20. Aslan
TWENTY
ASLAN
Iwake to the sound of soft snoring.
She’ll deny the snoring later. I’ll never tell her.
Dawn light filters through my bedroom windows, painting everything gold.
Leire is sprawled across my chest, one arm flung over my stomach, her breathing deep and even.
Her hair is a tangled mess of red and bronze, half-covering her face.
The claiming mark on her shoulder has faded to a permanent pattern—my tiger’s signature written into her skin.
My tiger rumbles contentment.
Mate. Ours. Complete.
For once, I don’t argue with him.
I lie still, watching her breathe, cataloging the freckles across her nose, the way her eyelashes fan against her cheeks, the curve of her mouth that’s just slightly parted in sleep.
Memorizing this moment so I can call it up later, on the hard days, on the days when the world burns and the Warding Line strains and new threats emerge.
She shifts in her sleep. Her hand flexes against my stomach, fingers curling. Me, maybe. The thought shouldn’t warm me as much as it does.
I’ve held vigil before. Watched over wounded pack members, dying friends, the slowly cooling body of the woman I built a life with. Those vigils were heavy with grief and duty and the bitter taste of failure.
This is different.
This is watching someone I love simply exist. Breathe. Dream. Be alive and present and here, in my bed, in my life, in my future.
Dorothea would approve. The thought surfaces unbidden, but it doesn’t bring pain anymore. Just a quiet certainty that she wouldn’t want me to stay frozen in grief. She’d want this—want me happy, want me living, want me holding someone else close in the morning light.
Thank you, I think, to whatever part of her might still be watching. Thank you for loving me enough to want this for me.
There will be hard days. There will be danger. The Preservers are still out there.
But right now, in this golden morning light, with my mate warm against my chest—
Right now is enough.
The knock on my door shatters the peace.
Leire jerks awake, magic crackling at her fingertips before her brain catches up. “What—”
“Company.” I’m moving, pulling on pants, scanning the room for threats. But everything in me reads the visitor as harmless before I reach the door. Just... unexpected.
I open the door to find Grandmother Peach on my porch, carrying a pie dish covered with a checkered cloth. Silver hair piled in its usual gravity-defying arrangement, looking as impossibly put-together as ever for seven in the morning.
“Good morning, dear.” She beams at me, those too-bright eyes taking in my bare chest, my mussed hair, my general state of recently-interrupted intimacy. “I brought cobbler.”
“Of course, you did.”
“Don’t be grumpy. It’s unbecoming.” She tilts her head. “I also brought answers. Well. Some answers. Partial answers. Teaser answers, really. Think of them as appetizers for the main course of revelations coming later.”
“Grandmother Peach.” Leire appears behind me, wearing my shirt—again—and nothing else. Her hair is a disaster. She looks beautiful. “How did you know we were here?”
“I’m the matchmaker witch, darling. I know where all my matches end up.
” She sweeps past us without waiting for an invitation, depositing the cobbler on my kitchen counter and immediately beginning to rummage through cabinets.
“You need more plates. And forks. Where are your forks? A man your age should have a proper fork collection.”
“Left drawer.” I close the door. Share a look with Leire that communicates volumes.
“Found them!” Grandmother Peach produces plates I’m certain I don’t own and begins serving cobbler with the efficiency of someone who’s done this thousands of times. “Sit, sit. Eat. Then we’ll talk about the documents.”
“Documents?”
She slides a leather folder across the counter. It’s old—the leather cracked and faded, the edges worn smooth. “Found on one of the Preservers your Protection Network captured. Caius was very thorough with the interrogations. I made copies before returning the originals to him—this is my set.”
“You copied evidence from an ongoing investigation?”
“Borrowed the originals, copied them, returned them promptly. There’s a distinction. Also, Caius knows I did it. He made that disappointed face he does—you know the one, like a very stern wolf who’s discovered someone left the gate open—but he didn’t actually stop me.”
Leire picks up the folder. Flips it open. Goes still.
I move to look over her shoulder. The pages are yellowed, covered in cramped handwriting that switches between languages—some I recognize, some I don’t. But certain words jump out.
The Severing.
Mate potential.
The old pairings, severed but not destroyed. Sleeping. Waiting.
“What is this?” Leire’s voice is barely a whisper.
