Epilogue

Chasten

Something fell on my nose, and I startled awake. Delanie Hope let out a long yip that sounded almost like a swear. A leaf had landed on her too and she was not having all this nonsense of trees spitting their dead skin all over her – no matter how many pretty colors they came in.

"It's a leaf, Del," Kirk yawned, scooping her up under her belly and pulling her up to the top of the truck bed with us. She let out a protesting bark and squirmed this way and that until she saw he held her morning bottle of formula all mixed up with deer broth we brought from home. Her eyes grew into saucers and a second later she shifted back into our not quite one year old baby.

"She's always hungry," I teased.

"Had to feed before she tries to eat another squirrel," he shrugged.

"I miss coffee."

"We'll drive and get coffee after she eats," Kirk laughed. "And our breakfast too. Too many leaf peepers to go hunting right now."

"We're leaf peepers," I screwed up my face pretending to be mad.

"Yeah, and we didn't buy hunting tickets either. Probably were sold out by the time we knew we needed them."

"I still say no one would've missed that squirrel she tried to eat."

"I don't think so either. I would've let her have it, but it was faster than she was, and Del has to learn to be faster if she wants to eat them."

"Meanie," I rolled my eyes at him, but he was right.

"We'll take her hunting when we get back home. I'll catch a squirrel and turn it loose in the backyard or something."

"Isn't that cheating?"

"Not really. That one might be faster than her too and smarter than me and get out of the backyard with its life," he shrugged and glanced at my belly.

"I'm not," I shook my head.

It was a debate we'd had over the last few days. I had a nasty bout of motion sickness on the road and Kirk was ten thousand percent sure I was pregnant. I wasn't so sure. I thought it was all the curvy roads he took with a medium lead foot to keep up with the flow of traffic.

"I got the stick for you to P-E-E on," he said.

"I don't think that's a cuss word."

"I don't want our daughter to think she should run around and P-E-E on S-T-I-C-K-S like her daddy," he smirked at me.

"What here? In the trees?"

"The test is in the glove box with a specimen cup from work," Kirk nodded.

"Will you give it up if I go do this?" I laughed.

"Yeah because then you'll know I'm right and we'll stick to one cup of coffee a day," he said, righting Delanie's bottle that had slipped loose from her suckling lips. "You do want another one, still, right?"

"Only if you can promise me they'll be as cute as her," I said, nodding down at our baby.

"Probably. At least this cute," he said and booped her on the nose.

She shot him a dirty look but kept suckling as I climbed out of our makeshift bed in the back of the new truck, that Kirk only bought last month, to grab the pregnancy test. We hadn't parked near any of the bathroom stations preferring quiet so that Delanie would sleep to the convenience of having them nearby. So I headed into the woods until I couldn't see Kirk, Delanie, or anyone else and peed on the Frost forsaken stick and set the timer on my phone. Three minutes later – there they were. That damn little pixelated baby proving Kirk right.

"Love you," he said over our mating link, his words oozing with vindication.

"Love you too. You better not know before me next time."

"You knew! You just didn't want to believe it."

"We're not leaving early."

"Wouldn't dream of it. Hell, if we stay long enough Dreala might fly out to check on you. She's a full service doctor."

"Shut up and feed the baby!"

"Love you" he said again.

"Love you forever."

Keep an eye out for my next book where we return to the Starscale worlds!