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A brilliant circle of light rises up from the darkness below, cresting over the silhouette of trees. I’ve watched a handful of sunrises in my lifetime, but none so majestic, the way the golden light dances across the shadows and shimmers off the early frost. Doesn’t seem real. It shines over the gathering mist in my eye, and I snort a laugh at the unearthly beauty of it all.
Shuttering it out of sight, I tip my head back, letting the heat warm my skin, and smile back at my old friend. “Showy bastard.”
Epilogue 2
Titus
Fourteen years later …
“You’re sure we weren’t supposed to turn off a few miles back?” Thalia stares down at the folded map that must be fifty years old—a relic we swapped for a bundle of jerky and a jug of elderberry wine, back at the trading station. Sitting in the passenger seat, with her bare feet kicked up on the dash, she holds the accordion pages up to her face, seeming to study the route.
“This is the right road.” A quick glance gifts me the view of her toned thighs peeking through the slit of her long white skirt.
“Hello?”
At the wave of her hand, I reluctantly drag my attention away from her legs, and back to the road.
“You’re not even paying attention to the road. How would you know it’s right?”
Paper crinkles and crunches as she leans into me, her breasts pressed against my arm, stoking the frustration of not having gotten laid in more than a week, since we left for the small community. If not for Asher sleeping in the backseat, I’d have stopped alongside the road a few times already.
“Looks like the battery is low,” she says. “I saw a sign a mile back, for a charging station up ahead.”
“Yeah. We can stop. Stretch.” In a bid to torture myself, I steal a glimpse of her cleavage sticking up from the neck of her too-tight tank top. Fucking hell, the woman is a walking bite of temptation. “Find a wall to pin you against for five minutes.”
“Titus!” she whisper-yells, glancing over her shoulder toward Asher and back. “He probably heard that.”
“What?”
“You know what. Doing … the thing.”
“The boy is nineteen years old. He’s known about the thing for a while now.”
Brow furrowing, she leans back in her seat. “So … is that what you two talk about when you’re out in the woods for days at a time? Women and sex?” She mouths the last question, as if the kid isn’t out cold in the backseat, and even if he isn’t asleep, she’s likely already clued him in, anyway. “Has he … been with a girl yet?”
Stretching my arm over the rear of the seat, I toy with a strand of her silky blonde hair, trying not to think of those long tresses dragging across my stomach. “What’s spoken in the woods, stays in the woods.”
With a roll of her eyes, she crosses her arms and turns toward the window beside her. “I’m his mother. I should at least know if we left behind any grandchildren back at Freya’s camp.”
“None that I’m aware. And, Christ, don’t say that. We’re not old enough to be grandparents yet.”
“He’s lucky the old woman didn’t string him up and burn him at the stake.”
A quick look at the kid in the rearview mirror shows his head kicked back, mouth catching flies as he snoozes away. “After what he’s told me, I’m surprised they didn’t put a statue of him in the middle of the camp.”
Lips crimped in repulsion, Thalia shakes her head, waving her hand in dismissal. “I don’t need any details.”
“Good. Because I don’t need a recap of what he told me.”
Cleansing my brain of the stories Asher relayed, I turn off the dirt highway, toward a small building that looks like it was dropped from the sky and plopped in the middle of nowhere. Miles of open land at either side of it boast more greenery than the vast desert we traveled to get here. An object off in the distance snags my attention on the way in, and I squint to see what appears to be bodies propped like a crucifix on three posts, sticking up about thirty feet in the air.
A warning.
Place could be run by hostiles, a reminder that I can’t afford to be distracted here.
Two dome-shaped solar panels stand empty, side by side, where I steer the truck into one of the two bays beneath them. Though some still drive the outdated vehicles, gone are the days of siphoning gas and stealing abandoned clunkers. The new cars run on solar power, and if one has something worthy of trade, a few places in the city are willing to barter. The carpentry I’ve taken up over the years earned me the nicest vehicle on the lot, when I traded a beautifully carved four-post bed and some kitchen chairs for it.
An old timer wearing a khaki fishing hat hobbles out of the small building, carrying a sack of something that I hawk as he approaches.
