I grinned. “Sorry, dude, she’s taken.”
Lacey nibbled on a cheesy breadstick, humming under her breath in pleasure. “You remembered the extra spicy pickles, too.”
“You’re carrying Cupcake. That means my job is to feed both of you, check off everything on the honey-do list and make sure you don’t try to do anything crazy like move an oven by yourself.”
She tapped the end of my nose. “Well damn, Caldwell, there goes the after party.”
Over in the corner of the room by the fireplace, Simon and Juliet were sitting close together, engrossed in conversation over glasses of eggnog. Shortly after everything came out, Lacey and I brought dinner over to Juliet’s house. Not gonna lie, there were some tense moments. I mostly listened, answering questions about my family honestly as they came up. After dinner, I did the dishes while Lacey and her mom made popcorn and turned on the Gilmore Girls. After the kitchen was cleaned up, I slipped Lacey my keys and whispered that I’d walk home so she could hang with her mom. The following week, Simon drove up from Austin and we all went out for burgers and sweet potato fries at a diner downtown. And maybe it was my imagination, but by the end of the night, after exchanging crazy Fancy stories over a plate of onion rings (because of course Simon was awesome and had a cat, too), things just felt like they were in a better place. It was going to take time, rebuilding my relationship with Lacey and her mom the way I should have from the start. I was just grateful that now I had the chance.
On the far wall, the TV abruptly switched over from the holiday movie that had been playing to a news segment.
“There was a vampire sighted in downtown Chicago,” Lacey murmured as they began playing three-year-old footage of the traffic cop’s arrest of #DashCamVlad, the same grainy video everyone around the world had watched so many times we all had the lines and blocking memorized by now. “Dozens of witnesses reported seeing him flash out.”
“What are they playing at now?” The shot passed over Vlad’s face, stirring something in my memory. But— No. It couldn’t be. I blinked, shaking it off.
Catching Lacey’s hand, I tugged her towards the back door. “Got a second? There’s something I want to show you.”
“If you’ve rigged up the patio with silly string and air horns, can I just say you already did that two years ago, and I nearly peed my pants.”
“Like I could forget. You charged across the street, picked up a brick paver and threw it through The Spoke’s front window.”
“While Brody looked on from the parking lot,” she reminded me.
That had been priceless. You two need to figure your shit out, my oldest brother had told me, and then climbed back into his cruiser without another word.
We stepped outside on to the back patio and Lacey gasped. The clear cold night was perfectly cloudless, the air crisp and smoky, a pale crescent moon burning at the edge of the horizon. Thousands of tiny white twinkly lights hung from the rafters of the gazebo, making the air around us shimmer like a constellation of stars. Fat red poinsettias sat on the wrought-iron table. Around them, tiny tea lights shimmered in a crystal bowl.
Lacey covered her mouth. “How did you—”
When she spun around, I was down on one knee, a dark blue velvet ring box in hand. We’d gone to pick it out the day after she accepted my proposal. She’d chosen a square cut diamond set into a white gold band with our initials engraved where the ring would rest against her pulse point. I would wear a plain white gold band as its mate.
I stared up into Lacey’s eyes and felt my throat go dry.
“What do you say we give that white picket fence another try?”
I’d spent half my life convinced I was the black sheep of this family, discarded, unwanted, sure nothing I could do would ever be good enough. But life wasn’t about tallying up all the ways you’d been wronged. It wasn’t about holding grudges or demanding apologies. It was about making the most of each day, living the best life you could in the moment. It was about finding the people who had your back and holding them close—your family, whether that was one you were born into or one you found later. Lacey and I had fought our way back to each other again. And I was never letting her go.
“I love you,” she whispered, and as I swept her up into my arms, whoops and hollers sounded from the open screen door.
Cal clapped me on the back, hugging me for a long moment. “Proud of you, Dally. Dad would be, too.”
A lump formed in my throat. I’d only had two sessions so far with the therapist he’d recommended, but I had a good feeling. He’d helped me find a meeting dealing with addiction recovery to attend once a week in the next town over. Sometimes the first step was the hardest one to take. Hayden hugged Lacey, eyes bright. She’d taken the news about Ellie hard. Let’s just say her latest open mic night at Dark had been a barely disguised rage session directed at my youngest brother.
Slowly everyone made their way back into the house but me, Brody, West and August.
Brody turned to West. “I don’t like what you’re planning with Topher. He’s unstable. You take him out in the field and both of you are going to get hurt.”
West folded his arms. “His brother is out there somewhere, maybe being held against his will. This doesn’t end for him until we get answers—one way or another.”
“Then you’re going to clear anything you’re planning with me or River.” Frowning, he lowered his voice. “But that isn’t why I needed the three of you to stay. We’ve got trouble.”
My pulse kicked, senses instantly on high alert. “What’s going on?”
“For right now, what I’m about to say doesn’t leave the four of us. We clear?”
Everyone nodded. Brody paced to the far side of the patio.
“You probably already know I asked River to poke around but keep it quiet. Turns out we were right. The Council has been developing a treatment targeted at Ferals whose viral loads are too high. The original goal was to find a way to help them lead normal lives and reduce the risk to the human population. They were searching for a drug that affected shifters could take once a month at the full moon—something that could turn high viral loads into a manageable chronic condition.”
“They’d never go feral at all,” August said quietly. “No more colonies on the outskirts of pack territory. No need for Alphas and Tracers to step in. No more safe rooms. No more horror stories.”
I folded my arms. “That’s been tried before.”
“Apparently, this time they’re close to making it work.”
West snorted. “You know, except for the inconvenient part where the vamps are weaponizing their drug so it can be used to kill or kidnap shifters.”
August spoke in a low voice. “When River tried to go in last month and find out who could have accessed the pack security protocols and therefore would have known which cameras to take out just before the bombing, the data had all been corrupted. Whoever did this had high level clearance.”
“And knew how to cover their tracks,” I added.
“We have to assume that person was the one who leaked the biologic agent they were developing to the vamps,” Brody said.
“Why?” West leaned against one of the patio chairs, staring up at the sky.