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It was that time.
Before things got any crazier.
Before I potentially missed my chance of forever.
Condemning myself to death and Bael to endless misery without me.
There was no reason to wait any longer.
There was no doubt in my mind that I loved him. As impossible and stubborn and moody and human-hating as he was.
What can I say? I felt kind of flattered to be the only human he liked.
“For the record, I recognize how antiquated and patriarchal this is,” my father said, fussing with his tie as he waited to walk me toward Bael. “But it is time to walk you down the aisle.”
We needed to do the ceremony.
But I wanted it to be a wedding as well.
So we were combining them.
And my father was doing the fatherly thing.
He’d been surprisingly accepting of the whole situation. It probably helped that on his way back to the States, he encountered an actual monster. Like from the myths.
So when I sat him down to talk about Bael, about the old gods, about everything that was going on, he’d actually been relieved to know he hadn’t experienced a pretty detailed hallucination.
Then he’d started piecing it all together like we had been doing for months. And because his mind worked like mine, the only rational conclusion to come to was that we were telling him the truth, that the world as we knew it was changing right before our eyes.
I’d asked him once what he thought about the ceremony, if he would consider eternity if given the chance. Because, well, I wasn’t above asking Lenore to give him immortality as well.
He’d told me that now that he knew the Elysian Fields existed, he was personally more interested in that sort of eternity than one stuck on Earth with warring humans, gods, and monsters.
Sure, it was going to crush me when the day of his death came, but I had to respect that decision.
And he was respecting mine as well.
As it turned out, my father really liked Bael. He liked the whole group, in fact. Maybe because he loved to learn, and each of them had so many stories to tell, so much previously unknown-to-him wisdom to impart.
He was writing a book on it all, in fact. And he made me promise to get it published if he couldn’t in his lifetime.
“Future generations like to hear first-hand accounts of what was going on during huge, world-shifting events,” he claimed.
I had to agree with that.
And, in a weird way, I was kind of pleased that, eventually, my previous students would all becomeveryinterested in the “myths” I’d tried to get them passionate about for so long.
“I’m nervous,” I admitted as I linked my arm through my father’s as we made our way out the back door and toward the woods.
“About your mate or about the ceremony?” he asked.
“The ceremony,” I told him. Since there wasn’t a doubt in my mind about Bael.
“Nova, Jo, and Lenore all assured me that it is safe and that they felt pretty much no difference.”
My father’s brand of reassurance went along with my brand of anxiety. And by the time we made it to the little clearing in the woods, he had me calmed down and ready to take this final step toward eternity.
“Why does this almost… look familiar even though I know I’ve never seen it before?” I asked Bael as he slid a ring on my finger after the ritual with Lenore was completed.
