Epilogue
ONE MOTH LATER
“Ok mom, yeah, I’ll see you next Tuesday.” Lucia hung up the call on her shiny new cell phone as she walked into the destroyed greenhouse I was attempting to repair—again.
“How’d it go?” I stood up, wiping my dirty hands on my pants, before placing them on her hips.
She bit her lip. “It was fine.”
“Lucia, we talked about this,” I scolded her mildly. I couldn’t read her emotions anymore, so she had to communicate with me. She was getting better at it. Baby steps.
She let out a long sigh and buried her face in my chest. “It was disappointing. Looks like my brother has officially stepped down as CEO, but I did some digging and, of course, now he’s just an independent consultant for the company. Mom offered me my old role back, but…”
“But?”
She finally met my gaze. “She’s not budging on the patents. That was the whole point! I can’t go back if we are still using those stolen recipes.”
My brave, stubborn witch. I held her close and rubbed my hands gently up and down her back.
“What’s the saying? Salem wasn’t built in a day. Keep trying, keep communicating with her. That’s the only way she will change.”
She relaxed into me. “I know but…it’s hard. It hurts that she can’t see how wrong it is. Why do I have to explain it to her?”
“You don’t. But then who will?”
She sighed again. “You’re right.”
“It can happen occasionally.” She chuckled at that and glowed a little brighter.
“If I went back, I could buy your mom a new house.”
“Tired of our new roommates already, huh?”
“What? No! I…I love the noise,” she said with a shy grin. “But we might need to start a fund for all the honey we are going through.”
Mom was still back in West Virginia, set in her ways.
But three of my brothers had taken up Lucia on her offer to move into the manor—Motholemew, Timothy, and Motthew.
To say it had been ‘noisy’ was a bit of an understatement.
The bachelorette pad had transformed into a frat house overnight, sticky floors and all.
I had worried Lucia would regret the decision, but she was thriving.
She stroked my cheek, grinning. “I love having them here. Even if I need to get used to this new definition of privacy.”
Wasn’t that the truth. I think I was getting annoyed having them around so much. Luckily, I had years of experience.
“Both Motholemew and Timothy are going to lurk on the covered bridge tonight.” At my suggestion. “I was thinking we could run an experiment about the bond tonight?”
“Hawk, we’ve run that experiment pretty much every night for the last month. We can still feel each other’s—”
She trailed off into a much less combative sound as I sucked on her pulse point.
“Yes, but aren’t you the one always talking about statistical significance? We need more data.”
She rolled her eyes, but leaned into me more. “Funny how much about math you can remember when it is about sex.”
“If I’d known it was this rewarding, I would have paid more attention in school.” I pushed her up against the work table, tugging at the shoulders of her lace dress so I could kiss the soft skin over her collarbone when an annoyed groan sounded beside us.
“Yeah, don’t mind me. Just an innocent young mothman being exposed to his older brother’s degenerate behavior.”
Now I rolled my eyes as Motthew walked through one of the broken windows. “You were the one who said I needed to get a girlfriend.”
Lucia chuckled and pushed me away until I pouted. She reached across the empty space between us now, running her thumb over my lip piercing, and winked before turning to my youngest brother.
“Need help with your homework?”
He shrugged. “If you have the time. You know, I graduated early so I could take a semester off before starting university.”
“This is time off,” she countered. “It’s only one class, and it’s at Pumpkin Hollow Community College. Come on, let’s go inside.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek and patted my ass, then followed my brother. He complained, but I knew he was happy to have someone in his life on his level of book smarts. She was my light, but seeing how she cared for my brothers had convinced me I would never let her go.
She worked with Motthew on his schoolwork, and already had him learning sigil building—he was a natural, of course.
She’d changed the recipe for Motholemew’s medicine to better suit his moth genetics and he had been thriving, his chronic wing pain nearly completely eliminated.
And Timothy had really taken to Pumpkin Hollow, appointing himself the guardian of the covered bridge that led into town.
I didn’t one hundred percent understand it, but he was happy and had a hobby that wasn’t video games in mom’s basement, so I was happy.
As she walked away, there was a tug around my heart. It wasn’t the bond, I just hated to see her go.
Forty minutes later I’d installed three new panels and called it a night.
Motthew was in the parlor, playing FortKnight on the new TV, Lucia dozing on the couch next to him.
My wings fluttered as I watched her for a moment, the tension she carried in her brow wiped away in sleep.
She was radiant, even draped over the arm of the threadbare couch.
I didn’t want to wake her. We had an early morning tomorrow.
I scooped her off the couch and carried her up into our room. She nuzzled against my chest, and my heart was completely full.
Pumpkin Hollow’s town square was lively. A bit too lively at seven a.m. for nocturnal creatures like me and Lucia, but we were pulling it together. Pumpkin Hollow’s farmer’s market had started at seven a.m. every Sunday for the last hundred years, rain or shine. So we couldn’t be late.
I grabbed a wrought-iron table from near the gazebo and moved it beneath a tree for shade. Lucia encouraged a few vines to grow up around the legs, holding the handwritten FREE sign in front of the bottles and pouches she set on top. A few people stopped to watch, curious about the fresh addition.
