by Nancy Holder
“Dearly beloved,” Father Diego began. “We are here tonight, beneath this moon, to witness the joining of this witch and this werewolf in holy matrimony.”
Jenn gave Father Diego credit for being able to say that with a straight face.
Then, as Skye had instructed him, the Catholic cardinal tied their left wrists together with a golden cord. Now their hands were tied fast—they were handfasted.
“And as we see the love that they have for each other, we are reminded that love is, in the end, what truly matters. Love can move mountains,” he said.
Skye had never looked so beautiful, so joyous. Holgar couldn’t stop grinning.
Or shifting, for that matter.
She watched as he began to turn into a wolf and then pulled himself back time and again. She was glad that he had finally learned how to shift without the help of a full moon, but he clearly had a long way to go before he could fully control it. Every time he started to transform, Skye giggled, and her laughter was infectious.
Even Jamie was smirking. Further proof that miracles did indeed happen.
Holgar and Skye didn’t exchange rings. It wasn’t a tradition honored by either of their peoples. It especially made sense for Holgar, since wolfing out could be hard on a tiny piece of metal.
Jenn glanced down at the gold band on her own left hand and then over at the one Antonio was wearing, and thrilled to see it. They’d had Father Diego marry them in a private Catholic ceremony hours before. Father Wadim had offered the rings. The priest had found them in an old box of offerings the faithful had donated to the monastery.
Jenn Leitner was now Jenn de la Cruz. They hadn’t wanted to steal Holgar and Skye’s thunder. Besides, they both felt as if Father Juan had already performed the ritual. This had just made it official.
They’d had two witnesses—Gramma Esther and Greg Bassingwaite, whom Antonio had rescued from the castle before it had exploded. After Jenn and Antonio’s wedding, Greg had asked Gramma Esther if she’d like to go out for coffee when they got back home.
And Jenn was still trying to wrap her mind around what would happen when they were alone later. They were two innocents. She figured that a lot of humor, an overflowing of love, and the patience of a saint would see them through just about anything. It was all miraculous.
“I now pronounce you a mated pair,” the cardinal said, clearly pleased with himself over the phrase.
There was an expectant pause while everyone waited for the line that he’d clearly forgotten.
“Better kiss her quick, wolfie,” Jamie teased gently.
Holgar swept Skye up in his arms, and she squealed with joy as they kissed.
Antonio looked at Jenn, and she saw a single, watery tear run down his cheek. Then he gave her a wink that set her blood on fire. She blushed, but she didn’t look away. She was his, now and forever, just as he was hers.
He could look all he wanted. As long as soon he did more than just look. And by the gleam in his brown eyes, she could tell that was exactly what he had planned.
I love you, Antonio, she thought. My love. My husband.
My miracle.
She said so much to him in the silence between them. The blessed silence, free of danger, full of anticipation.
Skye and Holgar were still kissing. The others were laughing and cheering. The world was a new place. Jenn couldn’t wait to see what it held for Antonio and her.
Their enemies had been vanquished.
And their lives had just begun.
EPILOGUE
THE MONASTERY OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF ST. ANDREW
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
Silence had fallen over the little chapel, and darkness as well. Things were peaceful, calm, as they should be. Up before the altar, the wooden coffin rested, waiting for the morning when it would be sealed away in the tomb with so many other revered dead.
Suddenly a blinding light burst in the chapel interior. And inside the coffin Father Juan revived with a gasp. Panic surged through him for a moment, until he realized where he was. This wasn’t heaven. He was back on earth.
“Not again,” he groaned.
Then he rose.
And got to work.
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BARLEY MOON
Fare ye well, Lord of Light
Thou wilt rule on Yuletide Night
Blackfires burn and scythe the Rows
So crieth House of Deveraux
From out thy Vessel, Lady Faire
Cahors Witches take to Aire
Blood drink of Foe and Blood of Friend
Renew the Earthe with Blood again
Mile 76 from Lee’s Ferry, the Colorado River, August 1 (Lammas)
Oh, great. A storm. On top of everything else.
