The Wolves and the Vipers

Epilogue

"Ready?" I asked Aria.

She nodded vigorously, and I had to take care my hands didn't slip. I was covering her eyes, to make sure she couldn't see the surprise waiting in our garden. Jace opened the door for us, and I guided her out onto the porch now.

"Okay, any further and you'll fall down the steps," I warned her. She stopped obediently. "And that means it's time to open your eyes."

I took my hands away, and Aria stood there blinking in the sunlight. It took her a few moments to spot the treehouse in the branches of a towering oak tree, and then I watched her forehead furrow in confusion.

"That house wasn't there before," she told us.

"No, it wasn't," Jace agreed. "You should probably go and check it out."

She needed no further encouragement to run across the grass and start scaling the ladder. She was constantly climbing trees, so it had seemed like a good idea for an early birthday present. Jace and I were also hoping it would keep her out of the higher branches, because once or twice we'd spotted her twenty metres in the air, claiming she was 'scouting,' and it had almost given me a heart attack. She was having trouble adjusting to life indoors in many ways, so maybe a house outdoors would help her settle in.

Jace had spent a day building it from spare timber. Originally, Tyler had been helping, but after ten minutes with a hammer in his hand, he'd proved to be a liability to himself and others, so I'd sent Ashley outside to take his place. Things had gone a lot more smoothly after that, and it had been yet another excuse for Zoe and me to be alone together in the house. We were getting better at finding excuses for that.

"Can I sleep in here?" she asked us through the link.

Jace and I looked at each other despairingly.

"No, kiddo," I told her. I didn't mind being the bad guy, not when Jace was still trying to reconnect with her. "You'll still need to sleep in the house. But we can talk about a sleepover in the summer if you're good."

Aria made a face at us — I could see it even with so much distance separating us. A heartbeat later she shifted in her wolf, a mottled grey pup with legs too long for her body. She began sniffing around the treehouse, her tail wagging back and forth lazily. After a few laps of the house, she flopped down, resting her head on her paws while she peered at the outside world.

"She looks like she's enjoying herself," someone said from behind us. I didn't have to turn my head to know it was Kallie. She came and sat herself on the steps beside us and placed a steaming mug of tea down. She was wrapped up in a winter coat, like me, because the snow had crept down from the peaks to cover New Dawn's land these last few days.

A smile flitted across Jace's lips, so quick I almost missed it. "I think she is, but it's hard to tell with her sometimes."

For a few minutes, we sat together in silence. But I didn't quite relax. I knew Kallie must have come out here for a reason. She wasn't shutting herself in the house like she had in the aftermath of Danny's death, but she didn't tend to seek out company either. Jace could usually get a conversation out of her — she was always at ease in his presence — but the rest of us were lucky to get more than a sentence or two.

"I've been trying to find a good time to talk to you both," she said. "But with everything that's been going on, it hasn't been easy."

If I had been in wolf form, my ears would have pricked up. She sounded very serious, but there was a lightness to her tone and the beginnings of a smile on her lips.

"You don't ever have to wait for a good time to talk to us, Kallie," Jace told her. "You know that. What's going on?"

Kallie seemed to have swallowed her tongue. It was a few moments before she managed to find any words at all, and then they all came out in one big rush. "I'm actually... Um, I'm pregnant. I realised last week. It wasn't intentional, so I needed a little time to get my head around it, given that Danny's not here anymore."