Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Are you sure your fellows are okay working with us?” Gudarīks accompanied Johanna while she finished stringing her trip wires, leaving Astrid with Suri and the drone.
“What, are you afraid they’ll attack you or something?” Johanna teased, winding wire around a tree trunk. “Can you even be hurt?”
“I’m more concerned about Astrid, and how they’ll react to her.”
The forest ranger sobered. “I’ve been slowly acclimating my colleagues to the idea of her and what she’s capable of—all a part of my long-term succession plan. I don’t have children and no one familial left who’s equally committed to the forest or has an interest in keeping peace between humans and the supernatural. I don’t want the other rangers to fear her, but they can’t be blind to the truth either if they’re to one day take my job.”
“You’re Astrid’s best friend. No one can replace you.”
A heaviness settled over Johanna’s shoulders. She set down the wire. “I’m in my fifties,” she said. “That’s half my life gone, at best. Astrid will outlive me ten times over. I’ve known her since she was a little girl, was there as she grew up, and yet I’ll be but a blip in her history when it’s all said and done. As much as I wish I didn’t have to plan for retirement, someone will replace me. Many, in fact, will have to.”
The steepest price of longevity was losing loved ones. That agony never faded, and while one could learn to live with it, or suppress it in memory’s deep caverns, it changed a being. Astrid had seemed excited about the vast possibility immortality granted when they last spoke on the subject, but had she considered the casualties of time? In just a few short decades, she’d bury her friends. And who could say how much life was left in Perchta? Or himself? Would she have to bury them, too?
Immortality never felt like the guarantee it was meant to be. Not for him. There were far, far older things than himself in the grand scheme of the universe, things that always were. Gudarīks had a beginning. Surely, that meant an end, as well.
“You’ll take care of her, right?” Johanna asked, voice watery. She cleared her throat forcefully, as if to will strength where there was none. “She’ll need a constant.”
So much worry and heartache in those words. Absent from them was all the stern reservation Johanna had when they’d met. He couldn’t be sure he’d fully proven himself, but the forest ranger at least recognized that he cared deeply about her friend.
One thing was clear to him—Astrid would take this human’s passing hard.
Whatever doubts he harbored about his own lifespan, he would not let his Hexe suffer the hardship of losing her loved ones alone. He’d seen the powerful force of sheer will again and again in humans, and if that was all he had, he’d stretch life’s threads for as long as Astrid needed him to.
“There’s Perchta, of course,” Johanna continued, taking his contemplative silence for hesitation. “And the witch loves her something fierce, but those two are quite independent when left to their own devices. They’ve gone for months without talking before, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that evolved to into years or decades or...”
He placed his hand on her shoulder, a long-forgotten ache yawning in his chest. Sympathy, sorrow, connection. The forest ranger swiped at her eyes before looking up at him, startled. “I’ll take care of her,” he promised.
Fresh, silent tears streaked down her cheeks, but Johanna didn’t wipe these ones away, opting to place her hand on top of his instead. “Thank you.”