Page 27
Epilogue One
Xochil
-A few months later-
“W here is she?” I roared as I ran into the pack house.
“Xochil, calm down. She’s fine,” Dad said, coming out of the kitchen.
“You mind-link me to tell me she got hurt while training, and when I try to check on her, her mind-link is closed, and I’m not supposed to get concerned? I’ve never run so fast in my life,” I huffed.
I’d been at the edge of our property, checking on the scent markers, when Dad mind-linked me right after I’d felt her getting hurt.
“I told you she just lost consciousness for a tiny bit. I brought her back here, and your mom checked her out. Ogum is sorry, and he’d already healed her by the time we made it into the pack house.”
“In my defense, we would have been fine if the bird hadn’t deflected the knife,” Aline’s voice came from the kitchen in that deeper tone of Ogum’s.
I pushed past my father and into the kitchen, my heart finally beating again when I caught sight of Aline, sitting at the small table to the side with a hot cup of coffee next to her. Mom and Renata were sitting to either side of her.
But just seeing her wasn’t enough, so I stalked forward and pulled her into my arms, burying my face in her neck.
“Xoch—”
I put a finger to her lips without pulling away from her neck. I needed a moment to get myself back to normal from the fright of something happening to her. Once I had, I pulled back, sat on the chair she’d been occupying, and pulled her onto my lap.
Aline squirmed, trying to get off, but I held on.
“Okay, now tell me what happened,” I ordered.
“I told her not to do it,” Renata said in a very much I-told-you-so manner.
“Your grandmother saw it wasn’t going to go well, and you still did it?” I asked my mate.
Why would she go against a vision?
“She didn’t have a vision, Xochil. She just told me not to do it.”
“I don’t need to have a vision to know that was a stupid thing to do,” Renata answered with a smug lift of her chin.
“What happened, Little Witch?” I asked again.
“It was just supposed to be a demonstration,” she started, squirming as I felt her embarrassment flowing down the bond. “I’d been feeling very… inadequate around all the shifters and magic users.”
“Baby, you’re more than adequate. You’re spectacular, and you’re only just beginning your training. You don’t have anything to prove to anyone.”
“Says one of the strongest wolves in the pack,” Aline mumbled, making Mom cough to cover a laugh.
I glared at my mother, and she raised an eyebrow back at me.
“Don’t give me that look. Just because she has no reason to feel the way she does, doesn’t mean she'll magically stop feeling them. You need to address them and validate them, or this will keep happening,” my mother chastised.
“What exactly is it that you tried to demonstrate?” I asked instead of responding to my mother’s lecture. I may be twenty-five, but I was still not allowed to talk back to my mother.
“We were just doing small stuff,” Aline started. “We were throwing daggers and hammers and hitting small targets. We speared an apple off of Hector’s head,” she mumbled.
“And he let you?” I asked.
Hector was a young wolf. A good warrior, but he was a little weird with his reactions to things like knives and needles.
“I don’t think he wanted to say no to his future luna,” Renata giggled. “The wolf looked like he was going to pee himself, though.”
“Okay, so how did we go from potentially injuring a pack member to injuring yourself?” I asked.
“We were never going to injure him!” Ogum made his indignation at not having faith in his abilities known.
“I’m not doubting you. Hector is a bit of a squirmer. He doesn’t even like needles,” I told him, trying to assure him.
“Yeah, well, he did squirm, and we still managed it,” he huffed, a little mollified, and then ceded control back to Aline.
“So, then what happened?” I asked more gently.
“Well, umm... Ogum”—she stopped, and her eyes glazed over for a moment, then she sighed and corrected—“then we thought it wasn’t enough, and people were getting bored, so we upped it up a notch.”
“Meaning?”
“We… ummm… we asked one of the bears to throw a baseball as fast as they could so we could hit it with a knife as it passed by us.”
I could feel a headache trying to claw its way to the front.
I was well aware I was a little overprotective of my mate right now. I knew Ogum protected her, and her healing was almost as quick as a wolf’s, but she was still mostly human. Her body was more delicate than ours. Our people were a little rougher when they did anything because the base strength of our bodies was a lot higher than a human’s. And while Aline wasn’t the only human here, she was one of the few, and wolves sometimes didn’t know how to measure their strength when interacting with them.
I was even struggling just letting her train in private with Jacob, who I knew would cut off his own arms before hurting her. And, I only agreed after getting into a heated discussion with her about how she needed to be able to defend herself one day if I wasn’t with her. Her point that she’d been taken right from under my nose went a long way to win her argument, even if it made me more determined to make sure she was never away from me.
I knew it was illogical because we both had duties that took us in different directions daily. I took my issues to Dad, and he explained that it would pass. A lot of it had to do with the mating bond being new. Though he admitted it wouldn’t completely go away. As an alpha, there was no one more precious to us than our luna, and the thought of her coming to harm under our watch, made the protective instincts toward them a little hard to handle sometimes.
I was trying, but Aline wasn’t making it easy when she told me she was putting herself in danger. All it made me want to do was to sew her to my side so she wouldn’t be a danger to herself.
“Are you telling me that you willingly let someone, a bear, throw a baseball at your head with all of his strength?” I asked her with a little bit of disbelief.
Beside us, Renata giggled, though when I turned my head to send an admonishing look her way, she was the epitome of the concerned grandmother looking at her granddaughter with disapproval.
