Epilogue #2
“Ink like we talked about at Blacks a few days ago.”
North lifted a brow.
Bolt jerked his thumb toward the street. “We can go back to Anchor & Ink where we popped our virgin tat cherries.”
Fly looked at North grinning. “Geezus, Bolt.”
North looked back.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
Then Fly pushed off the wall.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Let’s do it.”
Bolt clapped his hands once. “Good. Ink waits for no man.”
They started down the sidewalk toward their car, neon buzzing overhead, the ocean a dark presence at their backs.
Fly fell into step beside North, close enough to catch him if he went down, but careful not to touch.
He didn’t trust the ground anymore, and judging by the look in North’s eyes, neither did he.
The tattoo shop was tucked off a side street, all low light and humming machines, the air sharp with antiseptic and ink. The artist didn’t ask many questions. He studied the designs, nodded once, and got to work like this was just another kind of oath being marked.
Fly watched the needle bite into the inside of his left wrist, felt the sting bloom sharp and precise. It hurt but not in a way he wanted to flinch from. This pain had shape. Purpose. When it was done, the skin around the ink was red and tender, the lines still dark and fresh.
He wrapped it carefully, flexed his hand once.
North weathered his tattoo in the same way. Quiet and reflective. When it was finished, just above his heart, Fly breathed easier. This was something they shared so profoundly. “Man, this means so much. Thank you for sharing the idea and going through with it. I know it wasn’t easy.”
North nodded, rubbing at his temples. “My headache actually feels better.”
Bolt’s mouth compressed through the ink scoring his back, but Fly really loved the symbolism of what the lightning meant to him. Some of the nausea receded at the thought of brotherhood.
They didn’t say much on the ride back. The hotel loomed huge and ostentatious, a luxury accommodation that Fly insisted on because this was the calm before the storm of service, and who knew when they would even get a hot meal and shower afterward.
North and Fly shared a suite, a connecting door leading to the room Fly had comped for Shamrock and Bolt. The arrangement felt right, close enough to hear each other if needed, far enough to breathe.
Bolt disappeared into his room with a muttered goodnight. Shamrock lingered long enough to crack a half-smile at Fly, then followed.
Fly closed the door behind him and leaned back against it for a second, the day finally catching up.
His wrist throbbed faintly now, heat pulsing under the wrap. He lifted it, unwrapped it just enough to look. The hoop. The anchor. The star, the mountain, the feather. Simple. Permanent.
This one went deeper than skin.
He lay back on the bed, arm resting across his chest, careful not to jostle the fresh ink.
The room was quiet except for the muted sounds of the city outside and the low hum of the air conditioner.
North’s presence as he got ready for bed and got under the covers of the adjacent queen bed was a steady, familiar thing, like a wall that didn’t need to announce itself.
Fly stared at the ceiling for a while, thoughts slowing, then loosening their grip.
The ache in his wrist became rhythmic. Manageable.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep took him not all at once, but in layers, pain, memory, purpose folding in on themselves until there was nothing left to hold on to but breath.
The world was wrong. It wasn't the beach or the plains, but a place of sickly purple light and shifting shadows that moved like oil on water. Fly stood on a surface that felt like neither ground nor cloud, a strange, yielding substance that muffled his footsteps.
Something was happening to his body, a weightlessness that felt more like home than his own skin.
He cried out, something warping in him, something interfering.
A searing pain ripped through his shoulders and back as bones cracked and reshaped against their will, a brutal, tearing agony.
His wings exploded from his back with a wet, ripping sound, a storm of white and gray feathers unfurling in the muffled landscape.
They rustled, each feather a needle scraping against his nerves.
His face elongated, jaw and nose fusing and stretching forward into a sharp, wicked beak, the skin pulling taut and hardening.
A cry was torn from his throat, not his own voice, but the piercing shriek of a bird of prey, a sound so loud and sharp it seemed to cut through the oppressive silence of the dream world.
He cried out again, falling to his knees as his body contorted, the sense of being dragged into something he hadn't agreed to overwhelming him, something sacred and honored now violated and perverted.
