by SM Reine
She felt entirely human. Not a demon, not a god. Just Elise.
He didn’t understand why, but there would be time for questions later. Much later.
Only one question couldn’t wait.
“About Nathaniel,” James said hesitantly.
“I took care of him,” Elise said. “He’s fine.”
“How so?”
She told him.
It wasn’t a perfect answer, but it was fitting. And Nathaniel would be happy. He would be safe.
“Thank you,” James said.
Elise just nodded. Then she took his hand in hers. Their fingers laced together as they both turned to look out at the sunset.
They stood together, side by side in the new world that Elise had made for them, and it was good.
It was all very good.
Twenty-Three
FOUR MONTHS LATER.
The wedding was held outside on a warm, sunny day, with just enough of a breeze that Rylie could smell the field of flowers on the far side of the pavilion. The weather reports had threatened an eighty percent chance of rain, but luck was on their side—there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky.
It was the perfect day for Summer and Nash to get married.
The angel had healed from the wounds inflicted in the war. There wasn’t a hint of scarring on his face, and what remained on his chest was covered by a dove-gray suit. It was off the rack—with a few adjustments performed by Rylie’s Aunt Gwyneth, of course—but the way he stood made it look like a designer piece.
Nash didn’t seem to care all that much about his suit, or the decorations that the pack had spent the last three days putting up, or even the weather. He only had eyes for Summer.
Who could blame him? She looked amazing, too. They’d had to get an entirely new dress for her after the genesis, since the last one seemed not to have survived the death and rebirth of the entire universe, but Rylie thought this gown suited her much better anyway. It fell just above her knees and buttoned down the front with tiny flowers embroidered along the hem. Not a traditional wedding dress by far—more like a particularly fancy sundress. But it suited Summer perfectly.
She quivered with excitement.
“You may now kiss,” said the priest.
Nash leaned toward her, but he only made it about two inches before Summer lost control of herself. She jumped on him, flinging her arms around his neck, kicking her feet off the ground, and giving him the kind of kiss that definitely would not have been church-appropriate.
Good thing they weren’t in a church.
“For fuck’s sake,” Abel muttered as the watching pack exploded in cheers.
It was so loud that Rylie thought that the whole world would be able to hear the pack celebrating.
She laughed and stretched up on her toes to kiss Abel, clutching the sleeve of his tuxedo to keep from tipping over. He still had to help her by bending down several inches. As a supernaturally graceful werewolf, Rylie had spent most of her pregnancy relatively agile, but even she was getting to be clumsy at nine months. It wasn’t possible to compensate for the sheer size of her stomach anymore.
When she dropped back down, Summer was still kissing Nash. His hands were tangled in her hair, ruining the perfect updo that Aunt Gwyn had put together. Summer seemed okay with this.
Cheers were turning to laughs.
“Get a room!” Trevin yelled.
Summer finally broke away. She wasn’t even blushing. She grinned, gave Trevin the finger, and went back to kissing her new husband.
Rylie watched the crowd, and seeing how happy everyone looked made her feel like her heart might just explode out of her chest.
Abram was right in front, standing between Seth and Levi. She didn’t even care that Levi was there anymore. He’d been less of an asshole since the genesis. Most people had been nicer in the ensuing months, actually.
Nothing quite like the whole world dying to make everyone get a better grasp on their priorities.
Ariane Kavanagh had come to the wedding, too. She was seated in a corner watching Marion and Dana McIntyre, both of whom Ariane was raising now. The girls weren’t paying any attention to the wedding. They fought with branches they had ripped off a tree, practicing sword-fighting and getting mud all over their fancy shoes.
Aunt Gwyn wasn’t far away from them. She’d brought her girlfriend with her, who looked a little astonished by Summer and Nash’s extremely unabashed display of affection.
Brianna and Anthony, in the row behind them, didn’t look much more enthusiastic about it. The witch was making gagging faces at Anthony. He looked like he was trying to ignore her.
Even that just made Rylie smile harder. She hadn’t thought that she would ever see a day like this again. There was no ash in the trees and no gloom in the sky at all—no evidence that there had ever been a Breaking. The sanctuary was in great condition. So was Northgate. The town was still mostly empty, but people were moving back into the more rural parts of the United States now that they realized that the horror everyone had survived over the last couple of years had ended.
Without any scarcity of food or supplies, the pack was growing again, and Rylie didn’t really want it to stop. They were a big, happy family.
It had been a long time since Rylie felt this content.
Actually, she wasn’t sure she had ever felt this content.
Summer and Nash were still kissing.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Abel said, stepping toward his daughter.
Rylie held him tight. “Don’t even think about it.”
The priest rolled his eyes, dropped his book of poetry, and walked away, leaving Summer and Nash at the altar.
They did stop kissing after a few more seconds, and the pack pelted Summer and Nash with birdseed as they walked back down the aisle. Rylie hung back with Abel. She didn’t want hair full of birdseed.
Through the seed and streamers, Rylie glimpsed two people standing at the very back of the pavilion, hanging apart from the rest of the crowd. She felt a stir of surprise.
