Epilogue
Tamsin
By the time the leaves started to turn, people had mostly stopped staring.
Not entirely. Not in the way I’d have liked. But the looks had morphed. Less outright fear, more calm assessment. More curiosity. The occasional nod.
It was an improvement.
I walked along one of the main thoroughfares with my coat flapping around my knees, the air damp and cool.
Steam vented from grates in short, regular bursts.
The lamps overhead burned steady amber, but the banners strung between them were new, blue cloth with a chalked small crescent symbol painted on in white, a token of Skye that meant ‘safe hunting.’
It was the banner of the Accord.
My Accord.
One of ours stood at the gate where the street narrowed toward the council quarter, a tall woman with dark hair braided tight and a battered rifle slung over her shoulder. She was a wolf, just like me. She met my eyes as I approached, then straightened and gave a short nod.
“Morning, Tamsin,” she said.
“Morning, Branwen,” I replied. “Anything interesting happen today?”
She snorted. “You mean besides the man who tried to argue I couldn’t search his bag because I ‘looked like I might bite him’?”
“And?”
“I told him that was exactly why he should let me,” she smirked. “He wisely reconsidered.”
I smiled. “Good.”
Past the gate, the crowd thinned a bit. A pair of wolves in human form walked side by side down the street, both wearing discreet Accord pins at the lapel. A year ago, this would have sparked a full panic. Now, people just gave them a wide berth and kept moving.
It was progress.
On the corner, a sandwich board stood outside a freshly scrubbed building front. The chalk on it was in Eamon’s careful hand. It read:
Dr. Eamon Tierney Clinic
Injury, illness, consultation
No one turned away.
The front room smelled like herbs, soap, and antiseptic. I stepped inside and paused just past the threshold, undoing my coat.
Eamon was leaning over a young girl’s arm, wrapping a bandage around a neat stitch line. The woman’s mother hovered anxiously nearby, wringing her hands. The girl herself looked more curious than scared, craning to see what he was doing.
“No,” he was saying patiently. “She doesn’t need to stop playing. She needs to stop playing on rusted metal, there’s a difference.”
The mother fretted. “But the wolves—”
“If a wolf had bitten her,” Eamon said, tying off the bandage, “this would look very different. That ladder of yours is a far greater threat at the moment. Get it fixed.”
The girl giggled. The mother tried to scowl but it became more of a sigh.
Eamon caught sight of me over their heads and grinned. “You’re next,” he said, teasing around the edges.
“I don’t have an appointment,” I said.
“You never do,” he replied.
The woman glanced between us, eyes widening slightly as recognition dawned. “You’re—”
“Yes. I’m Tamsin,” I said gently. “You should get home before the weather turns though.”
They went, the mother ushering the girl out with a muttered thank you. Eamon watched them go, then set about tidying his space.
“How many today?” I asked.
“Four humans, three wolves,” he said. “Two with old injuries, one with a cough, one with a question about whether their son’s temper meant he was secretly feral.”
“Does it?” I asked.
“No,” he answered dryly. “It means he’s sixteen.”
I stifled a laugh.
“Nox was looking for you, by the way. Something about a few messages for you. And an illegal card game. But mostly about the messages.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll go find him before he finds more trouble.”
“You’re probably too late,” Eamon murmured.
He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Our version of an office sat above the clinic.
It had formerly been some minor official’s workspace, now a tangle of desks and maps and filing cabinets that had seen better decades.
The window looked out over the street, the glass wavy from age.
Griff had reinforced the door with a new bar that blended in so well you wouldn’t notice it until he dropped it into place.
Bishop sat at one desk, pen moving steadily across a ledger. Beside him, a second book lay open, columns of names marching neatly down the page.
He didn’t look up when I entered. “You’re late,” he said mildly.
“I didn’t realize I was expected,” I replied.
“You’re always expected,” he said.
“Anything new?” I asked, nodding toward the maps.
“Nox got tired of looking for you and brought me a few letters for you,” Bishop explained, sliding an envelope across the desk. The paper was creased and salt-stained from the trip.
