EPILOGUE
Six months later, the chapel had a new roof, a repaired window, and — over Agatha Vane's initial and entirely predictable objections — a small brass plaque by the door naming it, plainly, for what it had always been: a ground held by two bloodlines, together, on purpose.
Wren had stayed. She told herself, that first month, that it was only to settle her father's estate properly, and then only to finish cataloguing three generations of Calloway and Thornwood notes into something that might actually keep the next generation from having to relearn all of this the hard way, and by the time she stopped inventing reasons, she'd already moved the last of her boxes out of the city apartment and into the house at the top of the ridge road that faced away from everything except the two of them.
She still ran her little herbalist's practice out of the front room, though her clientele now included, with a regularity that would have appalled her a year ago, an occasional nervous shifter needing something for nerves that no human doctor could safely prescribe.
Danny, the young scout who'd found the first deer with her all those months ago, had become something like a regular, showing up every few weeks with some new ache he swore was serious and clearly mostly wanted an excuse to talk to somebody who treated him like more than the pack's youngest member.
Odette still poured drinks at the Antler & Ash and still called her *honey* in a tone that had gone, sometime in the last six months, from wary to something closer to fond.
Garrett came by on Sundays now, awkward and trying, teaching himself slowly how to be an uncle to a family he'd spent thirty years being taught to fear, and had, on one memorable occasion, brought Rourke a bottle of whiskey by way of apology for thirty years of suspicion the beta had never actually personally earned.
Even Dinah Pruitt at the grocery store had softened, in her own way — she still called Wren *Calloway* rather than by her first name, some habits apparently too deeply worn to break entirely, but she'd started setting aside the good coffee for her without being asked, which in this town, Wren had come to understand, counted as an unmistakable declaration of affection.
On the evening of the first snow, Kade found her exactly where he always found her lately — on the back porch that finally, blessedly, faced a view that reminded him of nothing but good things, watching the tree line go silver under a full moon that, for the first time in living memory, held nothing in its shadows worth being afraid of.
"Agatha wants to formalize the joint council by spring," he said, settling behind her, arms coming around her waist the way they always did now, easy and unthinking, like a habit neither of them had to fight for anymore. "Says the valley's gone soft without something to be afraid of."
"The valley's gone sensible," Wren said, leaning back into him. "There's a difference."
"Mm." His mouth found her temple, unhurried. "I could get used to sensible."
Below them, at the tree line, a wolf watched a while — one of the younger pack members, out running the boundary the way Kade once had, alone, on a night that no longer asked anything of him except to enjoy the running.
He caught Wren's eye across the distance, the way Kade once had from exactly this ridge, and dipped his head before vanishing back into the silver dark.
Wren watched him go, and felt no cold follow him into the trees at all — only the ordinary, settled hum of a bond long since finished, and a valley, finally, at peace with what it had always been guarding together.