The woman was wearing a red cotton dress and sandals. A thick braid hung over her shoulder, decorated just over the ear with a big white flower the size of her palm. She looked so pretty in such an ordinary way that Rylie wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t been standing between James Faulkner and a muscular pit bull with a pink nose.
Elise Kavanagh had come to Summer’s wedding after all.
Rylie had invited her a long time ago, but she hadn’t actually thought Elise would come. Especially since nobody had seen her since the genesis. Everyone had assumed that Elise just hadn’t survived her last fight against Belphegor.
She wasn’t just alive. She looked great.
Rylie had so many questions for them.
She moved to follow Summer and Nash down the aisle, clinging to Abel’s hand for balance. She only made it two steps down from the stage before she felt a strange pop, like a rubber band snapping deep inside of her belly.
Warm fluid gushed down her legs.
Rylie looked down. She couldn’t see past her massive stomach to her feet, but a puddle was spreading over the steps, and she could still feel fluid draining from her belly.
“Um,” she said.
Abel smelled it an instant later and looked down. “Did you just…?”
“Yes,” Rylie said faintly. “I think I did.”
Aunt Gwyn was up the stairs in two seconds flat. A contraction hit Rylie hard, wrapping around from her back to the front of her stomach, radiating down her thighs, and sucking her breath away.
She staggered, but her aunt caught her.
“I think you’re going to have to miss the reception, babe,” Gwyn said.
Rylie thought she was probably right.
Once the news of the baby’s arrival hit the reception, it quickly turned from a celebration of a wedding to a belated baby shower.
Summer didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she seemed happy to have the excuse to duck out of
the party with Nash. Elise spotted them enjoying private time in the forest. The kind of private time that occupied their attention enough that they didn’t even notice Elise passing with James.
“Seems like it won’t be long before the pack’s celebrating the arrival of another new member,” he muttered once they were safely out of Summer’s enhanced earshot, his voice muffled by the sounds of carousing in the sanctuary.
Elise didn’t respond. She and Ace had stopped just outside the second pavilion, where the reception was being held, and her dog’s tail had started wagging wildly. Ace had smelled familiar people. No longer broken by his time with the cult, he wanted to join the party.
It did look like they were having fun. Seth and Anthony were pouring congratulatory beer down Abel’s throat while others cheered them on. Luckily, werewolves were more or less impervious to alcohol poisoning. Abel would have to drink a lot more beer than anyone had brewed since the genesis to get sick.
She liked seeing Seth and Anthony enjoying themselves. She had been keeping an eye on them for the last several weeks, and they had mostly been working together. Starting a new version of the Hunting Club, just the two of them with Brianna. They had a new office in Las Vegas. McIntyre would have been proud. Elise knew that she was.
Part of her wished that she could join them.
A much larger part of her was far happier in seclusion with James. And Ace, of course.
Evening had fallen since the wedding, and the entire pavilion was lit with gold lanterns, casting the party with an inviting glow. But even though Elise didn’t have problems with light anymore—something she occasionally forgot—she hung back in the shadows.
Anthony probably would have been happy to see her, but she didn’t think she and James would be welcome guests where anyone else was concerned. Too many bad memories. Too much trauma.
It didn’t matter. Elise hadn’t gone to the wedding to visit with the pack.
“Let’s go talk to her,” Elise said.
They headed to Rylie’s cottage. There were people talking outside, and more women in the living room. Elise and James slipped around back. The bedroom window was open and Rylie reclined in bed, alone except for her new son.
Summer had made it clear that Rylie wasn’t taking visitors yet when she had announced the new baby at the reception, but Elise didn’t ask permission to visit. She unleashed Ace to let him sniff around in the forest, then entered through the back door, taking James along with her.
Elise knocked twice on the bedroom door. Rylie said, “Come in.” She didn’t need to ask who was visiting her—not with her sense of smell.
Rylie was propped up in bed with a few pillows, and if there hadn’t been the top of a fuzzy head sticking out from the top of the blanket, Elise never would have known that there was a brand new baby on her chest. Rylie looked calm, smiling, maybe even glowing.
The woman looked exhausted, though not as terrible as Leticia McIntyre had looked after her births—a thought that immediately swamped Elise with fresh grief. But Leticia had been a normal person. Rylie had werewolf healing on her side. It would take a lot more than a baby to knock her down.
The TV in the corner was playing. It was muted, but the press conference on the screen was closed-captioned. The new secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs’s speech rolled along the bottom of the screen at a rapid clip.
Secretary Friederling didn’t look like as much of an asshole as his predecessor, Secretary Zettel, but that wasn’t saying much. Elise had never met anyone who was as much of an asshole as Gary Zettel.
“Anything good in the speech?” Elise asked.
“I guess,” Rylie said. “He’s saying that the OPA isn’t going to pursue some of the laws they started before…you know, before. No registration or anything.”
“I’d say that’s good.”
“I guess so.” She didn’t seem all that interested in that line of questioning. Rylie turned the TV off with a remote control and returned her attention to the bundle on her chest.
