Once we’d left San Francisco, we all breathed easy again.
Dawn arrived while we were somewhere in Nevada. Cormac was the one who broke the thoughtful, tired silence we’d been driving through. “I’m trying to figure out—did we win or not?”
Ben was at the wheel. I’d been dozing off in the front passenger seat. I’d assumed Cormac had been doing the same in back. Apparently, he’d been thinking instead. Funny, I’d been trying to avoid thinking.
“Define win,” Ben said.
“We’re all alive, we won,” I said curtly. That was all the argument that mattered—the pack was safe. Right?
“I guess so,” Cormac said. “Then why does it feel like we got handed a booby prize?”
Because for all that we’d done what we came to do—help Anastasia protect the Dragon’s Pearl, turn back Roman’s forces—and learned a few things in the process, the future seemed incredibly hazy. Because I was still thinking that Roman was right and I should stay home. Not get involved.
Not raise an army to fight him, like Anastasia wanted me to do. That was the booby prize.
“What do we do about it?” Ben said. We answered with more silence, until he glanced over at me. “You’re being quiet.”
“So?”
“That’s not like you.”
I said, “I like how we’re talking about this as ‘we.’ What are ‘we’ going to do about it. Thanks for that.” I smiled at Ben and craned my head to smile at Cormac over the seat. I wasn’t surprised that he wouldn’t look at me.
“Somebody’s got to look after you crazy kids,” Cormac said, gazing out the window to the gold-tinged landscape, plains gilded by a brand-new sunrise, scrolling by.
Epilogue
BACK HOME, BEN made me go to the doctor. I didn’t want to—my hip was fine now, I could walk, run, shape-shift, no problem. Since becoming a werewolf I hadn’t ever bothered with health insurance, because, why? I never got sick, I never got hurt. At least not permanently. But Ben wanted to know. So I went, roughly explained the situation (“I fell and hurt my hip awhile back,” I said, using as few details as possible), and the doctor ordered X rays.
The doctor got the films back, and Ben and I waited in the exam room while he studied the image of my pelvis. Before too long, he nodded and made noises of affirmation.
“Right there,” he said, pointing to a couple of denser lines of white on the edges of the bone above my right hip joint. I never would have noticed them looking on my own. “The injury was actually to your pelvis rather than the femur, a couple of hairline fractures consistent with the impact from a bad fall. It’s completely healed—I’m guessing this happened at least a year ago? And you never went to the hospital for it? I’m amazed you could even function with a break like this. It’s usually quite painful.”
Ben and I glanced at each other. How much to explain, how much to leave out?
“She’s stubborn,” Ben said finally. “Likes to tough things out.”
“Well,” the doctor said, tsking me. “Next time, go to the emergency room. If there’d been any bleeding or infection associated with the break, you could have been in real trouble. We also might want to test for osteoporosis. This may be a symptom of weakened bone structure…”
I thanked him for his concern, and we left.
“I’ve always wanted to know what happens when a werewolf breaks a bone,” I said as we walked out to the car. “I ought to send the X rays to Dr. Shumacher for her files, see what she makes of it.”
“You were damned lucky,” Ben said. “What if it had been more than a hairline fracture? What if it had been a break that needed to be set, and the fast healing made it heal wrong? Then what?”
I shrugged, not really wanting to think about what would have happened if I’d ended up lying on the bottom of that shaft with a snapped femur instead of a cracked pelvis. Ben grabbed my hand, raised it to his mouth, and kissed it. The worried crease on his brow, his pursed lips, suggested he was imagining that same scene.
“Let’s not dwell,” I said, pulling my hand free so I could wrap that arm around his middle and hold him close.
* * *
I MET with Rick in his comfortable office under the art gallery, hoping he could help me make sense of some of what had happened. I told the story, and for him I left in the weird bits. Well, the even weirder bits.
“Anastasia’s really gone?” he said when I’d finished. I nodded, grim. “It’s hard to imagine. She’s always been here.”
“She seemed happy, which was pretty amazing to see.”
Rick smiled in response. “Well, good for her. And now she’s left you to fight the good fight?”
I blushed. I still wasn’t entirely prepared to address that part of the story. But I had the coins, a point of access.
“The artifact Anastasia—Li Hua—was protecting, the Dragon’s Pearl, has the power to replicate objects. Food, gold, whatever. She thought he was trying to make a supply of these.” I placed them on the table for him to examine.
“Isn’t that the coin you found in Dodge City?”
“Anastasia recognized it. Roman’s followers and people under his power have them. Defacing them seems to neutralize them. We have to assume he used the pearl to make a bunch of them before we took it back.”
“He’s expanding his army,” Rick said. I nodded. Rick turned Anastasia’s
