Epilogue
Aitor
Two Years Later
“ I sabella, stop biting your sister!” Ikal’s voice echoed down the hall from the nursery. Our babies had just turned two, and they were tiny terrors.
And that was in their jaguar forms. Soon, they would shift for the first time, and Ikal and I were anticipating even more chaos. Toddler proofing was very different from cub proofing, and we’d spent almost every night after the babies went to bed doing our best to make sure they couldn’t get into anything when they started shifting.
A tiny sneeze followed by a frustrated moan from my mate greeted me as I rounded the corner into the nursery. As always, it looked like a hurricane had swept through the room. Toys and blankets were scattered everywhere with the cubs dotted around.
Isabella still had her sister Emilia’s ear in her tiny teeth while Emilia’s twin, Elena, swiped at her and hissed. The cubs’ claws were small but sharp, and I immediately went to the girls to break up the fight while Ikal plucked Diego from the ruins of a baby powder bottle.
“Why do we even have baby powder?” I asked as I separated the girls, taking a tiny claw to the back of the hand for my efforts.
Ikal blew out a frustrated breath. “I was trying to get ready for when they’re in diapers. I now see the error of my ways.” He brushed some of the powder from Diego’s fur, creating a little baby-scented cloud.
“Where is Carlos?” I scanned the room, counting and recounting the cubs, but I only came up with four.
“Shit.” My mate pinched the bridge of his nose, leaving powder fingerprints behind.
“I’ll go look for him.”
Carlos was in a hiding phase, where he liked to lie in wait and pounce when we least expected it. He’d somehow snuck out of their room the other night and was hiding under our bed. He jumped out when Ikal got up to go to the bathroom, and he’d almost gotten smooshed and given his father a heart attack. Clearly the very stern talking to he’d received hadn’t helped to change his behavior.
Not that either of us were expecting it would.
Ikal and I were both bonded with the cubs, and we could feel some of their emotions through the bonds, but for the most part all we picked up was love, hunger, and a general sentiment of “fuck you,” which from what we’d heard from other parents and read was pretty much the toddler MO.
“Let’s go find your brother.” Isabella mewled in response, her little nose twitching as she sniffed for him. “Carlos? Where are you, buddy?” Isabella squirmed in my arms then climbed my shirt, her little claws digging into my chest as she perched on my shoulder. “Carlos?”
I partially shifted just enough to tap into my stronger jaguar senses, using my nose to sniff him out. I picked up his scent, but it was different somehow. Still, I followed it to the hallway bathroom. The door was mostly closed, and I pushed it open slowly.
What I saw made my heart stutter in my chest. “Ikal! Come here! Hurry!”
A second later, Ikal stood behind me, the rest of our cubs hanging off him. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Look.”
Where a jaguar cub should have been was a dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy with the sweetest chubby little cheeks. He’d pulled all the toilet paper off the roll and sat tangled in the middle of the mess, giggling happily as he tugged on the paper.
“Oh, Tor. He’s so precious.”
Isabella scrambled off my shoulder, landed on her feet, and trotted over to Carlos. She sniffed him deeply, licking at his face, then sat back on her haunches. As we watched, a shudder rolled through her, and her fur receded revealing smooth baby skin. Her little cub legs lengthened into chubby baby limbs until another dark-haired, dark-eyed baby sat in the pile of toilet paper, giggling with her brother.
Not to be out done, the other cubs stalked on their jaguar legs to sniff at their siblings. Emilia, who was always the most cautious, approached last and almost got sat on when Isabella tried to stand on wobbly legs and promptly fell down on her chubby baby butt. Emilia got out of the way just in time, turning to hiss at her sister who just giggled in her face.
Diego shifted too. Like Isabella and Carlos, he had dark hair and dark eyes with a smattering of the sweetest little freckles across his nose. Elena was next, but unlike her siblings she had Ikal’s coloring. Her sandy brown hair was curly and her eyes were blue just like her daddy’s. Since they were identical twins, we expected Emilia to look the same, but she stayed in her jaguar form, jumping and tugging on pieces of toilet paper, until one of her tiny claws got a little too close to one of Carlos’s legs, leaving a red scratch behind. Carlos started crying, which set off a chain reaction until all the babies were crying and Emilia was mewling unhappily. The noise echoing off every hard surface made my ears ring, and Ikal and I waded into the fray, each picking up a toddler in each arm. I let Emilia climb up and cuddle against my chest. I felt a tiny twinge of sadness through my bond with her, and did my best to rub a hand over her furry back while still balancing her siblings. “It’s all right, mija. Your time will come.”
“We better get these babies in diapers.” Ikal sighed as he made his way out of the bathroom and back to the nursery.
“Right behind you.”
It took longer than it should have to wrestle the tiny terrors into diapers, and Diego did his level best to hit us both in the face with pee as he fought us on the changing table. We were both breathing hard as we set the last toddler down on the nursery floor, which was the moment we realized the spilled baby powder from earlier had never been cleaned up.
Isabella, Carlos, and Elena were covered in baby powder, and Emilia had baby finger-sized streaks in her fur. Diego was late to the party but on his way to join in. Ikal slumped to the floor, laughing, and I slid down next to him, watching them make a giant mess.
“This is our lives now,” my mate said through happy tears.
“Yes, yes it is.” I pulled him into my side, kissing his temple. “And I couldn’t be happier about it.”
“Me either.”