Epilogue - Lucy
We buried Davan in the forest behind the cabin.
The ground was cold, and the earth fought us, but it only took one tiger Shifter with a shovel to make the hole deep enough.
Apparently, being shot in tiger form is different from being shot in human form.
The tiger form can take a lot more damage before succumbing to death.
I didn’t help dig. I wanted to, and I would have, if they’d let me, but a woman named Tila, who was maybe sixty and had forearms like braided rope, put her hand on my shoulder and shook her head once.
“This part is ours,” she said, not unkindly. “Our dead belong to the people who have known them longest.”
Warrick stood at the edge of the grave and didn’t speak. His mark on my throat throbbed in time with his heartbeat, or maybe mine, I couldn’t tell anymore as his grief moved through the bond in slow, heavy waves. I stood beside him, held his hand, and didn’t try to fill the silence.
Kess dropped the first handful of dirt. The sound it made on the canvas they’d wrapped him in was soft and final.
As for Andrew and his men, the rest of the Shifters turned up before the first hour was out.
They arrived in trucks and SUVs, ones and twos and threes.
Men and women, from a girl who looked maybe fifteen to a man with a white beard and a limp who moved with more purpose than people half his age.
Over twenty of them … and watching them work was like being at the shelter during a mass intake; everyone knew where to go, their task, the order of operations.
Nobody gave instructions because nobody needed them.
The bodies went first. I didn’t ask where.
Two women, each carrying a bottle of something chemical, walked the yard in a grid pattern.
It was methodical and thorough. A man in his forties raked blood into the dirt, then shoveled it into a bag.
Another man spread fresh gravel across the yard.
The bullet holes in the cabin wall were patched by a quiet, enormous man named Orrin, who didn’t speak the entire time.
Everyone was caught up in their grief for Davan.
One girl, though, young, I was guessing earth-born, who had dark hair cut blunt at her jaw, caught my eye across the yard and grinned.
Quick, bright, gone before I could respond. But I’d seen it.
Andrew’s vehicles disappeared, one by one, driven away by ambush members who’d brought extra license plates in their glove compartments.
I watched a woman who looked like someone’s kindergarten teacher hot-wire an SUV without breaking her conversation about grocery prices, and I realized that these people have done this before.
Scott was led away. An older man and a woman I hadn’t been introduced to took him by each arm, put him in a car, and drove away. He went without fighting. He didn’t look at Warrick. Warrick didn’t look at him.
I didn’t know what would happen to Scott. Right now, I didn’t care. Right now, Scott was a closed file, and I had no interest in opening it.
By late morning, the clearing looked like nothing had happened. The gravel was smooth. The cabin wall was solid. To me, the air smelled like pine and cold October dirt and nothing else.
The ambush filtered in and out over the next two days, bringing food and fuel and the kind of quiet, purposeful presence that reminded me of the volunteers who showed up at the shelter after a bad storm.
Nobody asked me questions, but they watched me the way new rescues watched the staff at the shelter: assessing, cautious, not hostile but not trusting, either.
Gazes lingered on the mark on my throat, though.
One old-world Shifter, a man with deep lines around his mouth and hands, held my eyes for three full seconds before giving Warrick a nod so small I almost missed it.
Kess barely spoke to me, but she didn’t avoid me, either.
I had the feeling I existed at the edge of her awareness, noted but not addressed, and I understood that this was the most she could manage right now.
But when she passed me in the kitchen or the hallway, she moved around me.
When dogs did that, they were acknowledging that someone was higher up in the hierarchy than they were.
I wasn’t sure what it meant when tigers did it.
The girl with the blunt-cut hair caught me in the kitchen on the second morning, while I was making coffee …
properly, because Warrick still hadn’t read the instructions on the bag and somebody in this cabin needed to maintain standards.
Up close, she looked fifteen and had a restless energy that meant she seemed to be constantly jigging on the balls of her feet.
“You’re the mate,” she said.
I turned and smiled at her. “Lucy.”
“I know. Everyone knows.” She leaned against the counter. “You really shot that guy?”
“In the shoulder.”
Her grin was wide and bright and completely unbothered by the violence of the statement. “Cool.”