She spent longer than was necessary rearranging the tinctures and teas, then stepped back into the shadows, nervously picking at her nails.
I set my hands on her shoulders, and gently pushed her forward.
“You don’t need to do that anymore. Lurking is just my job now.” I whispered in her ear and left a soft kiss on her neck.
“But what if—” But before she could finish the thought, a woman with a very large handbag stepped up to the table.
I barely heard Lucia say, “Hi Doris.”
The woman smiled. “Hi Lucia! I just wanted to let you know how helpful your tea was. Thanks for leaving it for me. My mother is doing so much better.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Lucia was a little louder that time.
Doris gave her a beaming smile. “I’m sorry about our misunderstanding last time.
I’m still getting used to all this magic stuff.
It’s quite a shift for a city girl like me.
” She looked down at the FREE sign. “Gertrude said—well, she said that you really liked honey. I hope this is an acceptable form of payment?”
My antennae perked up as she pulled a golden jar out of her oversized bag.
Lucia reached for it before cradling it against her chest. “It’s perfect.”
Doris smiled again as she stepped away, and more citizens of Pumpkin Hollow took her place.
Each thanked Lucia for what she had given them, some apologizing for not reaching out or saying they needed to get together soon.
Some took more tinctures, but all left jars of honey on the table.
Some of those jars were thank you, and some were apologies, and some maybe even bribes to diffuse their own guilt of leaving her alone for so many years.
But she accepted them all, the gifts of a town who had never forgotten her, just maybe hadn’t had the magic to help her.
She was glowing as more of her neighbors left more and more jars of honey on the small table until I worried it might collapse under their weight. She was grinning and radiant.
She was chatting with a woman named Evie when a couple I immediately could tell were tourists walked up to the table. No one wore flip flops in Pumpkin Hollow.
The woman had bleached blonde hair and a smile that was a little too wide, and a bit…sharkish.
She reached out her hand to me. “Hi! I’m Mai Perez, and I think you must be Hawk Archeron.”
I took her hand, and did my best to hold in my nervous squeak. “Yes, ma’am. But how do you know me?”
She gave me one firm shake before letting go. “I’m actually friends with your brother Motholemew. We met in an online shifter forum. He’s told me all about you. He said you would be here today.”
I wasn’t sure what was more shocking, that I had been talked about or that Motholemew had friends who were girls.
“And I’m Marcus Webb, and we represent SFABT, Shifters For A Better Tomorrow. We came to talk to you and Lucia Atropa about the medicine for shifter autoimmune disorders.”
Immediately, Lucia shoved herself between me and the strangers, her hackles raised. “Whatever you’ve heard—”
Mai immediately threw her hands up. “No, no, it’s not like that. We…we know your history with Atropa Pharmaceuticals and, well, we want to support you. Motholemew told me about the changes you made to his medicine, how much it’s helped him.”
Lucia’s shoulders dropped, but not her guard. “What about it?”
“We want to support you to expand your research. Make new recipes.” Mai paused, her face dropping.
“It’s getting worse. New cases are popping up everywhere, in new types of shifters, and now we see it moving into other magical folks.
Anyone who is tied to nature is affected, like our whole world is sick.
” Tears welled up in her eyes, but she clenched her fists.
“We need people like you, people willing to fight for what’s right.
You’ll have SFABT backing for research, as much as we can afford, and you didn’t hear this from me, but we are working on making cases against all the big magical corporations, and some of the normal ones too.
Someone has to stand up. Will you stand with us? ”
Lucia was stunned, and so was I. Marcus grabbed Mai’s shoulders, and she relaxed. He held out a hand with a business card, and I took it while Lucia just stared.
“Think about it. But Lucia, we can’t do this without people like you.” He nodded at me and gently tugged Mai away, who gave Lucia one last look before disappearing into the crowd.
Lucia was silent for the rest of the market, giving mostly soft smiles and nods.
I didn’t push her. She was silent all the way home, as she clung to me on the back of my motorcycle.
She was silent as we unloaded the one metric fuck-ton of honey the town had brought her.
We piled it onto the kitchen counter and she leaned into it, just staring at the golden jars until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Lucia…”
“A house, Hawk. I could buy your mother a house. I could pay for all of Motthew’s school. We could have whatever we needed if I went back to Atropa. When it was just me it didn’t matter but now…”
“We already have everything we need.” And it was true.
She finally looked up at me, her eyes filled with tears. “Money makes things easier. A lot easier.”
“I know.” I walked around the counter and grabbed her from behind, wrapping my arms around her waist and inhaling her soft scent.
“But we just broke one curse, don’t need another.
I’ve got you, and my brothers, and even this black furry demon,” I said, stroking Mugen as he hopped up on the counter to nudge Lucia with his head.
I twirled the business card between my fingers and handed it to her. “You just got your voice back, don’t you want to use it?”
She grabbed the card, then rolled one jar of honey on the counter between her hands. She stared at it as if it held her decision in its flaxen depths.
“It was worth it, wasn’t it? I tried…I tried to do it from the inside, and they just wouldn’t see. This time,” she pulled out her cell phone. “This time, we take the fight to them.”
“That’s my girl.”