Epilogue
Three days later…
Katie
The federal facility looked different this time.
A few days ago I’d been walked through these halls with a cuff still on my wrist. The corridors had been very institutional, and everything about it had felt cold and unwelcoming.
The wing they brought me to now was none of those things.
My escort, a woman in a dark suit who hadn’t offered her name and whose ID badge faced inward against her jacket, led me through a security checkpoint I hadn’t seen on my previous visit.
It required a keycard, a six-digit code, and a biometric scan that read her palm print through a glass panel.
The corridor beyond was carpeted. The lighting was warm and the doors had no windows.
She stopped at the third door on the left and knocked once, a single precise rap, then opened it without waiting for a response.
“Ms. Gregory,” she said, gesturing me inside.
The office was small but purposeful. There was a desk, two chairs, and a single window that looked out onto an interior courtyard I hadn’t known the building contained.
The desk held a laptop, a legal pad, and a coffee cup that was still steaming.
The walls were bare except for a small, framed document near the door that I couldn’t read from the visitor’s chair.
The woman behind the desk stood when I entered.
Late twenties, maybe thirty, with auburn hair cut to her jawline and pale eyes that moved over me in a single efficient sweep.
She was dressed in a charcoal blazer over a white blouse, and she wore no jewelry except a watch with a leather band.
She looked like someone who listened for a living and had gotten very good at it.
“Katie.” She extended her hand across the desk. Her grip was firm and brief. “Please sit down. Can I get you anything? The coffee here is surprisingly decent.”
“I’m fine.” I sat in the visitor’s chair. The cushion was actual cushion, not the punitive flat pad of the interrogation room. “I was called in for more questioning. And told I wasn’t in trouble.”
“That’s correct.” She sat back down and folded her hands on the desk, her posture relaxed. “I’m Special Agent Mercer. I’ve been assigned to your case as of forty-eight hours ago, replacing the team that spoke with you previously.”
I studied her. Harwood and Davis had operated out of a standard interrogation room with a metal table and a camera screwed into the ceiling. This was a different setup, and the woman sitting across from me was a different category of agent.
“You’re not FBI,” I said.
Her expression didn’t change. Not a flicker, not a tightening, nothing that would register as a tell. She held my gaze with the even patience of someone who had been told this before, possibly many times, and had a well-rehearsed non-response ready.
“My credentials are with the Bureau.”
“Your credentials might be. But this wing doesn’t exist on the building directory I passed on the way in. And agents Harwood and Davis weren’t ‘reassigned.’ They were removed from the case because whoever you work for decided this situation was above their clearance.”
Something moved in her eyes. Not irritation. Recognition, maybe, the look of a professional encountering competence and recalibrating.
“You’re a law student.”
“Eighteen months from a JD.”
“It shows.” She picked up her coffee and took a sip, unhurried, and set it down again. “You’re smart enough to know there are some questions you shouldn’t ask, Katie.”
“Fair enough.” I crossed my legs and settled into the chair. “So what do you want to ask me?”
“I’d like to hear what happened. In your own words, at whatever pace is comfortable. Starting from the hike in the Sandia Mountains and continuing through to the events at the cave three days ago.”
There was no recorder visible on the desk, though that didn’t mean one wasn’t running. She hadn’t pulled out a notebook or clicked a pen. She simply sat there with her hands folded, watching me with those pale, attentive eyes.
“Harwood and Davis thought I was a contract killer,” I said. “Or at minimum an accomplice.”
“I’m aware of their assessment.”
“And you?”
“I’m here to listen. Not to assess.” She paused. “At least not yet.”
I looked at the window. The courtyard beyond it was small, four walls of pale stucco enclosing a square of gravel and a single pinon tree. The tree looked old and unbothered by its incarceration.
I told her.
Not everything. Not the sex, not the spanking, not the knotting, not the physical details of my relationship with Silas.
But the rest of it. The Sandias. The feeling of being watched.
Robot Mark in his doorway. The hike, the wolf, the creature in the ravine.
The hospital. Yazzie. The motel. The safe house.
The interrogation room where a thing wearing Yazzie’s face had shot a guard and injected me with a tranquilizer.
I even told her I had shifted into a wolf.
I said it all plainly, without hedging, because I was done constructing careful versions of the truth for people who would choose not to believe me. If this woman was going to dismiss me the way everyone else but Yazzie had, she could do it with the full picture in front of her.
She didn’t dismiss me, though.
She didn’t react at all, actually. She just listened with the same even attention throughout, occasionally asking a clarifying question that was never skeptical, never leading, never lined with the subtle condescension that every other official I’d spoken to had deployed like a default setting.
When I finished, the office was quiet for a moment.
“The creature you’re describing,” she said. “You said it has a specific name.”
“Skinwalker. It’s called a skinwalker.”
She nodded, clearly not unfamiliar with the term.
“And the man who’s been protecting you. He also has a specific nature.”
“He’s a shifter. A wolf.”
She nodded again.
