Page 77 of Protective Pucking Orc

The gods had built this pond. Let the gods have him.

The splashing weakened. Slowed. Somewhere in it his voice came apart—rage first, then bargaining, then nothing that was words at all, just wet, whooping breath, thinner and thinner, and the snow kept sifting down soft and gold through the porch lights, and the mountains stood black and eternal over all of it, and at some point, without any sound at all, the pond went still.

Steam curled off the open water. The snow began, gently, to fill in his footprints.

I exhaled for what felt like the first time since the wind had shifted, and turned to my family.

They were wrapped around each other on the bottom porch step, Rosa burrowed into her mother’s chest, Sofia rocking her, both of them crying, both of them whole, and my legs went out from under me. I sank down and gathered them in, both of them, everything I had, my arms shaking—shaking, me, the Wall—and pressed my face into Sofia’s hair while my Kteer keened its relief and rage together into one long silent howl.

“He can’t—” Sofia’s voice was wrecked. “Dakvaar, is he⁠—”

“Gone.” I said it plainly, for Rosa’s sake and for hers. “He’s gone, dkaar. He will never come near either of you again.”

She broke then, fully, and I held her through it, one hand splayed across Rosa’s small back, the snow landing in Sofia’s hair, until—far out front, down the mountain road—the first sirens rose thin against the night.

Jord. His network of friends and cousins and drinking buddies; the patrols he’d arranged with a rookie’s earnest thoroughness. Someone up the road had heard shots and made a call, and the cavalry was already coming. I thanked the gods for that ridiculous, loyal male and made a note to hug him the next time I saw him.

Gently, I tipped Sofia’s chin up. Her eyes were swollen, her lashes wet, and she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“Dkaar. The police will need to know what happened here. All of it—him, the past, everything.” I brushed my thumb along her jaw. “May I tell your story? Or do you want to?”

She glanced down at Rosa—weighing how much truth her daughter’s small shoulders could carry—then dragged in a shaking breath and met my eyes.

“Together.” Her hand found mine and gripped hard. “It’s our story now. We tell it together.”

Together. The same way we’d face everything from this night on.

Boots crunched gravel at the side of the house; flashlight beams swept the snow; a voice called out identifying itself as the law, and I rose, lifting them both with me, my Mate tucked under one arm and my daughter in the other, and carried my family up the steps, balancing on my skates’ blades.

“Over here,” I called back, and my voice came out raspy, scraped raw by everything I’d nearly lost and the overwhelming relief. “We’ll explain inside.”

Inside. Where it was warm, and there was cocoa for kitlings and tea gone cold that could be remade, and lamplight, and locks that no longer needed checking.

Inside, where my family was safe.

Home.

Epilogue

Sofia

Here’s a thing nobody tells you about orc harvest festivals: they happen outside. In Colorado. In November.

“It’s tradition,” Dakvaar had told me that morning, hauling his fourth armload of firewood past the kitchen window in the tone of a male who considered the matter closed. “Kap’parral is held under the open sky, so the gods can see what the clan protected this year.”

“The gods are going to see a bunch of frozen humans, is what they’re going to see.”

“The fire will be large.”

“That’s not an answer,” I teased, “that’s a threat.”

He’d stopped then, stacked wood balanced on one forearm like it weighed nothing, and bent down to kiss me—slow, unhurried, tusks bumping my cheek in the way I’d come to love almost ten months ago.

“The fire will be large,” he’d repeated against my mouth, “and you will stand near it, and I will bring you hot cider all night, and you will admit that my people know how to hold a festival.”

I mean, not gonna lie, that sounded like an okay compromise.

And it turned out that when he said the fire would be large, Dakvaar meant…colossal.