Page 224

"A religious experience that looked like calculus."

"Shut up and go to sleep, Maren."

She grins against my chest. I feel it through the bond, warm and sharp and so completely her that I can’t imagine how I ever existed without it.

The night presses against the windows. Her breathing slows first, and I feel it through the bond like a tide pulling out to sea. Steady, soft. Stable. I pull her closer. My wolf settles, finally quiet, curled around something it’s been hunting for a very long time.

Ours.

Finally.

I close my eyes and let it carry me under.

EPILOGUE

One Year Later

MAREN

It's Halloween, and the only thing my mirrors have to say to me tonight is that my eyeliner is uneven. Thank goodness.

Bell & Bone has been full since ten this morning. I've rented out two hundred masks, sold every ceramic ghost in the building, and told nine separate people that no, the six-foot skeleton at the register is not for sale, he works here.

The town put the masquerade ball back at the Hollis mansion. Of course they did. Nobody in this place has ever stayed scared of anything with a bar in it.

"Twelve dollars," Cass says, ringing up a beaded evening bag.

"Eighty-five."

"For a purse."

"For a 1920s purse."

"It's a purse from when everyone was sad about a war." She rings it at eighty-five anyway and doesn’t stop making eye contact with me while she does it.

Sid supervises from the top of the jewelry case, tail curled over his feet, wearing an expression of profound disappointment in the entire human project.

Gage gave a child a piece of candy corn.

"He gives everyone candy corn."

It was my candy corn.

I laugh at him. “Oh, there’s plenty of candy corn left for you.”

There better be.

Della's in the wingback chair by the dresses with her boots up on a crate, drinking coffee hot, out of a cup, the whole thing, the way she has every single day for a year like she's making up a deficit.

"Your mailbox is crooked," she says.

"That's Gage's mailbox."

"It's crooked."

"He likes it crooked."

She makes a noise into her cup. She's been to see the ocean twice this year and has opinions about all of it. She calls me on Sundays. She’s never once asked me if I'm sure.