Epilogue
Denver International Airport was a sprawling prairie city.
Cat smelled the familiar dry air when the plane door opened and felt herself relax.
She’d told herself New York would work, but flying out of there had felt so good.
And with Mateo’s contacts, they’d be back on the land in a couple of hours, and not the day and a half it had taken her to hitch a ride to a ski town to catch the bus to Denver.
When they climbed out of the plane, however, there was no magic car waiting to whisk them away.
Mateo rubbed his neck roughly as he looked around, the book dangling from one hand like it didn’t weigh at least ten pounds. “I forgot.”
“You forgot what?”
“To tell anyone I was coming.”
“So we have to walk to the terminal?” she asked as she eyed the distant white tented roof of the main concourse.
A head popped out from the plane, and the pilot, another Italian who could not have been a shifter given his skinny frame, said, “The tower is wondering if you all need a ride?”
Mateo groaned. “Matt took care of these details.”
She shook her head. “And you call me the new age hippy, when you just float through life.”
“I was a little occupied,” he said, and she blushed.
In minutes, a little golf cart was whizzing toward them as Mateo spoke with the pilot about renting a hangar here so that he could arrange a moving company to empty the plane and get it all up to Silver Spring.
It would go to the basement of the Double Thirteen house for now while they called an architect.
She realized she would spend this pregnancy building a house and gulped. She put a hand to her stomach. She didn’t feel any different, and she had expected to. Maybe the child in her mind was not a now thing? But she rarely got visions years into the future. She had to be close, right?
The cart, which was not for golf but one for driving luggage trains, dropped them off at rickety aluminum stairs to the concourse that were labeled employees only. They went through the steel door at the top.
Mateo looked around, shocked, clutching the precious book to his chest.
“What?” she asked.
“Is it always this busy?”
She looked around at the afternoon traffic. “This isn’t busy. When was the last time you were at an airport?”
“This morning, and when I flew home, and when I flew back, and when I flew to Taiwan last month, and—”
“I don’t mean at the airport in your private plane. I mean in the concourse of an airport.”
He shrugged. “I was flying to Massachusetts to go to college.”
“Right. Come on.”
From her most recent trip to New York, she knew the way out. Presumably, there would be some sort of vehicle to rent. She tried to adjust to not worrying about money, which felt vaguely wrong. That was another thing she was going to have to fix. Many people needed it way more than they did.
When they got on the tiny train to the main concourse, he hung onto her and breathed in her hair. She thought once they got outside of baggage claim and into the fresh air, he would do better, but the moment they left the airport, he tensed.
“We’re almost there. It’s going to be okay.”
“No. I smell a wolf.”
He scanned the milling people, but her eyes were immediately drawn to a mop of red hair, and she gasped.
He tried to shove her behind him, but she wouldn’t let him. “Annie?”
“Wolf,” Mateo said. “The one from the woods.”
Cat hauled him through the crowds to her sister, who jumped out of her skin when she noticed them.
“What are you doing here?” Cat asked as a large hand landed on Annie’s shoulder, and they both looked up at the blond wolf from the other pack in Silver Spring. He was dressed in rough, homemade clothes and had a battered suitcase that looked like it came out of the seventies next to him.
“I mean no harm. I mean to protect her,” the wolf said roughly.
“Good,” Mateo said. “Because you know what would happen if you don’t.”
“Felix would never hurt me,” Annie said.
“Felix,” Cat echoed. How long had this been going on? When did they meet? Was she secretly in love with a werewolf this whole time? She bit her lip as instinctive questions rose in her mind and recognized that she would sound like the twins if she asked any of them.
“Where are you going?” Cat asked.
Annie giggled. It wasn’t a happy sound.
“Turns out you need identification to ride on an airplane,” Felix said slowly.
Cat frowned. “Don’t you have an ID? Driver’s license? Anything?”
He shook his head. “My family didn’t believe in that.”
“The concept of identity documents?” Mateo asked doubtfully.
“Right.”
“Take the plane,” Mateo said.
Cat looked at him and then clutched Annie’s hands. “That’s right! You can go anywhere. They won’t ID you in private. Well, if you don’t have a passport, maybe you can’t leave the country. That would get complicated. But anywhere else!”
“He has a plane,” Annie said with a hint of old humor in her eyes.
“They’re unloading it now. But then you can have it.”
“We can’t—” Felix began.
“Yes,” Annie said.
“You would let me into your territory?” Felix asked Mateo, looking very confused.
“We’re family,” Mateo said simply.
The wolf bristled and then looked between Cat and her sister. He was incredibly pale, and the flush of anger and embarrassment was obvious on his face.
“How odd,” he said and met Mateo’s eyes. “My wolf believes you.”
Mateo shrugged. “Mine too. What does it mean?”
The four of them shook their heads. Cat didn’t understand the relationship between werewolf packs, but she guessed they usually didn’t expand to include random strangers easily.
She had the smallest idea of what Mateo would do for family, and it was crazy to think that another pack was now included in that.
“Let me just make a call,” Mateo said.
As Mateo made his call, Cat hugged Annie fiercely. “Will you come back?”
Annie pulled away with a sad smile. “I don’t know.”
Cat wanted to say another thousand things but couldn’t. “Stay in touch?”
Annie nodded once as Mateo directed them to a car that would take them to the plane and bypass security.
As they were walking away, Cat hugged Mateo again. “Thank you for that.”
“Don’t thank me. They really are family.”
“I know.”
“Welcome home,” he said as another car pulled up for them.
“Welcome home,” she echoed and kissed him amidst the exhaust fumes and the crowds. In this liminal space for travelers, she never felt more rooted.
The End