Ignoring for the moment the thick, hot words her parents were exchanging at the bow of the inflatable raft, Holly raised her gaze to the shard of sky between the canyon walls. Nickel and copper sunlight sheered her vision, making her eyes hurt. Clouds like decomposing gray fists rumbled, and the canyon wrens fluttered from their hiding places, cooing warnings to one another.
Behind her, the extremely buff boatman who did these rides every summer for his USC tuition money grunted and sighed. Her parents had pushed the guy beyond his “Hello, my name is Ryan and I’ll be your river guide” manners, and she didn’t blame him. Her mother and father were wearing everybody out—him, her, and Tina, her best friend, who had had the bad luck to be invited on this nightmare vacation. Of course, Tina got invited to everything. Being an only child had its advantages, and both Tina and Holly were onlies.
Tina’s mom had dropped out at the last minute, claiming a problem with her schedule at Marin County General, but Holly wondered if the petite, dark-haired woman had known something was up. That would make sense; Barbara Davis-Chin was Holly’s mom’s best friend, and even grown-up best friends told their girlfriends everything.
Hey, I know the score, Holly thought. I’ve seen Sex and the City.
Five days ago, when Holly had gotten home from her horse stable job, it had been obvious something had been going on behind the closed doors of their classically San Franciscan Queen Anne Victorian row house. Her parents’ shouts, cut short by the sound of Holly’s key in the front lock, had practically echoed off the white plaster walls. She’d heard the rhythmic sound of a push broom as one of them swept up a mess. Above Holly’s head as she stood in the foyer, taking off her jacket, the floorboards of her parents’ bedroom creaked with tension.
“Hey, hi, you guys, I’m home,” she’d called, but no one had answered. Then after a moment or two, her father had come downstairs, his smile reaching nowhere near his eyes as he said, “Hi, punky. Good day at the stables?”
No one had talked about what had happened. Her parents, Elise and Daniel Cathers, had joined in a conspiracy of polite silence, chilly to each other that night while packing for the trip, with the emotional frost dipping below freezing on the flight to Las Vegas. Thankfully, she’d sat with Tina in another row of the plane, and she and her best friend had had their own room in their suite at the Bellagio.
Her parents had gone out to see Cirque du Soleil, leaving Holly and Tina in their own room to talk about the upcoming senior year and their plans for college—USC for Tina, UC Santa Barbara for Holly. Then the two adults had come back, very late—and drunk, Holly hoped, because she didn’t want to think that they would ever speak that way to each other when they were sober. They had flung mean words at each other like knives, words designed and honed to hurt. Holly knew it was wishful thinking that her father was not saying bitch, but witch, even though it had sounded like that through the closed doors of the suite’s second bedroom. That was what Tina had heard too.
In the morning Ryan had met the four of them in the Bellagio foyer and driven them to the raft trip launch site. Mom and Dad
had barely been civil to each other during the daylong safety training class.
Ryan got the raft into the water and told them where to sit. Then, as if the swirling waters of the Colorado had driven their tempers, the arguing had begun again, and during the day of white-water rafting it had grown steadily worse.
Now Holly and Tina hunched over their oars, paddling according to Ryan’s directions and pointedly trying to pretend nothing weird was going on. They wore bright orange life vests and orange helmets, Tina’s hanging low over her black hair, which she had dyed aquamarine in honor of the trip. Holly, her own dark hair a mass of damp, crazed ringlets, was crammed beside Tina in the center of the raft, which resembled a kind of pudgy dinghy. Cold water sluiced at them from every direction as the raft roller-coastered between slick black boulders and tree trunks. As chilly as the environment was, it was tropical compared to her parents’ attitude toward each other.
“Dude, what is wrong with them?” Tina asked in Holly’s ear. “They’re going to kill each other. Or us.”
“When we get home, adopt me,” Holly said miserably.
