Page 47

THREE MONTHS LATER

MERCY

“ Don’t you dare come in here!”

I turn away from the mirror just in time to see Charlotte slam the bedroom door shut. “You can’t see her yet!”

“I will break this door down,” Ambrose says from the other side.

“No, you won’t.” I stand up, the long skirt of my wedding dress swishing as I walk. Charlotte’s pressed against the door, squeezing the handle in place as Ambrose tries to rattle the doorknob to get in. She grins at me and winks.

I only met her a week ago, but she already feels like my friend.

“Let me see her!” Ambrose shouts.

“Calm down.” I slide up against the door and press my ear to the wood. “What’s wrong? I thought you said everything was ready to go.”

“It is. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

Charlotte makes a show of rolling her eyes. “He’s so dramatic,” she whispers to me, which makes me grin.

“I heard that!”

“Baby, I’m fine.” I know what he’s worried about: that I’m going to change my mind. About him. About the wedding. About this life we’re starting together. For the last two months, he’s asked me over and over if this is what I want, being with him. And every time, I told him the same thing.

“I haven’t changed my mind,” I say to the door. “Now go down to the beach like you’re supposed to.”

“Say it again,” Ambrose orders in that way he does, which makes me blush since Charlotte’s here. She notices, too, since she’s a Hunter, and gives me a rather lascivious look that just makes my blush deepen.

“Stop teasing her, Charlotte,” Ambrose snaps. “Humanita, say it again. One more time before we start.”

“I haven’t changed my mind.” I turn toward the door and press my hands up against the wood, imagining that Ambrose is doing the same. “This is what I want. To be with you.”

When I glance sideways at Charlotte, she has her hands squeezed up to her chest, her eyes as big as saucers. “You two are so cute ,” she whispers. “I have to tell Edie.”

Edie, the other human woman in love with a Hunter, also wasn’t what I expected when I met her.

Ambrose makes a kind of grumbling sighing noise and raps against the door. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he says. “I’ll see you soon.”

“You will,” I tell him.

“He is such a softie,” Charlotte says, tapping on her phone. “I hope he fucking heard me say that, by the way”

I roll my eyes, but if Ambrose does hear it, he doesn’t respond—although the front door of the beachside hotel clicks shut .

I always dreamed of getting married in a church, but that was just from growing up in the Church of the Well. I didn’t know there was any other way to get married, not really. When Ambrose asked me if I wanted a beach wedding, a little over a month ago, the idea shimmered like a diamond. I hadn’t been to a beach since before my parents died, but I remember going when I was a child: the salty wind and rhythmic rush of the waves and the cries of seabirds.

He asked me after he had been gone for a few days to help Charlotte take care of something with her half-brother Rowan, leaving me alone not in the ranch house near Cocana but in a pretty Victorian house along the border, where he took me after the hunt in the desert. We’ve been living there since, and I thought we’d get married in the big backyard, beneath a cathedral of orange trees. But when he came back from his trip, he had another idea.

So that’s how we ended up here, in a little seaside town in South Texas called Rosado. It’s not much, but when I saw the waves cresting against the pale sand, I knew this was where I wanted to get married: holding Ambrose’s hand by the sea.

“Okay.” Charlotte slips her phone in her pocket. “Edie says everything’s good to go down on the beach. Let’s just finish getting you ready.”

Charlotte pulls me back over to the vanity, settling me down on the seat. She’s been helping me for the last two hours—doing my makeup so my eyes look big and bright, pulling my hair back in a complicated bun that looks nothing like the braids I had to wear at the Church of the Well. We bonded over those braids because her mom used to wear them.

“Here you go.” Charlotte pins the veil into my hair. She made it herself, out of fresh roses and a long trail of organza silk. When it’s situated, she steps back, and all I can see in the mirror is myself, looking like the bride I never thought I’d be.

“If Ambrose ever fucks up,” Charlotte says. “You come find me. Jaxon and I will get it sorted. He doesn’t scare us. ”

I glance over my shoulder at her, flush with warmth. I know I don’t know her well , but she’s more protective of me than anyone I’ve ever met other than Ambrose. Edie, too. They’re like a family, the five of them, and they welcomed me so easily that I realized I never really understood what a family was before now.

“He’s not going to fuck up,” I say. “But thanks for the offer.”

Charlotte grins and pulls me back up to my feet. “You ready?”

I nod.