I leaned forward slightly. “You already know all of this.”
“I know some of it.” She picked up her coffee again, cradled it in both hands, and looked at me over the rim. “Enough to recognize what you’re describing. Enough to know that the agents who interrogated you previously were operating with an incomplete understanding of the situation.”
“An incomplete understanding. That’s diplomatic.”
“Diplomacy is part of my job.” She set the coffee down. “Katie, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to think carefully before you answer.”
I waited.
“What would it take for you to walk out of this building today and go home? Not home to your apartment on Canyon Road. Home to wherever you’re building your life now.
” Her eyes held mine with a directness that was not unkind.
“What would it take for you to go live your life with your… mate, and leave the events of the past two weeks in this room?”
I felt my hands clam up. She knew about Silas. Not just that he existed, not just that he’d been at the hospital or carried me through Albuquerque. She knew what he was, and what I was. And all she seemed to want from me, and by extension from Silas, was for us to keep our secrets.
I sat with that for a moment.
“Three things,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
“First, my name gets cleared. Completely. Not quietly shelved, not ‘no longer a person of interest,’ not buried in a filing cabinet somewhere. Cleared publicly. Every record that connects me to Mark’s death gets expunged.
I have a legal career ahead of me, and I won’t build it on a foundation that has ‘suspected of involvement in a homicide’ hiding underneath it. ”
She nodded once. “What else?”
“Mark gets cleared too. He was my friend, and whatever narrative the media has been running about him needs to be corrected. His death was not the result of anything he did. He was a victim, not someone who got in too deep with the wrong people. I want that publicly clarified.”
“And the third?”
“Ranger Yazzie.” I held her gaze. “The skinwalker killed her, used her form. If there’s any suspicion attached to her name because of what happened, that gets cleaned up. She believed me when no one else did. She helped me. I won’t let her reputation become collateral damage.”
Mercer was quiet for a moment. She looked at the legal pad on her desk. It was blank.
“Ranger Yazzie,” she said, “is alive.”
My hands, which had been resting in my lap with what I thought was reasonable composure, gripped each other hard enough that my knuckles went pale.
“The skinwalker attacked her in order to take her form. Physical contact is sufficient for that ability, it doesn’t require killing the original.
She sustained significant injuries and was found by a colleague approximately forty minutes after the creature left her.
” Mercer watched my face as the information settled.
“She’s been at a medical facility in Albuquerque for the past seventy-two hours.
She’s expected to make a full recovery.”
I looked at the pinon tree in the courtyard. Its shadow had moved since I’d last checked. The sun was shifting, the afternoon light warming the stucco walls to gold.
Yazzie was alive. She hadn’t been lying dead somewhere while the skinwalker walked around wearing her face like with Mark.
“I’d like to see her,” I said. “When she’s able.”
“That can be arranged.” Mercer made what I suspected was a mental note, though nothing in her posture changed. “So your three conditions are your name cleared, Mark Alvarez’s reputation corrected, and Ranger Yazzie protected.”
“Yes.”
“And in return?”
“I never speak of any of this to anyone. Not the skinwalker, not the shifters, not what happened on the mountain or in the hospital or in this building. None of it. To anyone, ever.”
Mercer studied me across the desk for a long beat. The pale eyes were still, appraising. Then something in her expression shifted. Not a smile, but a loosening at the corners of her mouth that suggested satisfaction with an outcome she’d anticipated but hadn’t been certain of.
“The timeline for the public record corrections will be approximately two weeks. Media narratives take longer to redirect, but we have resources for that. By the time you return to law school next semester, your record will be clean and the story around your neighbor’s death will have been revised to reflect an animal attack with no connection to you. ”
“What kind of animal attack?”
“Mountain lion. The forensic evidence will support it.”
“It won’t. The detective said the wound patterns don’t match any—”
“Katie.” She cut me off, gently. “The forensic evidence will support it.”
I nodded.
“Yazzie’s personnel file will reflect commendable service,” Mercer continued. “The incident at this facility will be attributed to an attack by a lone extremist with no discernable motive, and the families of the guards who were killed will be told they died as heroes.”
I nodded.
Mercer stood and extended her hand again, and I stood and took it.
“One more thing,” I said, not releasing her grip.
She waited.
“If you ever need to reach me, for whatever reason, don’t send agents to my door.”
Something that was very close to amusement crossed her face. “Fair enough.” She released my hand. “There’s a car waiting to take you wherever you need to go.”
I walked to the door, then stopped with my hand on the frame. The document on the wall was at eye level now, and I could read it. It wasn’t a diploma or a commendation. It was a quote, typeset on plain white paper in a simple black frame.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I looked back at Mercer. She was watching me with those pale, composed eyes, her hands in her pockets, her expression revealing nothing and everything at once.
“Hamlet,” I said.
“Act one, scene five.”
“A little on the nose, don’t you think?”
The corner of her mouth moved, and this time it was definitely a smile.
“It was nice to meet you, Katie.”
Not ready for it to be over?