Epilogue
Mama sets down her carefully iced cake next to the letter we’ve just received.
“Ireland?” she asks, reading the sender’s address. “What have they got, a leprechaun problem?” She huffs and pushes it aside to make room for plates. A thump sounds upstairs, followed by swearing in French.
“Camille,” Mama shouts, “I didn’t ask for electric wiring in my house! I’ve done just fine with lamps until now. You’re going to burn the whole place down, and I’ll burn with it.”
Camille comes down the stairs with footsteps like an avalanche, then appears in the entry to the sitting room, grinning. “I’d never burn down a house unless I wanted to. Unrelated, what’s your address again, Inge? No reason.”
Inge sits back with a huff, crossing her arms over her chest. “I still don’t know why we invited Camille to join the agency.”
Maher scoots over to give Camille a spot beside him. “Because,” he says, “as we have discussed many times, we need a dedicated engineer and scientist if we’re going to devise new ways of dealing with old problems.” He frowns. “It’s not really leprechauns, is it?”
I shake my head. “The usual. A flurry of inexplicable deaths. Baffled local officials. Our reputation is spreading.”
“Much like a rash,” Camille says.
“I can do anything she can do,” Inge insists.
Maher leans forward, pinning Inge with his gaze. “Oh, would you like to tell us what, exactly, you can do and how you do it?”
Inge’s mouth flattens into a single sullen line.
“That’s what I thought.” Maher helps himself to a slice of cake.
Inge, as always, says nothing when prodded to explain what happened in Paris, and we leave it alone, as always.
Though I am desperate to know the full story of Maher’s riding through the streets of Paris on the back of wolf-Inge to beat us to the Palace of Electricity, people are entitled to their secrets.
I trust that in time she and Joren will let us into theirs.
Or not. It’s their decision. I don’t have to know who or what Inge is to know I can trust her. Just like I trust Maher, and Joren, and Mama, and even Camille. I’ve learned a lot about trust in the last year as I slowly undo the damage of trying so hard to earn the approval of an uncaring man.
I pick up the envelope and hold back a smile as I see who it’s addressed to. The Van Helsing Detective Agency. Not named after my father, but in spite of him. After all, he only studied.
We solve.
Though the cases we receive are often nearly as horrifying as when we were chasing the Watcher, we’re better at coping with it because we do it together, and because we have success after success rather than a grueling, unending hunt.
We’ve become what Dávid hoped we would be, and I’m sorry every day that he isn’t here with us. But I know he’d be proud.
Despite everything I’ve seen, I’m not certain I believe in an afterlife, but I know we don’t leave this world alone. Dávid took part of us with him, and we kept part of him here, and in that way we’re all infinite. Every contact leaves a trace, after all.
But some contact I’ll never get enough of.
Arms wrap around me from behind. A voice that has tormented and plagued and intrigued me for more than a decade now, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life, whispers, “What are we hunting today, Little Fox?”