I unfolded it carefully.
Tamsin,
Good news! The lycan numbers are shrinking on Irish soil.
Slowly, but they surely are. The reformed Watch is actually doing what it should have been doing all along—tracking real threats instead of inventing them.
There’re still a few idiots who think ‘kill first, question never’ is a viable strategy, but we’re breaking them of that.
Logan mostly scares them straight by just standing there. It’s a terribly useful skill of his.
The Isle of Man feels different with fewer whispers and more howling. I didn’t expect to say this, but it might actually become a place worth living instead of hiding.
Try not to let London eat you from the inside out. If it starts, send word. We’ll come set something on fire.
—Sera
I smiled despite myself.
Bishop’s eyebrow twitched. “Good news?”
“Relatively,” I said. “They’re not dead, the lycan numbers are dwindling, and Sera hasn’t declared herself Queen of the Watch yet.”
“Yet being the operative word,” he quipped.
“And Zara?” I asked.
He nodded toward another envelope under a paperweight. I picked it up and recognized her scrawl immediately.
Tam,
Ireland is still a mess, but it’s our mess now. We stabilize more ferals every week. Some of them cry when they come back to themselves. Some punch me. Both reactions are understandable, really.
Villages that used to lock their doors at sunset are starting to leave them cracked open again. There’s a bonfire in one town every full moon where wolves and humans actually share food without hiding knives under the table.
We’re short on hands and long on work, but for once, none of it feels pointless. I hate to say it, but it’s starting to feel like home.
Oh. Try not to let London turn you into a politician. I don’t think we could be friends anymore after that.
—Zara
“Too late,” Nox smirked from the window seat.
He was half-sprawled on the sill, one boot braced on the frame, the other propped on a crate. I hadn’t noticed him at first, which was typical. He was tossing a coin up, catching it, flipping it over his knuckles, like his hands couldn’t bear to be still.
“You’re already a politician,” he went on. “You just haven’t noticed yet.”
“That’s rude,” I said. “And probably accurate.”
He grinned even wider.
“Anything from Ashcroft’s old network?” I asked him.
“Bits,” he said. “A few rats trying to squeeze out of holes before the bricks settle. Some mid-level parasites who thought they were important enough to inherit his mess. They’re not. I’ve been… discouraging them.”
“How have you been discouraging them?”
“Explaining things,” he said. “Firmly. Occasionally with teeth and claws.”
“And do they listen?” Bishop asked.
“Well,” Nox said. “They stop talking, which is almost as good.” He sobered then, just a fraction. “There are still pockets of his followers,” he sighed. “Old loyalties. Old fear. It’s not gone.”
“I know,” I replied.
Ashcroft was dead, but what he’d built wasn’t. Not entirely. Systems didn’t crumble because one man bled out on a polished floor. There were still people who thought like he did, or who had found safety in his lies and didn’t want to let them go.
We’d cut off the head of the snake, but there were always more heads.
But there were more on our side now, too.
“Griff and Elias are downstairs,” Nox said. “They’re arguing about where to put the new weapons lockup so it doesn’t spook visitors.”
“Griff thinks everything spooks visitors,” Bishop said. “He’s not wrong.”
“And Eamon keeps threatening to move it into the clinic if they don’t decide,” Nox added. “So maybe go… referee.”
“That sounds like my cue,” I said.
“Queen duty,” Nox murmured.
I flicked the coin out of his hand as I passed. “Careful,” I said. “If you call me that too often, I might start making royal decrees.”
He smiled brightly. “Tempting.”
The Accord’s ground floor had turned into something halfway between a guard post and a community hall. There was a desk near the door where someone always sat with a ledger and a pot of tea. A bulletin board on the wall held notices: job postings, missing relatives, requests for mediation.
Near the back, Griff and Elias were standing in front of a storage room with the door open, arguing in low voices.
“We can’t put it here,” Griff was saying. “It’s right next to the main hall. Someone trips over a crate and we’re going to have a diplomatic incident.”
