Epilogue
TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER
The world was so very different these days, thought Callie as she walked around the apartment, absently straightening up while Ash—cloaked in glamour as always—went down the street for a pepperoni pizza.
She had to admit that the changes were to be expected.
Even though she still looked like, felt like, acted like she was twenty-four years old, more than two decades had passed while Callie and Ash were frozen as statues in Faerie courtesy of Melisandre’s revenge.
Two decades where the world turned, life went on, things changed… and her baby girl grew up.
Zella—who went by Riley, though Callie couldn’t help but use her given name if only in her thoughts—was twenty-one now, though after a lifetime of loss and tragedy, she often seemed older than she was.
With the same white-blonde hair as Callie, the same blue eyes, they could pass for sisters, though sometimes Callie thought Zella acted more like the parent than she did.
From little things, like explaining to Callie and Ash how much had changed while they were trapped in Faerie, to big things like breaking them out of Melisandre’s castle and using her shadow magic to bring them back to the human world, Zella was no longer the baby that Callie and Ash had been willing to sacrifice everything to protect.
Instead, she was a determined young woman with a mate of her own.
Ninetroir, Ash’s fellow guard and the Dark Fae who once owed him a life debt, turned out to be more than the protector that Callie begged and pleaded and bargained with him to be.
He was Zella’s fated ffrindau, and in the months since Zella freed Callie and Ash from their fate before following her own and facing off against Melisandre, he was as devoted to Callie’s daughter as Ash still proved to be to Callie.
Case in point: though she was capable of picking up a pizza herself, Ash insisted on retrieving it for her.
Once upon a time she would’ve rolled her eyes at his tendency to be so overprotective. But that was the old Callie. The innocent yet stubborn girl who refused to bend for her fated mate.
That was another thing that changed, wasn’t it?
Ever since she returned to the human world, she struggled to regain her self-confidence.
Zella was a godsend, and she didn’t know what she would do without Ash, but Callie had a hard time comparing the Newport she’d lived in with a newborn to the urban center it turned into over the last twenty years.
The apartment building they once lived in was now condemned, which technically made them squatters, but while they were adjusting—during the time when Ash was training Zella for her inevitable confrontation with Melisandre—Callie was happy to stay in the familiar apartment.
After Zella and Ninetroir returned from that last trip to Faerie with the news that Melisandre was dead, Callie realized that hiding in the old, warded apartment wasn’t necessary anymore.
Neither was constantly looking over her shoulder, worried that a fae soldier would sneak up on them at any given moment.
Not again.
Her past was gone. She lost her old life the moment Ash stabbed the fake Mitch all those years ago. She could’ve sworn she didn’t have a future, either, not after the first time the Fae Queen’s soldiers tracked her and Ash down to Newport.
But she had one now. Zella pointed that out to her. So did Ash.
She… she could still be a photographer, she supposed, though it would be a learning curve since everything was digital now.
Digital… considering mortals carried their computers around in their pockets in the shape of smartphones while Callie hadn’t even had a mobile phone of her own back then, she shouldn’t be surprised that her career turned digital.
Buster’s was a relic of a time lost. Buster himself was in his seventies now, and according to her daughter’s research, happily retired and living with his grandkids down in Georgia.
He actually shut down his photo business within a few years of Callie’s sudden disappearance, and though she mourned its closure the same way she mourned a lot about her old life, she was at least happy to know that Buster was still alive.
Zella had explained how nearly everyone and everything could be discovered on the internet.
To Callie, who’d been graduating high school in the time when the internet belonged to rich kids, who never outgrew her habit of visiting a library, she finally understood how different her world must have seemed to Ash when they first met.
Instead of magic, though, technology ruled. In a way, Callie was grateful that computers weren’t as big a deal when she was Zella’s age. Though her parents and her family would have missed her, her disappearance was more of a blip than anything else.
Of course, then Zella just had to show Callie the footage captured by security cameras the day that the Fae Queen sent her soldiers after Ash and Callie and their baby. She was grateful that she wasn’t recognized, if only for her poor family’s sake.
When she made her deal with Ninetroir all those years ago, she’d been in a small town she now knew was called Black Pine.
Five hours away from Newport where she had lived with Ash for more than a year, no one ever realized that the pretty blonde who lived with her family in Newport was the same distraught mother caught on tape abandoning her baby.
Only she hadn’t abandoned Zella. Running on a fatalistic cocktail of adrenaline, recklessness, and fear, for the first time in Callie’s life, her sight failed her.
When met with a young man wearing a baseball hat and coveralls bearing the gas station’s name, she never noticed what he was hiding beneath the brim of his cap.
He had been a Light Fae, another of Melisandre’s prized guards, and the Seelie who ambushed Callie in the bathroom and dragged her through a fiery portal straight to the Fae Queen’s throne room.
His name was Rysdan, she discovered when Ash ordered the other Light Fae to release her.
Her mate had been overpowered by the soldiers Melisandre sent to their apartment and brought to Faerie, just like Callie, and though he struggled in his crystal cuffs when he realized that she had also been captured, he was too weak to command the other fae to do anything but smirk as he bowed before the queen.
She’d been furious when she realized that Rysdan brought Callie—but no baby.
