, because I had no choice. The world wouldn’t have stopped turning because I bled all over it. I could fight or die.
I chose to fight.
My breath moves steadily and deeply, filling my lungs with life as my limbs stretch in time with the wind. The scent of pine and damp earth fills my nostrils. This is peace, or something close to it. But peace has edges now. War made sure of that.
I circle back to a place I haven’t visited since before the final battle. A grove by the cliffs, shadowed by rock and overgrown trees. This is where Aura hid. The woman who brought Ahya into the world disappeared like mist at sunrise.
Her scent is gone now. Rain washed it away long ago. But I remember it. She left more than a child behind. She left questions that no one can answer.
Does she wonder about Ahya? Does she think about the child who shifts between forms as easily as water slips through fingers? Does she lie awake in the dark and ache with regret? Or did she give Ahya up in her mind long before her body walked away?
I don’t know. I may never know.
But Scarlet? Scarlet has taken that child into her heart, wrapped her around the twins growing inside her, as if she were born to be her mother. And maybe she was. Fate is strange like that. The goddess’s plans are a constant source of mystery.
Scarlet’s love for Ahya is fierce and selfless, but it comes with a fragility I recognize, because if Aura ever returns, if she tries to reclaim what she abandoned, Scarlet’s heart could break.
The forest shifts around me. Quiet becomes stillness. Stillness becomes tension.
A cry rings out across the sky.
I lift my muzzle, curious.
It’s not a wolf.
It’s not a bear.
It’s not anything I’ve heard in my life.
A heavy rush of air follows, like sails snapping on an old ship, but faster, larger. I stop dead in my tracks, eyes scanning the tops of the trees that sway and bend, and the clouds that merge and blend as they drift into the horizon.
There’s nothing.
But there’s a scent in the air. Faint. Foreign. Burnt metal and ozone.
All that talk of dragons was nervous mouths painting myths with fear. I told myself they were wrong. That was panic talking. Ahya’s existence had suddenly made the impossible possible. But the age of monsters is over.
But what if it isn’t? What if those scouts saw something real.
What if the creature Cami feared was in the skies over Blackwood? What if it was never Gregory who summoned it… but something else? Something like Aura’s magic?