41. Epilogue
“Truly?” Innocence said with a scoff, burrowing deeper into his absurd fur coat, two-sizes too large at the very least.
“Never heard someone bitch so fucking much,” Gunnar offered, tugging Audrey closer to him, who giggled against him.
“Please,” Innocence said, sniffing. “All of you, barbarians.” He gave Audrey the side-eye. “My sympathies to your cold extremities, dearest.”
Tomas laughed, finishing his lap around the stakes and ropes set up about fifty feet from Gunnar and Audrey’s cabin—which extended in the opposite direction with markers for their expansion.
“It’s really not that cold today,” the kid offered, grinning ear to ear when Innocence waved him off, grimacing.
“You’d better make it worth walking all the way up here,” the incubus sneered, flippant, and he turned and headed down the rails toward the station.
“It won’t be done for a few weeks yet!” Tomas called, still laughing, and Innocence flipped him off and kept right on walking. After watching him depart, Tomas looked back at them, his expression hesitant.
Gunnar rolled his eyes. “Told you eight fucking times already. It’s fine.” He pointed north. “Your parcel swings wide, but it makes sense to keep the houses close up on this end. The chuchuna are just over the hill the other direction.”
“I know, I just . . .” Tomas looked to Audrey, who only smiled, her scent pleased—just how Gunnar liked it.
“It will also make it easier to keep up your lessons,” she offered. “For reading and for processing.” She shrugged against Gunnar, warm. He liked that too. “That way you don’t have to drag your kills farther than needed either, since you’ll be using our supplies while you learn.”
“But why?” Tomas asked, earnest as he was in everything. Gunnar wondered, now and then since Mateo’s death, if he’d only ever saw the kid as a threat because of his so-called brother. Completely healed from the blood madness, Tomas’s scent radiated nothing but hope. And gratitude.
Audrey glanced up at a Gunnar, her nose wrinkled.
Cute, she wanted him to answer. Pain in the ass.
“Because you deserve the chance, and my woman here can’t do anything by halves.” She pinched his stomach, but he ignored her. “Not a lot of us get that, so don’t fuck it up.”
“Jonathan!” Audrey laughed as she moved away from him, shaking her head. He just grinned at her. “I’m going to make lunch. Lyubava and Zhadan are coming by with the cubs. Do you want to join us?”
“Okay, sure,” Tomas said, smiling now. Audrey headed off, and Gunnar watched her go but felt Tomas’s eyes on him.
“What’s on your mind?”
Tomas shouldered up next to him, gaze wandering by their cabin, the stakes that marked where he’d make a home, and the chuchuna family trudging through the fresh snow.
“I don’t know, just worrying, I think.”
“Anything in particular?”
He scratched at his nose, adjusted his scarf and hat. Gunnar needed to work on all the kid’s ticks, get him less twitchy, but it would come with time. Found he didn’t mind it, the idea of helping Tomas find his stride. He’d fit in well here, and the right things drove him; he wanted to protect Innocence, protect the place he called home, same as the rest of them out here on the taiga.
“Kushiel was important in the ESC.”
“Important period, yeah.”
“What’s going to happen about that?” Tomas glanced up at him, concerned and open.
The dead angel buried in the leshy’s forest, he meant.
Gunnar shrugged, because he didn’t know. None of them did, not yet. “We have a connection with the Citadel, the archivist who helped change the Vilestars Accord.”
“The one Audrey worked with, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the fucker.” Gunnar smirked when Tomas choked out a laugh. Then he sobered, fixing his gaze to the sky, clear and wide. For now. “We’ll see what he thinks. Something’ll come, no doubt.”
Tomas nodded, crossing his arms again, straightening his spine a bit. “Guess we’ll need to be ready then, whatever comes.”
“Yeah,” Gunnar drawled. “We will.”