Aaron
Another Six Months Later—The Glen
Ireach across the bed for her before I’m even awake, and my hand lands on empty sheets. I sit up. The other side’s been slept in and left, the light still thin in the windows, and I drag a hand down my face and tell myself not to do this. She didn’t leave.
But the thought’s already in me, stupid and familiar, sinking its teeth in deep. Did she leave me? Did she finally take a clear-eyed look at this life I talked her into and change her mind?
I’ve watched her be happy here. She laughs in our kitchen, nurses our son before dawn, curls into my side every night—and none of it stops the animal part of me from bracing for the morning she wakes up and remembers everything she gave away to be here.
Then the door eases open and she comes in with him on her hip, and everything in me goes quiet at once. Mara, in her nightgown and the robe she never bothers to tie, her hair loose, her tail swaying behind her.
Just the sight of her puts me back together. She crosses to me with the cub, and the room fills with them—honey, warm skin, that milky-sweet newborn smell.
“You’re up early,” she says.
I reach for the cub, both hands already going for him. “Here, let me—“
“No.” She shifts him out of my reach, easy. “I’ve got it.”
She climbs onto the mattress one-handed, careful, and settles back against the headboard. I scoot in close and look at my son. Mother Fate, he gets me every time. Lucian.
He’s got my eyes, dark and serious, watching the world like he’s already taking notes on it. But his mother’s in him too—a pair of rounded lion’s ears tucked into his curls, a little tail that won’t hold still, curling and uncurling against Mara’s arm. A hybrid.
The future king of the Glen, half warlock and half lion, and not one soul here has so much as blinked at it. They love him exactly as he is—they line up to.
Mara works her breast free of her nightgown, and he’s rooting for it before she’s done, frantic, latching on with a greedy little sound.
“Lucian.” She laughs down at him. “Easy, boy.”
I can’t help grinning. I lean my shoulder into hers and watch him eat. It’s so good it aches.
Mara catches me looking and rolls her eyes. “I have been here six months, Aaron.” She says it fond, her thumb stroking circles on his back. “I delivered our cub in this very room. And you still wake up every morning sure I’m going to be gone.”
“Sorry,” I say. She’s got me there.
She rubs Lucian’s back while he feeds, and when I lean in to get my face closer to the two of them, her tail comes around and pops me in the back of the head.
“Ah—damn.” I rub the spot.
“That wasn’t me.” She keeps her eyes on Lucian. “That was her.”
“Alright.” I glare at the tassel, hovering now, pointed straight at me. “I see how it is.”
I scoot in closer anyway, one hand still on the back of my head, then give up on dignity altogether and lie down with my head in her lap. I look up at the two of them—my son’s jaw working, my woman looking down at me with her whole face gone soft.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“I’m trying to calm down.” I close my eyes, then open them on her. “You walked into the Glen with me, baby. You walked in and never once looked back. I keep waiting to understand it, and I never do.”
Lucian’s tail finds my face and starts batting at my nose, little taps, and I let him. I’d let that cub do anything.
Mara’s free hand drifts down to flick his tail gently away, then stays, stroking down the side of my face, warm—her grown king, sprawled in her lap getting beat up by a baby.
“I’m glad you got it ready for us,” she says. “The Glen. I think it would’ve been harder, coming into the dead version of it.” Her eyes hold mine. “You gave us somewhere whole to start.”
I roll onto my side and press a kiss to her belly, where our son grew, then leave my mouth there before I look back up at her.
“I want another one,” I tell her. “I mean it. The whole thing, start to finish, with none of the distance this time. I want to be there for all of it. I want to watch you grow round with our baby and not miss a single day.”
“Ohhh.” She laughs, tipping her head back. “I am taking a break, sir.”
“Fair enough.” I catch her hand off my cheek and kiss the center of it.
“Besides.” There’s a new light in her eyes, the look she gets when she’s been sitting on a secret. “Ellie says I can teach. Interspecies studies, at the Academy. The witches and warlocks are practically begging for it.” Her tail gives a pleased little flick. “They want me, Aaron.”
I sit up so fast Lucian loses the rhythm and fusses, and the wrong words are halfway out of my mouth before I can catch them. “You’re a queen, baby, you don’t have to—“
Her tail flicks up, the tassel aimed dead at me.