Then she was gone, out the back door to where Kess was loading firewood, and I stood there with Warrick’s coffee pot and felt something loosen in my chest. Twenty-odd strangers who turned into tigers and buried bodies in forests, and one of them thought I was cool.
I could work with that.
That afternoon, I heard fragments of Warrick making calls through the cabin walls—names I didn’t recognize, arrangements I didn’t fully understand. He’d picked up the thread Davan had held for thirty years, and he was learning, conversation by conversation, how to carry it.
I watched him, and a feeling settled in me that I hadn’t expected.
Twenty-six people who needed someone to track them, make sure they were looking after themselves, that they had roofs over their heads, jobs they could do, safe places they could Shift.
Warrick would have to mediate their disputes, hold their stories, make sure nobody disappeared without someone noticing.
He didn’t have to do it alone, though. I would be there.
In a way, it felt like I’d adopted twenty-six strays.
Or they’d adopted me. The paperwork was unclear.
I called Dani the day after Andrew died, while Warrick was making us lunch. She picked up before the first ring finished.
“Luce.” The relief in her voice was so thick I could have spread it on toast. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Are you okay okay, or are you Lucy-okay, which is a completely different thing and usually means you’re functioning on caffeine and selective amnesia?”
“Somewhere in between.”
“Is it that fucker Andrew? Because I have my bat, Luce. That bat can do a lot of damage. And I’m keen as fuck to try it out on Andrew.”
“You don’t have to worry about Andrew anymore. He’s gone.”
There was a beat of silence. “Gone as in left town or gone as in …?”
“Just gone. Trust me, he’s not going to be a problem anymore.”
“Okay.” She didn’t push, and I loved her for it. “So, I refer you to my earlier question: where the hell are you and when are you coming back?”
“I’m staying with Warrick for a couple of days, but I should be back at work by the end of the week.”
“The hot PI guy is a keeper, then?”
I smiled, glancing at Warrick as he buttered the bread for the sandwiches. “Yeah, he’s a keeper.”
“I’m glad. You deserve to be happy.”
“You do too, you know that, right?”
“Course I know that. Love you, Luce.”
“Love you too.”
By the third night, the cabin was quiet.
Everyone had gone back to their lives, their towns, their solitary territories strung across Illinois.
Warrick was by the fire. He’d been there since dinner, one hand on the arm of the couch, the other tracing the scar on his forearm.
I crossed the room and took his hand. Laced my fingers through his. Held it.
He looked at our hands.
“Come to bed.”
“Lucy, I’m not—” He exhaled. “I don’t know if I’m good company tonight.”
“I didn’t ask for good company. I asked you to come to bed.”
His jaw loosened. Not a smile, not yet, but the line of his mouth shifted. He stood up. Felony, displaced from the warm spot beside his thigh, gave me a look of such targeted resentment that I made a mental note to check my shoes for revenge hairballs in the morning.
The bedroom smelled like him. His flannel was draped over the armchair.
The book on the nightstand had an old coffee ring on the cover.
This room had been his alone for a long time.
I could feel it in the way the space was arranged, everything functional, nothing decorative, the bedroom of a man who’d never expected anyone else to be in it.
I turned and put my hands on his chest. He covered my hands with his.
“I kept going back to that stone because if I stopped, I would have to admit he was dead.” His voice was quiet. “But the gate is just a rock now. It has been for years. My father’s gone. Taking revenge on Torek won’t bring him back.”
The bond went deep and still. Grief that had been carried so long it had worn smooth. Warrick was letting me feel it. The boy at the gate. The man at the stone. Every Friday, palm on cold rock, buying one more week of not having to accept what he already knew.
“I’m done.” He took a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t care if it was the mate bond, or Ratheer or fate that brought me to you.
” His thumb moved across my knuckles, sending tiny sparks of electricity racing through me.
“But you are my everything, Lucy Lewis. I love the way you hold your coffee with both hands. The way you sing to Felony when you think nobody’s listening, even though you’re terrible at it.
How you love every animal you come across, even the ones that bite you.
Especially the ones that bite you.” He paused.
“I love the way you sleep on your left side with one hand under the pillow and your feet cold against my legs. I love that you steal my shirt, and the fact that you look a fuck of a lot better in it than I do.”
My eyes burned.