I will do everything I possibly can to live through this night so I can see it for myself.
After that meeting wraps up, I head down to the warehouse in Phoenix. I tell myself I’m fired up after hearing all the talk about the future, but when I get there I find myself getting all of my affairs in order.
As if I think that there is some possibility that Vinca could rise tonight and there might be something left after that. I doubt there will be much of a world left, much less someone to come along and pick up where I left off. That’s not really my impression of what happens when a death goddess razes the world. That’s certainly not what she claimed she’d do the last time.
It was definitely sold to us as the kind of apocalypse that left no room for plucky bands of rebels to eke out an existence against the cruel background of her nonsense, the way they do in all the books and movies and television shows that imagine these things.
Still, I don’t stop. I leave detailed notes describing everything it is that I do, and I tell myself it’s not because I think I’m going to die but because Iwantto live. I want to make sure that these systems I’ve built can stretch out and hold the kingdom Ty’s building as securely as possible.
On the drive back from the warehouse I can already see the shadows getting long and that winter sun draping itself above the western hills. My plan is to go back to the den and see Ty one more time before meeting him to run the full moon—and before all the rest of the things that may or may not happen between now and then—but as I look at the swiftly darkening sky, I don’t think I should. I remember what Savi said about the three of us together. There’s no doubt that’s the smarter play.
Yet I really don’t feel smart as I drive up the old Highway 99 that pokes around to the west of the big interstate as the local route up from Ashland. The sun is setting on this last day of the year in reds and oranges, and maybe it’s the usual New Year’s thing that gets me thinking about this life I’ve led. These years of being fated, then unofficially mated to Ty. My escape from this valley. My return. All of our fights. All of our tempests and tempers.
I remember all of our years with perfect clarity. These last few as notable for our partnership as our passion, though both have grown so much that we’re almost unrecognizable from where we started.
“I can’t lose him,” I whisper, as if the sunset is listening. As if this last bit of the year can intervene. “I wantall of him. Tonight.”
I feel those words settling in me. They feel different. Bigger, maybe. More intense. Like spells I’m pressing into my own bones.
I understand, then, that this is how it’ssupposedto feel. This is what a claim is supposed to be about. This deep determination to bewithhim in all the ways I can. This conviction that all the things that have always worried me about claims and mating from a distance don’t matter, because this is us.
This understanding that Ty and I can make the world what we want it to be, so we can certainly makeuswhat we need to be too.
I feel silly for ever imagining otherwise.
It makes me sad for all the females like me who weren’t allowed to wait until they felt like putting themselves forward at a gathering. All the females who weren’t allowed to find this iron conviction deep inside themselves.
I feel it now. He is mine. I am his. And I want everything that goes along with that.
I decide there’s no point in beating myself up for not getting here sooner. It took all of those moves I made to get me to this one. It took everything I did, everything we were, to be sitting in this rattling old vehicle on New Year’s Eve, finally completely certain that there is nothing I would rather do than run with him, submit to him like a wolf and partner with him like a human, and have him call me his forever.
That I have to deal with Vinca’s beak-faced, wormy bullshit in the middle of this makes me highly motivated to do whatever is necessary to get rid of that bitch once and for all.
I’m actually gritting my teeth a little as I drive up Winter’s bumpy driveway. Everything feels like déjà vu tonight, or maybe it’s just a hint of that “Auld Lang Syne.” I remember the first time I drove up here like this. How I had an irritated pack of bodyguards who all warned me that trying to rent one of the cottages here would piss Ty off. They were right. It did.
Though he still let me do it.
I remember meeting Savi and Briar for the first time. I knew who Savi was on sight, of course. I knew Briar was one of the Kind at a glance. Made of magic, if not, apparently, able to access any.
I never thought I’d be friendly with either one of them.
I knew Winter best—though, back then, I barely knew her at all.
Now look at us,I think as I swing out of the Explorer and let my boots hit the cold, icy ground. We were all hanging out in a bar last nightlike regular old twentysomethings on a sitcom somewhere. Practically idyllic, if you squint and tell yourself that there weren’t three gorgons and a whole drunk-ass manticore at Gold Rush last night.
The sun is behind the hills now. The dark night falls like a curtain. Savi, apparently not wishing to bother with her fancy vehicle, appears in the door of her cottage. On my other side, I hear the front door to the house open, and a glance tells me that Winter’s there.
She starts toward us, over the yard that still shows patches of green grass beneath the thinner patches of snow.
“So are we immediately invisible to all trackers?” I ask. “Or do we have to be holding hands and braiding each other’s hair?”
“If you touch my hair,” Savi tells me with a smile, “I will use your intestines as macramé.”
“I can tell how much I’ve changed in the past couple of months,” Winter says. “Because honestly? That sounds like arts and crafts, not a murderous, psychotic threat.”
“Welcome to the Reveal,” I say grandly. “The true reckoning is never with the monsters without, but rather with those within.”
Winter keeps walking over and Savi comes forward, and then we’re all sort of standing there by the side of my car.