She leaves the bedroom first, making a show of checking for Ambrose as if he might be lurking around to get an early peek at me. He’s not, though. When it’s clear, she gestures for me to join her, and we go out into the open walkway, the breeze warm and balmy. It’s early September, still warm enough for a beach wedding in Texas, but out of season so that Rosado and its beach are mostly abandoned. Plus, Charlotte’s half-brother Rowan runs the hotel, and he apparently made sure everything is empty just for us.

Charlotte taps out something on her cell phone, then nods when it dings. “All right,” she says. “Ambrose is where he needs to be. Edie says you’re good to make your entrance.”

I smooth down my skirt. I’m not nervous about marrying Ambrose—nothing feels more right to me—but I am nervous about the wedding itself, even though hardly anyone is here. I’m not used to being the center of attention.

“Come on.” Charlotte loops her arm in mine, and we take the stairs to the hotel’s courtyard, walking together past the glittering swimming pool and out to the rickety boardwalk that leads to the beach. I can’t see anything, just mounds of vine-covered dunes and the glassy water glimmering in the distance.

“You ready?” Charlotte asks.

“Ready,” I say.

Together, she and I walk down the boardwalk. I never dreamed about being given away at my wedding—I don’t have a father to do it. But Charlotte volunteered and said it made sense since we had both escaped the Church of the Well. I agreed.

There’s no music, just the rhythmic swell of the ocean. Charlotte and I crest over the dunes, and I see what Edie and Charlotte’s boyfriend Jaxon have been working on for the first time:

An altar made out of driftwood and flowers and antlers and animal bones. Jaxon stands in front of it, Ambrose at his side. The altar is beautiful and strange, but when I see Ambrose, he’s all I can see—especially as his eyes drink me in, making me feel like I’m the only human in the world.

Charlotte laughs. “Oh, he’s down bad.”

I blush and focus on walking down the aisle that Edie and Jaxon created out of stones and seashells. She’s sitting in a folding chair next to Sawyer, her Hunter boyfriend. Rowan is there, too, big and hulking as he watches silently from the back row. Another Hunter, like Charlotte. He has a date with him, a dark-haired woman named Abi who curls her fingers protectively around his hand.

But all I care about is Ambrose.

Charlotte guides me across the beach, the wind whipping my dress and veil out behind me. When we reach the altar, she looks Ambrose dead in the eyes and says, “Don’t fuck this up.”

“Get out of here, Charlotte.” But he’s looking at me as he says it, his lips curled up in a smile.

She does, scurrying over to join the others. Ambrose takes my hands, pulling me around so that I’m facing him. His eyes pin me in place.

Jaxon clears his throat.

“Welcome, everybody,” he says. “We’re gathered on this beach beneath the eyes of the gods to bind these two people together in blood. ”

I take a deep, shaky breath. I definitely never fantasized about a pagan wedding, but I don’t need the Christian god anymore. I only need Ambrose.

He squeezes my hands. I squeeze them back, and he smiles.

“Mercy Hendricks,” Jaxon says, offering me a small, sleek dagger. “You may begin.”

I take it from him, the weight smooth and cool in my palm. A wedding dagger, Ambrose told me when he gave it to me, nestled in velvet like a ring. To seal our commitment.

I step up to Ambrose, who offers me his left hand, palm up. I press the dagger’s blade into his flesh. Breaking his skin is harder than I expect, and he pushes up, doing the work for me. Red blood blooms.

“Mercy,” Ambrose murmurs. “I mark you as mine until the universe ends.”

And then he smears his blood gently across my forehead. I shiver at his touch, at the warmth of his blood, at the way this ceremony mirrors the night he claimed me as his.

Then I hand him the knife and offer him my left hand. He cuts it so quickly I hardly feel the sting.

“Ambrose,” I say, my voice shaky. “I mark you as mine until the universe ends.”

And then I bless him, dragging my bloody palm across his forehead. He catches my wrist and presses his cut palm against mine.

“Our blood will mingle until we are one,” he says softly.

“Our blood will mingle until the death of all things,” I respond.

And then he drags me up to him, more roughly than you would expect for a wedding, and kisses me in a way you definitely wouldn’t expect. But this is Hunter’s wedding, after all.

“Okay, cool it,” Jaxon says. “We’re still in public.”

Ambrose pulls away from me, grinning, and brushes his knuckles against my cheek. “More of that later,” he whispers .

I grin back at him.

Jaxon rolls his eyes. But he’s grinning, too. “I present you Ambrose and Mercy Echeverría, joined by blood until the end of time.”

I’m distantly aware of the others applauding and cheering, but it just blends into the sounds of the ocean. All that matters right now, to me, is Ambrose.

All that matters is that I finally found my way home.

The End

Thank you for reading Turn That River Red! I hope you enjoyed it.