stared at him. The glow of life I’d lent the Unsettled had already begun to dissipate, and some of them had faded well beyond the way they’d looked when I’d first seen them. Odessa had destroyed their bones. They didn’t have enough to hold on to anymore.
“Let go of me,” I told Tobias after he got me up the steps. The werewolf released his grip on me, and I reached for his elbow instead. Tobias let me hang much of my weight on his arm, and I hobbled across the brick gutter so I was once again surrounded by ghosts.
I searched their faces until I spotted the officer, the one who’d seemed particularly interested in me earlier. He hovered near Beau, but as I caught his eye, he flowed toward me. He was shorter and broader, but now that they were next to each other, I could see the resemblance. This was Beau’s brother, Asa. Of course—he’d seemed more alert because he had boundary blood.
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure how much the Unsettled could recognize about what was happening, so I said, “Many of the bodies underground have been destroyed, which is why so many of you are getting fainter. I can’t tell you what will happen after you fade from here. Maybe you’ll all wander on to another place, or maybe you’ll just stop . . . being. I don’t know. But I do know that there’s another option.”
Asa nodded to show me that he followed. Behind him, Beau sort of bristled, but I ignored it. This wasn’t about him. “I can send you home,” I said softly. “To where you should have gone when you died, wherever that is. I can open a door for you.”
I didn’t look at Beau, because he’d told me to do what I could for these men, and this was it. The officer looked around at his fellow soldiers for a moment, and then he turned and mouthed a word to me.
Home.
With tears in my eyes, I opened the door for them.
Epilogue
As the airplane finally touched down, I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks to whoever might be listening. Even in first class, my claustrophobia had started to get the better of me, and I wanted to be clearheaded for my arrival in Atlanta.
It had been two months since I’d returned home to Colorado. My cast was off—despite what felt like my best efforts, it had still been a pretty simple break by the time I got it casted in Boulder—and I was more or less back to full strength.
In more ways than one. My nightmares about the cave in Wyoming had faded some since I’d sent the Unsettled home. The nightmares weren’t completely gone, and I still had the Iraq dreams sometimes, but for the first time in months, I was sleeping through the night more often than not.
My friends were doing well too. Kicking ass in Atlanta had helped Lily find some of her footing as a leader back home. Tobias was more attached to me than ever, to the point that Mary occasionally grumbled about his loyalty. Katia had asked me to come over twice to help her rearrange the furniture, but she finally seemed happy with her apartment. Charlie had turned five and decided that her future career was to be a clothing designer for dinosaurs. I didn’t know if she meant clothes for some mythical living dinosaurs or the skeletal dinosaur fossils at the Museum of Nature & Science, but I thought it was more fun not to ask.
Simon and I were avoiding each other more than we had since I’d first met him, but we both seemed at peace with it. In a way, it was nice to have his feelings out in the open, so we could acknowledge them and move on.
And then there was Quinn. My being away, and him not being able to help, had hurt him more than I’d realized, but the way his eyes lit up when I told him about Holly was a gift I will remember for the rest of my life. However long it might be.
“She’s okay,” he said with great relief.
“I think she might be better than that,” I told him. “I think she might be great. She’s going to be a world-class cop.”
He had beamed so hard with pride that I half expected his shirt to tear open like the Incredible Hulk’s.