So furious, in fact, that the gasps and whispers that broke out among the crowd of fae nobles told Callie that she wasn’t the only one who could see through Melisandre’s glamour at that moment.
It dropped for a moment while Rysdan explained that he was unable to take the baby, twisting his words expertly without ever once mentioning the deal Callie had made with Ninetroir.
Of course, she’d learned that the Light Fae had ulterior motives of his own.
He’d decided to claim Zella as his own, terrorizing Callie’s daughter for years while she paid the price of challenging the Fae Queen: twenty-plus years had passed in the Iron while Callie stood next to her mate, frozen and unaware, just another pair of tortured statues in Melisandre’s garden.
She didn’t have any memories of the lost time. The last thing Callie remembered was Melisandre’s eerily beautiful face smiling at her as she used her magic to turn Callie to stone when, suddenly, she was looking at a frantic female who could’ve been her twin.
Not her twin, though. Her daughter.
Just then, Callie missed her. Though Zella and Ninetroir had made a room of their own since their mating, she loved having her daughter near.
Even if Ash was still bothered by his former comrade mating his child, they both had to realize that Zella had grown into a strong, independent woman while they were gone.
She was their daughter, yeah, but she was also Ninetroir’s mate, and as Callie knew, that was a bond nothing could break.
It wasn’t a normal mother-daughter relationship, but Callie at least had a friend in Zella. Having her living just a floor below helped cement their growing bond, and she missed her when she was gone.
Like now. Only a few days ago, Zella and Ninetroir left for a return to Faerie.
With Oberon back on the throne again, he sent Helix to bring the newly mated pair to him for…
it wasn’t a favor. If anyone knew that the fae didn’t do favors, it was Callie.
But, hell. It was a favor even if Ash or Zella or even the Summer King himself wouldn’t call it that.
She didn’t know when she would come back, though she swore she would once she took care of something for Oberon.
With Ninetroir tagging along, Zella’s personal shadow, Callie didn’t worry that anything bad would happen to her daughter.
But she missed her, and wished she could’ve had the chance to talk to her again before she left so suddenly if only because she wanted to confess her suspicions to someone and, apart from Ash, Zella was all she had.
That was her fault, too. She’d made that choice, just like she made the choice to keep her suspicions to herself until she was able to confirm them...
Though Zella had offered to use the internet to look up Callie’s family—her mother, her father, her sisters—Callie had refused.
How would she explain where she’d been these last twenty-two years?
Or the fact that she hadn’t aged? No. Maybe one day she would, but for now…
she had a new family, one she’d chosen that fateful day when she took Ash back.
And, nervously patting the closest pillow as she waited for Ash to return to the apartment with his favorite human food, it was only getting bigger…
After Zella brought them back to the Iron, it had taken him a few days to recover from her potent shadow magic.
Though she was half-Light Fae, half-human, the Shadow Prophecy left her with the ability to manipulate shadows, something Callie figured out shortly after her birth.
Zella was Shadow, and she had to learn that, while it made her the perfect mate for her Dark Fae, it only sickened her father.
The iron, too, Callie knew. With Melisandre still a threat, Ash pushed himself to regain as much strength as he could, even as he adjusted to the new world much quicker than Callie. Of course he did. To her three hundred-year-old lover, twenty years passing in the Iron was nothing.
To Callie, it was everything.
Still. She had a second chance.
Cradling the barely-there swell at the bottom of her belly, she thought of the pregnancy test she bought weeks ago on a hunch, but only took twenty minutes ago after Ash had set out to pick up lunch.
They had a second chance, and she looked forward to spending every bit of forever with her bonded mate.
As nervous as she was, Callie smiled. It was shaky, but sure.
Her old life was as far away as if she was still existing on the other side of the veil. Her daughter was grown, but she was safe and, with Ninetroir, in good hands. And Ash…
When he opened the door a few minutes later, holding the pizza box steadily on the palm of one hand, a bouquet of flowers tucked under his arm as he closed the door behind him, Callie’s smile widened when his sun-colored eyes tracked unerringly to the way she was holding her belly.
And he knew. Without her having to say a word, she was absolutely positive that he knew.
“Calliope?”
The way he murmured her true name always did something to her. And though she had wanted to tell him explicitly that he was going to be a father again, she found herself dazzled as always when that beautiful, beautiful face locked on her.
So she just nodded, giggling when Ash dropped the pizza and the flowers where he stood before gliding over to her, swooping her up in his arms as his warmth enveloped her securely, careful not to jostle her or squeeze her too tight.
“I love you,” he told her, speaking the words that never failed to mean so much if only because it was so very unlike a fae to say. But Ash wasn’t just a fae—he was hers, and he always would be. “I love you so much, even more than the moon and stars put together.”
Her heart full, Callie hugged him tightly as her gaze landed on the bouquet of flowers before the happy tears made her impressive sight glossy.
They had yellow blooms, as always.
Freesia.
“I love you, too, Aislinn,” she whispered back.
Unconditionally.
Welp. There we are. The second half of the Rejected by the Fae duet. While the first book—Glamour Eyes—ended with Ash rejecting Callie, this book brought them back together… at least until the events of Favor, and everything that happens in my By the Fae universe after that.