“And if we put it in the basement,” Elias replied, “we’ll be hauling rifles up and down stairs every time someone looks at us funny. That’s not efficient.”
I cleared my throat.
They both turned.
“Before you ask,” I said, “no, we cannot store the weapons in Eamon’s clinic.”
“See?” Elias said to Griff. “She agrees with me.”
“I didn’t say I agreed with you,” I countered. “I just preemptively vetoed the worst option.”
Griff huffed. “Fine. We’ll put them where Bishop suggested. Inside, but behind another door. Locked. Out of sight unless we need them.”
“See?” I said “Compromise. Look at us, being reasonable.”
“It’s terrifying,” Elias scoffed.
Griff’s gaze softened as he took me in. “You look tired,” he said.
“You always say that,” I replied.
“You always are,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
It was a different kind of tired now, though. We weren’t running anymore but building something new. I spent far fewer nights lying awake listening for someone trying to sneak in and kill me. Now I spent more nights lying awake because there were too many meetings to think through.
“Come on,” Elias said. “Let’s head up to the rooftop.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We have to look broodingly over the city at least once a week,” he said. “It’s in the contract.”
“I didn’t sign a contract,” I said.
“You did,” Bishop called from the stairs. “You just didn’t read it.”
From up on the rooftop, you could see a good stretch of the city from the river cutting through to the cluster of council buildings to the humbler districts in between.
Steam rose from vents and chimneys. Lamps blinked on one by one as the light faded, turning the streets into veins of amber and shadow.
We settled in a loose circle, me on an old crate, legs drawn up; Elias leaning against the wall; Griff sitting cross-legged at my feet; Nox perched on the edge like he might leap off just to see if he could land without breaking anything; Eamon with his back to the warm pipe, eyes half-closed; Bishop standing, of course, arms folded, watching the city like it was a text he was still trying to translate.
“Looks almost peaceful,” Nox mused.
“Don’t jinx it,” Eamon murmured.
“Superstitious,” Nox replied.
“Experienced,” Eamon corrected.
I let their voices wash over me, warm and familiar. The wind tugged at my hair. Somewhere below, someone laughed. Somewhere else, someone shouted that it was time for dinner.
“You did it,” Elias said after a while.
“Did what?” I asked.
“This,” he continued, gesturing. “Wolves and humans living together in harmony.”
“We did it,” I corrected.
“Mm,” he said. “We helped. You did the impossible parts.”
“That’s not true,” I scoffed.
Griff leaned his shoulder against my leg. “He’s right,” he said. “The Accord was your idea. You built it when it was just an idea. Now it’s a… big thing.”
“Very eloquent,” Bishop said.
“You know what I mean,” Griff shot back. Then to me, softer, “You’re allowed to be proud of what you’ve done.”
I looked at them. At all of them.
“I am proud,” I said finally. “Of all of us. Of this. Of not being dead, which is also nice.”
“That’s the spirit,” Nox replied.
We lapsed into silence again, the comfortable kind, each of us watching the city in our own way.
Ashcroft was gone and that was a start.
There were councilors who still didn’t trust us, humans who still crossed the street when they saw a wolf coming, as well as pockets of resistance that would have to be dealt with eventually.
I leaned back, let my head rest on the cool wall behind me, and watched the lights come on across London.
The city was still flawed, but it couldn’t pretend wolves inevitably went feral anymore.
For the first time since Skye, I let myself believe that what we’d built might last long enough for someone else to take it and keep going.
“We should sleep,” Eamon said eventually. “Some of us have patients in the morning.”
“Some of us have corruption to discourage,” Nox winked.
“Some of us have ledgers to update,” Bishop added.
“Some of us,” Griff said, poking my calf, “are going to fall over if we don’t go to bed soon.”
I made a face. “You wolves are always so bossy.”
“Your wolves,” Elias corrected, pushing off the wall and offering me a hand.
The thing was, he was right.
I smiled, took his hand, and we went back inside together, leaving the city to its steam and its arguments and whatever came next.
It wasn’t perfect.
But for now, it was enough.
The End