Epilogue
Dax
The mating ceremony is held in the high meadow above the goat farm, because Violet requested it, and because I have discovered that there is no force in nature, shifter law, or the Rowan clan creed strong enough to make me deny her anything.
My parents arrive from Kentucky an hour before we're scheduled to begin. My mother approaches me, holding a folder.
"Dax, you’re looking well. I have prepared a comparison," she announces. "Violet Carmichael versus the California candidate. I scored both on fourteen metrics."
I scowl at her. "Mother. Now is not the time."
"Most impressively, Saoirse holds 2800 acres of forest-land, considerably more than Violet, although Violet’s family scores almost as well on political connections and personal wealth.
" My mother opens the folder, adjusts her glasses, reads with the precision of a woman auditing the annual budget.
Then she lowers it and looks at me, and something rare moves behind her eyes.
"She makes you laugh out loud, which I have not heard you do since you were six and your brother fell off the silo.
I have adjusted the weightings accordingly.
Violet wins by a considerable margin. The matter is closed. "
I let out an exasperated breath. I wouldn’t have let my mother’s fourteen points change my choice of mate, but there is no political advantage in informing her of this fact. "Thank you, Mother."
I do not, of course, wear what Jesse wore to his own ceremony.
I have informed everyone that I will be wearing the formal grays of the Rowan clan, in which my ancestors have mated for nine generations, and that anyone who suggests otherwise will be invited to spar with me.
Nobody suggests otherwise. I am, frankly, a little disappointed.
Ethel comes up from Cedar Run thirty minutes before sunset. She arrives, takes one look at me in my formal grays, and says, "Still on probation."
“I assure you, there will be no further miscommunications between Violet and myself,” I tell her.
She nods, satisfied, and goes to sit with Violet's stepmother, with whom she has formed an alliance I find genuinely alarming.
Then Violet walks across the meadow toward me, and I forget the folder and the probation and my own name.
She is wearing white, and wildflowers in her black ringlets, and she trips once on the uneven ground and rights herself before anyone can move, and beams at the recovery with an “I meant to do that!” smile. Her father walks beside her.
Her wolf and mine ran these woods together last night, side by side. I keep close anyway, but it's because I want to, not because she'd fall without me.
She reaches me. She smiles up at me, that smile that has knocked the breath out of me since the first second in a meeting room when I was sure I'd been hexed.
"You look very serious," she whispers.
"This is a serious occasion."
"You're vibrating. Your whole arm." She reaches up, touches my jaw. "Hi. I’m nervous. Are you nervous?”
I consider this. “I am right where I am fated to be, with the person who is fated for me,” I say finally.
“So…the answer is yes. For the first time in my life, I am nervous, because I want nothing more than to make you happy, and I don’t know if I know how to do that properly.
I am good at everything else, but what if I’m not good at this? ”
She goes quiet.
Her eyes go bright and wet and she presses her lips together. “You have made me happy forever, by saying that. I promise you. Now, let’s get this party started. I want to marry my sexy murder statue.”
Violet
Later, when the dancing has started and my father has been talked into eating a hot fudge sundae the size of his own head—Dax ordered it for him, gravely, and informed him that to decline would be a stain of dishonor on the Carmichael name, I sneak away to the edge of the meadow and pull my list out of the little white satin bag.
It's gotten long. I've needed three new pages.
Visit Cedar Run. Crossed off. Pet an alpaca.
Crossed off; they are friendly, the universe makes sense after all.
Pet the bull. Crossed off; he is misunderstood, his name is Gerald, he let me scratch his ears, Dax nearly had a heart attack.
Stay mad at Dax. I look at that one for a while.
Then I draw a single neat line through it, because it turns out I am very bad at it.
At the bottom of the last page, in my best handwriting, I add the only item that's left.
See the world.
I don't cross it off. I'm saving that one. We're starting next month—Dax has a map, and a route, and a list of every place I've never been, which is all of them. He made the list himself. He labeled it OPERATION SHOW HER EVERYTHING and pretended it was about security.
Across the meadow, my enormous, formal, deadpan, ridiculous fated mate catches my eye over the rim of his own sundae, the second one, the one he won't admit he wanted. His mouth lifts at the corner. He’s smiling, in public. For me.
I head back toward him through the wildflowers and the goats and the whole impossible bright sweetness of my new life.