“—of course.” I choke on the rest of it and start over, quick, since I’d like to live. “Of course you should. I think it’s brilliant. The best idea anyone’s had all year.”
“It would be good for them, having me there,” she says, letting me off the hook. “And good for Lucian. He needs to watch how we live among our people, not above them. He needs to see it’s something you do with your hands, not something you sit on a throne and announce.”
“You never stop amazing me,” I tell her.
“So.” She shifts Lucian to her other side, my girl. “While you’re off figuring out what to do about Henry and keeping Wintermoon in one piece, I’ll be right here, getting our son ready for the day this whole realm is his.”
I lean in and kiss her, nothing behind it but everything I’ve got. “I love you,” I say against her lips. “You know that? I don’t say it enough for how much I mean it. You’re the whole reason any of this exists, all of it.”
“I know.” Her forehead comes down on mine.
“I love you too, Aaron. I chose you. I’d choose you again right now, today, knowing every hard part coming.
” She pulls back just enough to look at me, her thumb moving over my cheekbone.
“You made an honorable king, just like they all said you would.” Then, firmer: “So stop bracing for me to leave. I’m not going anywhere, Aaron. This is my home now too.”
That undoes me, and I have to kiss the top of my son’s head just to have somewhere to put it.
Lucian finally pulls off her with a sigh far too dramatic for someone his size. Mara tucks herself back into her nightgown and slumps against the pillows.
“This boy.” She yawns, wide. “Always hungry. Every hour of the day and half the night. I swear he gets that from you.”
“Give him here.” I’m already reaching, gathering him in, that warm sturdy weight settling against my chest. “Sleep in. I’ve got him from here. You’ve earned a few hours, baby.”
“But—“ she blinks up at me, losing the fight as her eyes go heavy.
I lift him off her and Lucian squeals once in protest, a sharp little sound of betrayal—he’s a mama’s boy down to the bone. Then he gets a lungful of me, coffee and sandalwood and home, and the protest drains right out of him. He goes heavy and boneless against my shoulder, burrowing in.
“Come on, Lucian.” I press my lips to his curls, between his ears. “You can help me be king today.”
“But,” Mara murmurs again, already half-gone, her hand brushing my arm before it falls away.
I’m out the door before she finishes the word, my son drooling contentedly on my collarbone.
Ellie’s coming down the hall toward me, and I lift my chin at her. “Morning, Ellie.”
She stops and bows her head, and when she straightens she doesn’t say my lord. She says, “Aaron.”
I about trip over my feet. Six months I’ve been begging this woman, and there it is, dropped into a hallway.
“I was just coming to send for you,” she goes on, fighting a smile. “You’ve got a guest. In your study.”
“This early?” I shift Lucian higher. “Who?”
“A vampire.”
That stops me. “Is it Kade?”
Ellie shakes her head, and I’m already running back through the short list of anyone who’d dare it. “Then what vampire just strolls into the Glen uninvited and—“ I stop. There’s only one I can think of who’d manage it, and the tension goes right out of me.
Ellie’s already wiggling her fingers at Lucian, reaching. I hand him over slower than I need to.
“I wanted some father-son time today,” I tell her.
“And you’ll get it.” She tucks him into the crook of her arm, and the traitor goes without a fight. “Let me get him bathed and into clean clothes first. He smells of sour milk.”
I look at my son one more time—that small face, those serious dark eyes blinking up at me—then I groan and let him go and start jogging down the stairs.
I find Josiah in my study, standing in front of the painting.
He’s waving at it. Little fingers opening and closing. “Hi, Eric,” he’s saying, pleasant as anything. “I know you’re in there. I do hope you’re enjoying watching your grandson grow up into everything you’ll never get to touch.”
“How’d you know he’s in there?”
Josiah shrugs, one shoulder. “I know a Dorian Gray when I see one.”
That pulls a snort out of me. “You’re ridiculous, Jo.”
He turns, and those red eyes warm when they land on me. “Hi, brother.”
I cross the room and pull him into a hug, clapping him on the back. “Hey, Jo. What’s up?”