While he writhed on the strange ground, his vision swimming with the purple haze, he saw North.
He wasn't whole. Part man, part something immense and heavy, with a dark, shaggy head and shoulders that seemed to bow under an invisible weight.
He was on his knees, too, his massive frame shuddering with the same violation, experiencing the very same thing.
Their eyes met across the expanse, and it was as if a circuit closed, a raw and electric connection forged in their shared torment.
Shock, cold and sharp, coursed through Fly.
North... he was here in this dream? With him?
The realization was a fresh horror, a confirmation that this nightmare wasn't his alone.
Something vast and formless, a shape of pure hunger and shadow, coalesced in the distance and began to reach for them both with tendrils of absolute cold. That's when he woke up.
His heart hammered against his ribs, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He turned to look at North in the other bed.
He was also sitting upright, his chest heaving, his face pale in the moonlight filtering through the window.
They simply stared at each other across the small space, a silent acknowledgment passing between them.
"Did you just..." Fly started, his voice hoarse and raw.
North ran his hands through his long hair, a gesture Fly knew meant he was trying to ground himself. "Yeah."
Fly nodded, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. "Did you..."
North's eyes found his, and for a moment, the usual calm was gone, replaced by a flicker of the same primal fear Fly felt. "Yeah. Something...dark."
North hissed at the same time Fly did. His chest was burning over his heart. He pulled off his shirt at the same time North did, reaching for the light. He looked down, a half-formed trident was etched into his skin.
He touched it, the sign of brotherhood both grounding him and scaring the fucking shit out of him.
“North? What’s going on?” Fly frowned and looked over at him. Just below his newly inked tattoo, the same broken trident was visible.
“Something happened to you out there on the water, didn’t it?”
Fly was shaking now, as if it was freezing in the room. “Ye-s–s. The wave. My insertion was right, then it wasn’t. I should have died out there. The physics were wrong. You?”
North nodded. “Yeah. The sand…the earth…it wasn’t there when I tried to hold.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait for the call.”
“How do you know there will be a call?”
North touched the trident. “We’re all connected.”
Future location of Turning Point Equine & Therapeutics and The Little Pink and Brown Dance Studio, Pungo, Virginia
Blair hadn’t meant to build an empire.
She’d meant to build something meaningful.
It started with substantial proceeds from Pink by Brown and fifty acres of raw Virginia land.
The structures were beyond saving, roofs sagging, boards split by weather and neglect.
She ordered them torn down without hesitation.
That suited her. She didn’t want to inherit someone else’s compromise.
Her vision was clean, matte olive green, blush pink, and crisp white.
Discipline and grace. Strength and softness.
Her brand would be woven into every beam and fence post.
She and Breakneck had walked every acre before they signed the papers, boots sinking into red clay, measuring slope and drainage with a glance, mapping pasture lines in her head.
He saw details she missed. Sightlines. Reinforcement points.
Wind direction across open fields. She saw possibility.
He saw protection. Together, it became something solid.
She wanted space for horses to move. For clients to breathe. For the girls in her academy to look up from the barre and see open sky instead of walls. Summer ballet camps were already forming in her mind, young feet learning balance in sand before stepping back onto polished floors.
Turning Point Equine & Therapeutics was never going to be a converted hobby barn. She refused to patch something together and call it purpose.
The fencing came first. Clean white lines cutting through green pasture like intention made visible. Break insisted on reinforcing every corner post himself.
“If we’re doing this, we do it right.”
She caught him once, palm resting against the wood, as if grounding himself in something permanent.
The barns rose next. Deep olive against the horizon, white trim sharp and deliberate.
She designed them from the ground up with therapy in mind, open ventilation, wider aisles, rubber footing, accessible mounting systems that allowed disabled clients dignity instead of struggle.
Even the stall nameplates carried a whisper of blush enamel, a subtle reminder that strength and grace lived side by side here.
She hired deliberately.
A licensed equine-assisted psychotherapist with combat trauma experience.
A farrier who didn’t flinch at scar tissue.
Two barn managers with patience baked into their bones.
She built the studio from scratch, too.