Elara's first birthday was celebrated on the beach.
Twenty-three wolves and vampires gathered on the sand below the house. Garrett grilled fish he'd caught that morning. Isolde brought a cake—Elara couldn't eat it, but she smashed her hands into it with gleeful abandon. Thorne played guitar, old songs that predated the Blood Wars.
Cassius and Aldric sat together on a driftwood log. They weren't friends—Kael doubted they ever would be—but they had learned to coexist. To share a granddaughter. To recognize that the world they'd inherited was not the world they had to pass on.
Helena approached with a leather-bound book. "For Elara. When she's older. It's everything I've documented. The bonds. The prophecy. The network. Her parents' story."
Kael took the book. The cover was embossed with a single symbol: the three bonds, intertwined.
"She'll have questions," Helena said. "About what she is. Where she came from."
"She'll have answers. Thanks to you."
Helena smiled. "I spent seventy years studying the past. I never thought I'd help create the future."
Elara toddled across the sand toward Kael. She was walking early—another thing that marked her as different. Her silver-amber eyes were bright with curiosity.
"Dada," she said.
His heart stopped. "Did she just—"
"She's been practicing," Lyra said, appearing beside him. "I wanted it to be a surprise."
Elara reached for him. He lifted her into his arms, this small impossible creature who was vampire and wolf and human and something entirely new.
"Happy birthday," he said.
She g
rabbed his nose and laughed.