“History.” Grandmother Peach takes a bite of her own cobbler, expression serene. “Or rather, history that was erased. The Preservers have been around for a very long time, dear. Longer than Mistvale. Longer than anyone remembers.”
“What’s the Severing?”
She smiles. That infuriating, knowing smile. “Not yet. You’ve done the first part—the hard part. Proven that witch-shifter matings can still form despite everything they did to prevent it. But there’s more to come. Other witches with mate potential. Other pairings waiting to ignite.”
“Other witches.” Leire sets down the folder. “How many?”
“That remains to be seen.” Grandmother Peach finishes her cobbler, sets the plate in my sink with a decisive clink. “Your magic is different now, yes? Stronger? More stable?”
Leire nods slowly.
“The claiming anchored you. Like a familiar would, but... more.” She pats Leire’s cheek with grandmotherly fondness that somehow feels calculating. “You’re the first. But you won’t be the last. The magic is waking up, children. It’s been sleeping for a very long time, and now it’s waking up.”
She’s already heading for the door, moving faster than someone her apparent age should—then pauses. Turns back. For just a moment, the bright warmth dims to something older. Something that has been carrying a very long burden for a very long time.
“I’ve been waiting for this for two hundred fifty years.” Her voice is perfectly calm. “I tried twice before. The Preservers were faster, those times.” A beat. “They won’t be faster anymore.”
The warmth returns like a lamp being turned back on. She beams at both of us with the serenity of someone who has just watched several centuries of patience pay off.
“Good cobbler was worth the wait, I think. Keep the documents. Study them. But don’t try to solve everything at once. You’ve earned a rest. Take it.”
“Wait—” Leire starts.
But Grandmother Peach is gone. The door closes behind her, and when I yank it open, there’s nothing but empty porch and pale morning mist. No footprints in the dew on the grass. No lingering scent trail. Just silence and the distant call of birds.
I stare at the empty doorway. “She does that.”
“She does that,” Leire agrees. She’s staring at the folder. “How does she do that? The woman’s over two hundred years old. She shouldn’t be able to vanish into thin air.”
“I’ve learned not to question it. Grandmother Peach operates by her own rules of physics.”
“That’s concerning.”
“Very.”
Leire opens the folder again, spreading the pages across the counter. The handwriting is cramped and difficult, switching between languages mid-sentence. But the more I look, the more patterns emerge. Dates that span centuries. Names I don’t recognize. References to events that sound like myths.
“The Severing.” She traces the words with her finger. “It’s mentioned over and over. A ritual that happened a long time ago.”
“And they are maintaining it, apparently.” I tap another page. “‘The old pairings must never reform. The potential must be identified and neutralized before awakening can occur.’”
“Mate potential.” Her voice is grim. “That’s me. I’m what they were trying to neutralize.”
“You and others.” I flip through more pages. “There are lists here. Witches identified over the years. Most are marked as ‘handled.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing good.”
I’m still flipping pages when a name stops me cold.
Dorothea. Handled. Five years ago. Weather-working incident, contained. No further investigation required.
The page blurs. I have to read it three times before the words stay still enough to make sense.
“Aslan?” Leire’s hand finds my arm. “What is it?”
I can’t speak. I turn the folder toward her instead, my finger against the line, against the word that just rewrote five years of grief into something worse. Not an accident. Not bad luck. A name on a list, crossed off like an errand.
“They killed her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “She wasn’t unlucky. She wasn’t careless. She was a witch with the old potential, and they found her before she found anyone to bond with, and they made it look like weather.”
Leire doesn’t say anything right away. She just wraps both hands around mine, steady, grounding, while something in my chest that’s been braced for five years finally, quietly, breaks open.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice is soft. Fierce. “I’m so sorry.”
“I buried the question because I couldn’t stand to have another thing that didn’t make sense.” The words Elio’s office pulled out of me, come back around, true in a way I didn’t want them to be. “I knew. Some part of me always knew.”
“You know now.” She presses her forehead to my shoulder. “And now we do something about it. Both of them. All of it.”
I nod, because I can’t say anything else yet. But underneath the grief, something else is taking shape—not peace, not yet, but the first solid ground I’ve had under this particular loss in five years. An answer, even an ugly one, is still an answer.
Leire goes still. She’s pointing at something near the bottom of a page, her finger pressed flat against the yellowed paper. “Aslan. Look at this.”