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Then my brother flinches. It’s a subtle motion of his brow at first, and then he begins tugging his legs up from the rubble. He’s alive! My brother’s alive! Only, he can’t get his legs free from what’s left on top of him.
“Let’s help him,” says Max, and the three of them clear away the bricks that cover Simon’s limbs.
I bring him into an upright position and wrap my arms around him. “Breathe, Simon,” I whisper.
He gasps. His body shakes with a coughing fit until he can draw a lungful of air. Then he encloses me in his arms. “Asha?” he says weakly.
“Yes! I’m here! I’m always here!”
We hold each other for what feels like a lifetime, before the cold of the night seems to seep in once more, and I remember that my brother needs to be cared for. We all need to heal. And we can’t do that here.
I look at my men. “He’s okay. He’s going to be okay.”
My brother’s alive. He’s free. And we’re back together.
“That was incredible,” Orson says, taking a seat on the remnants of a wall. “You… you brought him back from the dead.”
“How?” asks Braxton, equally as astonished.
I shake my head. “I don’t know what happened.” I try to understand the event, break it down in my head, but I come up short. It was simply…magic.
Max and Braxton complete a circle around us and the gravity of the moment sinks in.
It’s over.
It’s fucking over.
The evil reign of the Blood Mages is at an end. Simon saw to that. I have my brother back, and though he’s in rough shape, he’ll recover. My mates made it through, stuck by my side despite the dangers of our journey.
In the silence, there’s a strange sense of what now?
The mission consumed our lives just as the Blood Mages did Simon’s, but now that both are at an end, it’s almost as if we don’t know what to do with ourselves.
Addressing this elephant, Braxton says, “What should we do?”
“Heal and then celebrate, I imagine,” replies Orson without hesitation.
“That’s a good start,” says Max.
“But then what?” asks Braxton.
Orson takes a breath and releases it slowly. “Our dream. The pack. Our house. Our family.”
“Family,” Simon whispers against me.
“Sounds nice, right?” I say to him.
In the rubble of the exploded mansion, the five of us resurrect our dream, which now no longer feels like a dream, but transmutes into something more tangible. A plan.
While we all make plans, I wonder in the back of my head if they’ll work out just as we imagine them.
Will we get to live in happiness?
TWENTY
Asha - One Year Later
Wind streams through my fur as the forest blurs into a brilliant collage of greens in my periphery. The pads of my paws enjoy the sodden earth beneath them, and my nose delights in the fragrance of the woods after the rain. The sky has cleared, but droplets still decorate the leaves and glisten in the sunlight shafting down from the canopy.
