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Sloan stood on the other side of a heavy altar made of stone. She spoke in Druidic, but I’d been told beforehand what the vows were, so I got the gist of it.

It was a promise, and pact, of forever. For better or worse, our fates were intertwined in perpetuity.

For druids, and now for me, mating was for life and even in death, we would follow each other to the next realm.

If I went down, he went down. We’d go down together, as a too young Dom had once told me.

With one shared athame, we cut each other’s palms and let it drip into the soil beside the altar, an offering back to the earth.

I wondered if that part was such a good idea with all that had happened between me and the real Grove, but held my tongue. Didn’t want to ruin the mood.

When the soil was sufficiently bloodied, we brought our wounded palms against each other and Sloan tied our wrists together with a colorful crios.

We made our blood oath and hand-fasting, my solemn eyes on his shining, mismatched ones.

All but one of Dom’s seven lieutenants attended the ceremony.

Sloan was officiating and the rest stood directly outside of the circle, spaced out evenly to further reinforce its power.

Siobhan wasn’t there. In spite of being one of his lieutenants, she wasn’t invited, for obvious reasons.

Later I heard she’d tried to disrupt the wedding but was stopped before she succeeded and had to be detained and sedated for some time afterward.

The news didn’t make me happy. I could be spiteful and I did hate her, but I wanted her just to get the hell over it and move on. Dom had been telling her very clearly (since she’d expressed her love to him as a teenager) that he did not and would never have those kinds of feelings for her. I would have felt pity for her if she wasn’t such a raging cunt.

The bride’s half of the wedding guests was significantly smaller than the groom’s, just a handful in fact, but when we were pronounced wedded, they cheered the loudest, Christian, Lynn, and Sven being particularly boisterous.

I glanced back and smiled at my little crowd.

Drake inclined his head politely when our eyes met, and Caleb appeared bored. Corbin was there, looking uncomfortable in his suit, but he smiled affably at me.

Henri was there, standing very close to Corbin. He’d forgiven me, and we’d become tentatively friendly again. Dom was still in heated negotiations with him to buy all of his Jillian inspired art.

Even Luke was there, still giving me doe eyes when Dom didn’t send him murderous looks for it. Lynn and Drake had rescued him from Tianlong’s household, and he seemed none the worse for wear.

Yinlong was there. We’d made her a flower girl even though it wasn’t typical for druid weddings. She was very happy with the role. She threw petals around enthusiastically every time I looked her way.

She was a frail looking thing, tall for her age but painfully thin. It was a deceptive delicacy, though. She held Conan’s egg in a baby carrier against her chest without showing an ounce of strain for the entire day.

He was tucked away in a blanket, a little hat clipped to the top to make it look like Yinlong was just very attached to the idea of playing with an oversized baby doll.

There was only one small snag during the ceremony, but it was a doozy.

We were close to the end of the vows when Sloan paused and shared an enigmatic glance with Dom. A rumbling noise shook the entire massive building.

They both looked down at the ground next to the altar at the same time, like they’d heard something the rest of us couldn’t.

I followed their eyes.

A strange, ominous object pushed up out of the dirt.

I hadn’t known about this part, but as I saw Sloan and Dom’s reaction I realized that it was a shock for them too. I didn’t take that as a good sign, and the look they shared then was not reassuring. Whatever this meant, it had shaken them both.

“She has to pick it up,” Sloan finally said after a prolonged staring contest with the strange little thing. “There’s no escaping it.”

“I’ll take it myself,” returned Dom.

“It is closer to her and you know what that means. There cannot be a proxy for this, not even if it’s you.”