“We’re almost old enough to get married.” Tina wagged her eyebrows suggestively. “C’mon, baby, you know you want me.” She blew Holly a kiss.
Smiling faintly, Holly sighed and shook her head. “Your mom would love that.”
“My mom is a bigger knee-jerk liberal than your whole family put together,” Tina retorted. “She’d love to plan our commitment ceremony, darling.”
Holly grinned and Tina grinned back. The smiles quickly faded, however, as the sound of angry voices rose once again over the rapids’ roar.
“—not going back early,” Holly’s father hissed.
“You never told me.” That was her mom. “You should have told me . . .”
Ay, Chihuahua, Holly thought. Tension eddied between them, and a fresh wave of anxiety washed through her. Something was basically, fundamentally wrong, and if she got really honest with herself, she knew it had been wrong for over a year.
Ever since I had that nightmare . . .
Her dad broke eye contact first and her mother quit the field, two territorial animals both dissatisfied with the outcome of their face-off. They were both good-looking people even though they were in their forties. Dad was tall and lanky, with thick, unruly black hair and very dark brown eyes. Her mom was the odd one out, her hair so blond, it looked fake, her eyes a soft blue that reminded Holly of bridesmaid dresses. Everyone always thought they looked so good together, like TV parents. Few besides Holly knew that their conversations were more like dialogue from a horror movie.
“Okay, hang on,” Ryan interrupted her thoughts—and for a split second, the arguing. “We’re gonna start the Hance Rapids. Remember, stay left.” He looked up at the lowering sky and muttered, “Damn.”
Holly cocked her head up at him. His face was dark and durable, much too leathery for someone who was only twenty-one. By the time he’s thirty, she thought, he’s going to look like a statue made of beef jerky.
“Gonna be a storm, huh,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the rapids and the creaking of the raft’s rubber skin.
He glanced at her. “Yeah. We’ll stop early tonight.” He glanced at her parents. “Tempers are getting kinda short.”
“They’re not usually—” she began, then shut her mouth, nodded, and got back to paddling.
White water tumbled ahead like a kettle put on to boil, and she and Tina sat up a little straighter, getting ready for the big, exciting zoom downward. Going down rapids was officially the fun part, the reason they were there. But Holly had had enough. She wanted to go home.
The river currents rushed, threading together and then separating, curling around rocks and boulders and making eddies like potholes in a street. They skidded and slid along, the by-now familiar blend of joy and fear tightening Holly’s chest and tickling her spine. “Yee-ha!” she yelled, and Tina took up the cry. They broke into laughter, bellowing “Yee-ha!” over and over in voices loud enough to echo off the canyon walls. Canyon wrens joined in and thunder rumbled overhead, and Holly felt a flash of anger that her parents were too busy being pissed off at each other to share in the fun.
The raft picked up more speed, then more; Holly’s stomach lurched and Tina shrieked with fearful delight.
Then the sky rumbled once, twice, and cracked open. Rain fell immediately, huge bucketfuls of it, completely drenching them. It rushed down so hard, it slapped Holly’s shoulders painfully. She flailed for her yellow raincoat wrapped around her waist, and the boat pitched and bowed as everyone lost track, startled by the downpour.
Ryan yelled, “To your oars!”
Holly’s parents snapped to, guiding the boat the way Ryan had taught them. Rain came down like waterfalls; the river waters sluiced to either side of a giant boulder, and Holly remembered rather than heard Ryan’s admonition to stay left of it. Everything around here, stay left.
The huge granite outcropping towered above them. Its face was jagged and sharp, not rounded with erosion as one would have expected.
“Wow,” Tina yelled, taking a moment to gesture at it.
The rain fell even harder, pummeling them, and Holly worked frantically to pull her hood back up over her head as a bracing wind whipped it off. The torrents blinded her. She couldn’t see anything.
“Jesus Christ, duck!” Ryan screamed.
Holly ducked, peering through the rain.