James sat on the mattress beside Rylie. He hooked a finger on the blanket and pulled it down an inch so that he could see the baby. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Well done,” he said.
“Yeah, I think he turned out pretty good,” Rylie said. “Not a whole universe or anything, but I’m proud of myself.”
“We can’t really compare the two. I didn’t push the universe out of my body,” Elise said. “I only had to die.”
Rylie didn’t laugh. “I don’t understand how that works. Actually, I have no idea what happened at all.”
Elise clenched her jaw. Glanced at James. He pretended that his attention was still on the baby, but she knew he was listening.
They still hadn’t talked very much about what had happened before, during, and after the genesis.
How was Elise supposed to distill the experience of being a god into words?
She’d known she was going to have to talk about it someday, though. Elise had spent months preparing answers just for this. “Belphegor killed me in the last fight, but not before the genesis consumed me. When all the other people who had fallen into the vortex came back, I came back with them. Human. Normal.” She sighed. “But I had a minute to…direct things.”
“A minute?” Rylie asked.
“A minute’s a long time when you exist outside of time.” Elise hooked her thumbs in her belt loops, rocked back on her heels. “I gave the rebirth of the universe a nudge. Rearranged things a little.”
“Understated as always,” James muttered.
He had no idea exactly how understated. Nobody did yet.
Everyone knew that something had changed when the genesis occurred. Almost everyone who was alive now remembered their cities falling apart, getting pulled into the void, and dying.
They also remembered waking up like nothing had happened in a world that was nearly identical to the one that had been shattered. Some people thought that everything that had happened after the Breaking was some weird, collective nightmare.
Others thought it was a demon conspiracy. A lot of people outright denied that anything had happened at all.
The truth was so much stranger.
“You brought me back,” Rylie said. “You brought Seth back.”
“I brought back everyone that I was capable of bringing back,” Elise said. “Everyone whose souls hadn’t been recycled yet.”
The bridge of Rylie’s nose wrinkled. “Recycled.”
“It’s hard to explain.”
She would have brought back everyone else, if she could have. The McIntyres and Neuma and everyone who had served her among the werewolves and former slaves.
But just as Nathaniel hadn’t been able to resurrect his mother, Elise couldn’t work miracles.
She had saved everyone she was capable of saving.
It hurt that she couldn’t do more, but that was just how the world worked, and even Elise hadn’t been able to change that rule. Her friends had been lost. They’d be reborn as entirely new people someday, unrecognizable as the people they had once been. Recycled. As good as gone.
Elise cleared her throat. “You and Seth were preserved in obsidian. Not just your bodies, but your souls. That’s why I could resurrect you both long after you died.”
“Me, Seth, and this little guy.” Rylie’s finger smoothed over the little head resting on her chest, making the soft curls spring back. “There’s so much to thank you for, Elise. Not just for me and the baby, but most of the pack, and…everything, I guess.”
Elise shrugged. What was she supposed to say?
Rylie shifted her grip on the baby. “Want to hold him for a minute? I need to adjust my pillows and get a drink of water and stuff.”
James started to reply. “No, I don’t think she—”
“I’ll hold him,” Elise said.
James couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d announced her plans to join a knitting circle. “Really?”
Rylie
grabbed a baby blanket, wrapped her newborn, and lifted him. Elise ignored James’s expression and collected the infant. She thought it couldn’t be that bad—she’d hauled her sister around a lot when she was a baby, not to mention the McIntyre girls, and this thing wasn’t going to be nearly as squirmy as those two.
It was still incredibly awkward to pull Rylie’s son to her chest and figure out how to hold him.
After making an entire universe, it was still sort of terrifying to take a brand new baby. He looked like a doll and felt like a droopy bag of rice.
Elise took a close look at him, one hand under his head, the other under his butt. The blankets fell open to show his face and the dry, wrinkled hands curled against his chest. Dense black curls were matted to his scalp. His skin was surprisingly dark, considering that Summer and Abram were fairly light-skinned.
“Not bad,” Elise said. There wasn’t much else to say about him. He was a pretty normal-looking baby, after all.
Rylie grinned. “So maybe you and James might…?”
“No,” Elise said.
James looked thoughtful. “Well—”
“Never.” She put extra emphasis on the word.
“Never,” he agreed dutifully.
“I was actually going to ask what you thought about being godparents,” Rylie said, closing her nightgown around her chest and carefully getting out of bed. “But okay.”
Elise’s upper lip curled. James tried to hide a smile behind his hand as he replied. “I’m terribly flattered, but regarding my history with the werewolf pack, I don’t think anyone would think very much of my involvement with your offspring. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m surprised that you’d even ask.”
“My Aunt Gwyn has some pretty strong feelings about forgiveness. And gratitude. She rubbed off on me.” Her cheeks turned pink. She didn’t look at them as she grabbed another bottle of water and set it on her bedside. “I thought it was a nice idea.”
“Does Abel think it’s a nice idea?” James asked.
“Gwyn’s not the only one with strong feelings about gratitude.”