“Of course not, Xochil,” Aline answered indignantly, but I could feel her getting flustered when Renata giggled from the side again. That told me there was more to her indignation.
“Not after I told her I would have someone mind-link you to tell you what she was doing, anyway,” Renata added quietly, knowing full well I’d be able to hear her.
“Little Witch,” I sighed.
“ The point is , I didn’t have anyone throw a ball directly at my head,” she mentioned, glaring at her grandmother, and then my mother when she giggled. Even Dad looked like he was struggling to keep the smile off his face. “Silas was to throw it perpendicular to where I was standing, so we only had a split second to spear the ball with the knife while it passed in front of us. It was supposed to be impressive,” she finished in a grumble.
I sighed deeply and lay my chin on her shoulder, the headache I sensed coming, bursting forth.
“So, if he didn’t throw the ball at your head, how did you end up unconscious?” I asked.
This story felt overly complicated, and I knew she was making it that way in the hope I would stop asking.
“Well, we were at the half-constructed area where Helios is trying to add more storage, and I’d put one of the hammers I used in a demonstration on top of one of the partial walls.
“And that fell on you?” I asked.
“N-no. It fell on the shovel.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose when Mom and Renata started giggling again, and even Dad joined in with a low chuckle.
“What shovel, Aline?” I asked, starting to feel laughter at the ridiculousness of this conversation trying to bubble up.
“Well, since we were in the middle of a construction site, there were some leftover tools all over the place. When Silas threw the ball, I got ready to throw my knife. I threw it, at the right time, I might add, but I didn’t see the pigeon flying across when I released it. The knife hit the pigeon, which looked like it exploded, with all the feathers going everywhere. I mean feathers were raining everywhere! It was like we were having one of those movie pillo—”
“Aline,” I growled in warning, and everyone around me giggled again.
“Since my knife was diverted, the ball hit the wall where I left the hammer, and the hammer fell down on the shovel.”
“And the shovel was somewhere around you and hit you in the head when it lifted?” I guessed.
“N-No. I was close, but not close enough for that,” she answered.
“I know I’m going to regret asking this, but what happened after the shovel missed you?” I asked, prompting another round of giggles and chuckles. Actually, I didn’t think they’d stopped since the last set of events was explained.
“There was an axe lying on the handle of the shovel,” she answered, making me tense up.
“You got hit with the axe?” I asked, suddenly wanting to check every inch of her beautiful skin for scars.
“No,” she said, and I took a big, calming breath as our family started laughing harder around me.
“I’m just going to stop asking questions now, Aline. I need you to finish your story. What happened after the hammer hit the shovel? Please, don’t stop. Even if the fire alarm goes off or if we’re attacked by Tezcatlipoca himself. I need you to sit here and finish the story before I have a heart attack or lose my ever-loving mind,” I explained my current situation as calmly as I could.
“Wolfie,” my mate tried to whine, using the nickname she knew Erinda and I were fond of, but even Erinda was immune to the nickname right now.
If I looked closely, I thought I might be able to see patches of her fur missing from the stress she was going through, as we listened to every non-step of this disaster chain.
“Please,” I begged her, my voice taking on a weird tone I don’t remember having, that sounded very close like I was on the verge of madness.
Aline sighed and slumped a little.
“The shovel sent the axe flying, which hit the beam behind me. Hanging from the beam was a drill, and when the axe hit it, it sent it falling to the floor. I thought the sequence ended there, so I turned back to the pigeon. The problem with that was that the cord of the drill was up on the half-constructed wall behind me. The cord was tangled around the handle of an empty bucket of cement, and it flung down and hit me on the ass as I was bending down to look at the pigeon to double check if it was dead or not. The hit sent me sprawling forward, and I hit the opposite wall and knocked myself out,” Aline finally finished her story in a rush.
At that point, our family around us was laughing hysterically, while I could only blink as my brain tried to process the series of events that led to my mate… knocking herself out.
“I think you broke your mate, Aline,” Renata rasped between giggles, sending my mother into another fit of giggles before she could even calm down from the first.
“No, I—” I stopped, because I didn’t have a fucking clue as to what I was about to say. I went over the entire story again in my head, and I focused on the one thing that hadn’t been answered. “So, was the pigeon dead?”
“If it wasn’t, it is now. After I came to, Hector shifted into his wolf, took the pigeon in his mouth, and trotted very happily into the woods. He mind-linked me to thank me for the snack as he left, and told me he was glad I was okay.”
I groaned and buried my head in her neck. “Of course, he did,” I answered, before I finally gave in and started laughing at the whole damn situation.
“Xochil, that tickles.” She squirmed as I chuckled into her neck.
“Good,” I laughed, a little maniacally, if I was going to be honest, but I couldn’t stop.
It didn’t help that everyone laughing was just more fuel to the fire, and the cycle of laughter felt infinite.
“It’s not that funny,” Aline complained, even as she continued to giggle at the breath on her neck.
“No. You’re right,” I said, finally lifting my head from her neck with one last chuckle. “It’s not funny that you got hurt. What’s funny is that I’m going to go gray by the time I’m thirty, either from waiting for you to tell me the long line of another series of chaotic events, or from the mini heart attacks you give me for each step of the way.”
Aline looked like she was about to argue, but I took her chin between my fingers and brought her face to mine, kissing her deeply.
“I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Like Dad said the first day he met you, you’re going to keep me on my toes.”
“Isn’t that the truth!” Renata said, still laughing heartily.