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He growls, and I laugh.
“Okay. Tristan.”
EPILOGUE
THREE MONTHS LATER… AGAIN
This sanctuary might be known as Winter Creek, but spring blooms beautifully in the hidden town.
There are flowers everywhere. Wildflowers, mainly, but the sweet scents overlay the verdant greens, the dewy mornings, the renewed earth of the season. It calls to my wolf, and even as the full moon rises up over the woods surrounding the pack house, I want to prance and roll and just enjoy being outside in nature.
I thought I would miss New Brunswick, where the most greenery I got were a few scattered parks downtown, and trees waving at me from a distance. For a state whose nickname is literally the ‘Garden State’, the urban center where I went to college, then rented an apartment with Lorelei was a damper on my wolfish side that I never noticed until I rode the train in Winter Creek.
It wasn’t as bad as Manhattan. I have no idea how Fallon—even if she couldn’t tap into her wolf just yet—survived living in the city for as long as she did. Like the flowers that dot the floor of the forest and line the creek, my former assignment and old friend really seems to have blossomed in the supe sanctuary.
With Claude and Gabriel dead, and Armand a witness to the blood magic Claude used to decimate half of the pack, Fallon did what she was born to do: she used her wolf shifter side and her witch blood to bring the witches in line. There hasn’t been a single whisper of an uprising or revolt against the new coven leader since then.
And, yes, I repeatedly refer to Fallon as the ‘coven leader’ or simply ‘Madame’ because I know it irks the piss out of her…
If you ask her, her loyalty is to the pack. It is. Fallon is a wolf first, but the more magic she learns, the more formidable a threat she’s become. She’s grown into a protector of her own, and if I didn’t have a reason or two to stay in Winter Creek, I would’ve rode out on the train, confident that she no longer needed me to watch her back.
She doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna stand there anyway, just in case there’s ever another threat to the peace promised in a supe sanctuary city.
I’m not alone, either. No matter what, Lucas will act as a shield for his beloved mate, the ultimate predator who will do anything to protect his pack. He has his Beta… my Beta… there to serve as his right-hand man. At the end of winter, Eleanor and Kirk returned to spend spring and summer at home before returning to the outside world, learning more about what happened in the seventy years the supes in Winter Creek were trapped in time. Bubbly Ellie—who reminds me a bit of Lorelei in how easy it was to let her in past my admittedly prickly exterior—might be the only full human member of the pack, but brooding Kirk will protect his mate to the death. The pack, too, but I have no illusions. Like any bonded shifter, his mate comes first.
I’ll begrudgingly respect the Alpha and support Fallon any way I can, but I’m more like Kirk than any of the other shifters here.
Because my mate comes first, too—even if he isn’t quite my mate yet.
That’s just semantics, though. Like how some full humans call their significant others their ‘husband’ or their ‘wife’ without a wedding or any kind of legal ceremony. There comes a point where you just can’t ignore what a relationship is, whether you have some government-given piece of paper or not.
Shifters don’t have marriages. No big party to celebrate our unions—unless, of course, it’s the Alpha couple—or any rings being exchanged. The mating ceremony is unique to each bonded pair, and once it’s performed, a bond snapping into place, the two shifters are together, ‘til death do they part.
Of course, there’s the whole ‘get the Luna’s blessing’ part, plus giving each other mate marks if you haven’t already, all while doing the physical act of mating on the night of the full moon, but when you’re as attracted to your intended mate as I am, that’s just a formality.
The Luna gave me Tristan Crowder. She told me months ago that my union was blessed so that’s not a problem.
Considering Tris’s brilliant idea of starting over began with a re-do of our regrettable first meeting by the creek, only with the two of us ending up fucking in our skin right out in the open before trotting back to the pack house together in our fur, completely covered in the other’s scent… we haven’t stopped mating in the last three months. Same thing with love bites that are definitely mate marks… my male is a biter and I’m covered in them, but I haven’t let him have one nibble when it’s the night of the full moon.
We haven’t fucked at all when the Luna is out—and that’s totally on me.
I love Tristan. Even when I tried to convince myself that I couldn’t stand him, I think I always knew that he was it for me. I trust the Luna. If she said the Beta was meant to be my mate, I was ready to make him mine forever at the jump.
But then it didn’t quite work out that way. After being trapped with him… he couldn’t avoid me in the cave. I couldn’t avoid him if I wanted to, either. We had to confront the simmering feelings brewing right beneath the service, and from the moment he went from licking my wound to licking my pussy… I knew he was at least attracted to me.
Over time, I’ve even come to believe he loves me, too. Me. Jeannie Lipton. The self-proclaimed bad twin and pain in the ass… he likes my attitude. He smiles behind his hand when I refuse to take any of Lucas’s shit, and uses that charming grin to disarm me and Fallon whenever my friend—whenever my sister—and I get into another one of our many usual arguments.
He built me a hope chest. Seriously. I’ve got not fucking clue what I’m supposed to use it for, but over the last month, he crafted it for me out of wood he chopped down from the forest. It’s sanded and stained, with a heart carved out of the front, and on the insides, he’s etched the name Jean Louise Crowder.
Shifters don’t have weddings, but when we make that forever bond, it’s traditional for the female in the mated pair to take her mate’s family name as her own. To see him already tack his on to my birth name—to be his Jean Louise instead of Jeannie Lipton—had me wondering: what the hell am I waiting for?
I know the answer. Our bond is open. It has been since the cave, and though I spent weeks and weeks testing it, checking to see if it was there, if Tristan had gotten cold paws and block me off from him… the bond remains open.
I sense his love for me. It’s a balm on my battered soul, but I’ve been hurt before. Tristan might not have meant to reject me the way he did. I get that. I’ve gotten over it. But as every full moon came and passed, the two of us doing just enough to ward off moon fever without going all the way and finalizing our bond, I didn’t want to trap him in a mating he could never get out of.
But that chest… he told me it was called a ‘hope chest’, and that’s all the emotion that came barreling down our bond as he hesitantly showed me the piece of furniture he’d been secretly working on these last few weeks.
Well, ‘secretly’. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming a full-fledged member of the Winter Creek Pack—as reluctantly as I did—it’s that there are no secrets here. Everyone knew that Tristan was working on something in one of the spare rooms on the third floor. He had it to himself since I all but moved into his room on the second floor a a couple of nights after he made that meal for me, but in a house full of supes, the sounds of his hammer and saw echoed at all hours of the night.