There was a millisecond where everyone froze, shocked brains registering what was happening. Then they all scrambled as if responding to an air raid in a World War II movie, grabbing their paddles and fighting the river’s determination to slam them en masse against the huge piece of granite.
“No!” Tina cried as her oar was almost torn from her hands by the force of a wave. She started screaming as the raft dove down at a 45-degree angle. Foaming angry water rushed over the five passengers up to their waists. Tina screamed again and batted futilely at the water as Holly shouted, “What do we do now? What are we supposed to do?”
“Keep calm!” Ryan bellowed. “Left, left, left!”
Holly’s oar felt entirely too fragile and slight to make any difference in the trajectory the water was flinging them into; at the same time it was too heavy and unwieldy for her to manipulate.
Then her mother shouted something and Daniel Cathers cried, “No!”
The river was a maelstrom now; everything was gray and cold and unforgiving and treacherous; gray stone and gray water, as the raft was propelled toward the boulder with the force of a catapult.
Holly held on to the paddle. It was useless now, but still she held it, hands frozen around it in terror. Someone, she had no idea who, was shouting her name.
Then Ryan’s voice rang out. “Jump! Now!”
His command broke her stupefaction. As she tried to unbuckle her safety straps and jump, the river crested over the raft, completely engulfing it. Cold, unforgiving water surrounded her, cresting above her shoulders, her head; she waited for it to recede, but it just kept barreling over her. She panicked, unable to breathe, and began pushing frantically at the restraints. She couldn’t remember how to undo them.
I’m going to drown. I’m going to die.
The steel waters thickened, becoming waves of blackness. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything, except the terrible cold. The raft could be tumbling end over end for all she knew. Her mind seized on the image of the huge face of rock; hitting it at this speed would be like falling out of a window and splatting on the street.
Her lungs were too full; after some passage of time she could not measure, they threatened to burst; she understood that she needed to exhale and draw in more oxygen. She fumbled at the belt but she still had no clue how to get free. As her chest throbbed she batted at the water, at her lap and shoulders where the straps were, trying so hard to keep it together, so hard.
I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.
The ability to reason van
ished. She stopped thinking altogether, and instinct took over as she flapped weakly at the restraints, not recalling why she was doing it. She forgot that she had been in a raft with the three people she loved most in the world. She forgot that she was a teenager named Holly and that she had hair and eyes and hands and feet.
She was nothing but gray inside and out. The world was a flat fog color and so were her images, thoughts, and emotions. Numb and empty, she drifted in a bottomless well of nothingness, flat-lining, ceasing. She couldn’t say it was a pleasant place to be. She couldn’t say it was anything.
Though she didn’t really know it, she finally exhaled. Eagerly she sucked in brackish river water. It filled her lungs, and her eyes rolled back in her head as her death throes began.
Struggling, wriggling like a hooked fish, her body tried to cough, to expel the suffocating fluid. It was no use; she was as good as dead. Her eyes fluttered shut.
And then, through her lids, she saw the most exquisite shade of blue. It was the color of neon tetras, though she couldn’t articulate that. It shimmered like some underwater grace note at the end of a movie; she neither reached toward it nor shrank from it, because her brain didn’t register it. It didn’t register anything. Oxygen-starved, it was very nearly dead.
The glow glittered, then coalesced. It became a figure, and had any part of Holly’s brain still been taking in and processing data, it would have reported the sight of a woman in a long-sleeved dress of gray wool and gold trimming, astonishingly beautiful, with curls of black hair mushrooming in the water. Her compassionate gaze was chestnut and ebony as she reached toward Holly.
Run. Flee, escape, don’t stop to pack your belongings. Alors, she will perish if you do not go now. Maintenaint, a c’est moment la; vite, je vous en prie . . . .
Nightmare, Holly thought fuzzily. Last year. Nightmare . . . .
The figure raised forth her right hand; a leather glove was wrapped around her hand, and on it perched a large gray bird. She hefted the bird through the water, and it moved its wings through the rush torrent, toward Holly.