“Oh, not much.” He steps back, hands sliding into his pockets. “Still hunting Henry. He’s slippery.”
“Still can’t find him?”
“I will.” No doubt in it. “Soon. But that’s not why I came.” Something passes over his face, and the easy goes out of it. “There’s something wrong with Queen Anora.”
I give him a strange look. “Anora?”
“She has a dark prophecy hanging over her. You knew that.” He tilts his head. “She’s born of dark magic, Aaron. I’ve been wondering how long a soul can carry that much before the weight of it caves them in.”
“I know it.” I move to the hearth and bring up a flame with a thought, mostly to have something to do with my hands.
“Dark magic, what it does to a witch or a warlock. There’s a despair that comes off it, this bottomless thing, and underneath, it’s sweet.
That’s the trap. It’s a drug, Jo. Taste real power like that, and the part of you that wanted to be good starts negotiating. ”
“I understand madness.” Josiah says it simply. “I still live in it. Every day. So believe me when I tell you Anora is going to be a far bigger problem than Henry ever was. And she’s going to be it soon.”
I turn it over, and it lines up into something ugly. “Is that why Amir’s been so eager to hand down his throne? He’s not tired of ruling. He’s trying to get out from under her before the prophecy comes due.”
Josiah doesn’t answer. His silence is loud enough.
“I don’t know that I can fight two evils at once,” he says instead, and for once there’s something almost human in his face, close to fear.
“One, I can do all day. But Henry on one side and Anora on the other, both at full strength...” He shakes his head.
“That’s the math where I lose, brother.” He tips his head toward me. “Unless we had an army.”
A grin spreads across my face. “An army, you say?”
He smiles back at me, curious, and I hold out my hand. “Come on. Let me show you what I’ve been cooking up out here while you all thought I was just playing house.”
Josiah takes my hand. I pull the world thin and take us to the field.
It opens up around us, miles of it, the wide flat training ground I carved out past the eastern wall, and whatever Josiah came here to say, he loses it.
Hundreds of them. Thousands, if I’m honest, witches and warlocks ranged across the grass in formation, casting in unison, light cracking off their hands in disciplined waves, the air full of the roar of magic. All those years they spent forgetting how to fight. I gave them a reason to remember.
When they catch sight of me at the edge of the field, the front line goes down. It ripples back from there, rank after rank dropping to a knee, heads bowing, until every soul on that field is kneeling in the grass with their faces turned to the ground.
Josiah stares. “Oh, my.” He looks out over them, then back at me. “You didn’t just bring the Glen back from the dead, Aaron. You forged the whole place into a weapon.”
I bow my head to my people, and they rise as one and turn back to their work.
“When you need me,” I tell Josiah, watching them, “you call on me. That’s all. You, Layla, Wintermoon, everyone Amir’s trying to protect, none of you has a single thing to fear as long as I’m standing. I can promise you that much.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. He just stands beside me and watches the army move.
And standing there, with Jo on one side and a realm full of saved people on the other, I think about the lost kid I used to be. The one who built his whole life around a beautiful, rotten man who never once wanted him, who would’ve burned down the world for one drop of the wrong kind of love.
I think about how far I had to be dragged to get here, and everyone who did the dragging.
My mother, who never stopped fighting for me even when I gave her nothing back.
Eric, who taught me exactly what kind of man I refused to become.
Jacob, who was the father I had the whole time, even when I couldn’t see it.
Wintermoon, that gave me a place to stand.
And Mara. Always, underneath all of it, Mara. The one who looked at the worst of me and stayed, and kept staying until it made me into someone worth it.
“Tell me,” Josiah says, quiet, his eyes still on the field. “What’s it like? Being a father?”
The question catches me off guard, coming from him.
“It’s a blessing, man. The best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I hold my hand out to him one more time.
“Come on. Would you like to hold him?”
Josiah looks at my hand, then at me, and something old and tired in his face eases.
“It would be an honor, brother.”
He takes my hand, then stops, his grip tightening before we go. “Wait. Does Angie know? Amir? Kade and Damon?” His gaze sweeps back over the army before it returns to me, and I just grin at him. The realization dawns across his face—I came to him first, trusted him with this before any of them.
Then I take us out, gone all at once.
The End.