Total Eclipse

Epilogue

“Mo-o-om!”

I was in the middle of a pile of paperwork and a simultaneous conference call with Warden HQ, which had already gone on for two hours and was likely to go on for two more. I counted to ten, silently, and hit the mute button on my phone just as someone, of course, asked me for my opinion. Ah well. I always told them family came first. “What is it?” I called, with extreme patience.

“I need you!”

“Do you need me right now?”

“Well—yeah, kind of!”

That was when I smelled something burning, and the smoke alarms went off at the back of the house. I jumped up, scattering papers in a summertime paper blizzard as I dashed toward my son.

He was standing in the doorway saying, “Mom, I didn’t mean to; it wasn’t my fault. . . .”

“Lewis Kevin Prince, get out of my way!”

He knew that tone, at least, and, head down, shuffled aside so I could see the freaking bonfire that was raging in the corner of his room. Those curtains were toast.

Again.

I called up my mad Fire skills and snuffed it out with only a little puff of smoke. It was worse than I’d thought—carpet melted into a toxic cesspool in the corner, the paint done for, the aforementioned curtains gone from white to charred rags. It could have been worse. At least this time, he’d kept it away from the closet, the computer, the game system, and his huge rack of books.

Our son was eight years old, and nobody in the entire history of the Wardens had shown this kind of crazy potential at this age. Potential for destruction, sure, but not with such an impressive amount of firepower. Literally.

I looked at the damage, sighed, and said, “Lewis, I’m going to have to get your dad for this.”

He looked so gleeful for a second that I wondered if that had been his plan all along. Dad, home, with us. If it was, he was smart enough to look immediately angelic. Not hard for him—he was a gorgeous kid, with floppy straight dark hair and big blue eyes. He had his father’s features, though. In the pictures I had hanging up around the house, there was no doubt at all as to his parentage.

I really don’t know where he got the stubbornness from, though. And the wild streak.

The front door slammed open, and a cheery voice yelled out, “Get some clothes on, you, you hippies!” Cherise. Good thing I’d put the conference call on mute. Yikes, that would have greatly enhanced my standing in the Warden executive offices. “Hey, are you burning a roast again? You really suck at this housekeeping thing, you know. Good thing I brought pizza and Bellinis.”

Only in Cherise’s world did that combination make sense. I loved Cherise’s world.

“Aunt Cher!” Lewis quickly abandoned the disaster of his bedroom and pelted out toward the living room. “Did you bring it? Did you?”

I followed him, because standing there in contemplation of the wreckage was just not helping. Cherise wasn’t alone; holding the pizza box was Tommy, whose shy smile always delighted me—like Lewis, he’d grown up to be a beautiful boy, and with far better manners (from Cherise! Who knew?). Lewis ran up to him and took the pizza, which made Tommy frown a little in anxiety and trail him toward the kitchen. “Don’t eat any yet!” I heard Tommy say sternly. “We need to wait for our moms!”

I could just imagine what Lewis would say to that. “Lewis, listen to Tommy!”

Yeah, right. Poor Tommy.

Cherise put her purse down—Prada, very nice—and added her designer sunglasses to the pile. She looked summer-hot, and life was definitely being good to her these days. She’d started up a personal stylist business, and was now all the rage among the Miami elite, with a rising number of Hollywood clients as well. “So,” she said. “I’m assuming the fire’s out?”

“Don’t worry, you won’t smudge anything.”

“Damn straight.” She flopped on the couch, put her sandaled feet up on the coffee table, and folded her hands over her trim stomach, which the sundress left bare. “You’re not bailing on us, are you?”

I flopped down next to her and stretched out my legs. Mine were longer and better toned, thanks to running around after my hyperactive hamster of a son. Cherise’s had a better tan. “I have a conference call.”

“When?”

I gestured vaguely toward the open door of the office, where people were still mumbling on the phone line without me. “Forever, apparently.”

“Come on, it’s a holiday! You work every holiday. Be a do-bee, not a don’t-bee.”

“I’ve got beer in the fridge, don’t I?”

“You could be drinking that beer at the beach. Followed by a really swell dinner with your friends. I’m here to make sure you go.”

I sighed. It was Memorial Day, and Memorial Day had a special meaning now for the Wardens. We didn’t officially have ceremonies—hadn’t since the first year—but all of us thought of Memorial Day as the day we honored our fallen friends and comrades. And we gathered, wherever we were, to break bread together and just . . . be glad we were still alive.

Over the past eight years, a lot had changed. The destruction wrought during Mother Earth’s brief, angry wakening had changed the face of a lot of communities around the world . . . and utterly obliterated a few. From the ashes, people rebuilt, and they rebuilt well. The remaining Wardens had helped, too. Finally, eight years out, the trauma was starting to lessen, but it would never really fade. Not for any of us.

I made a decision, and popped my head in the kitchen. As usual, Lewis had persuaded Tommy that they didn’t really need to wait for permission to start on the pizza. I shook my head and said, “Go ahead, boys. Eat up. It just means you can’t go swimming for thirty minutes.”

“Mom!” Lewis promptly said, and looked very disappointed. “That’s not even true. It doesn’t matter if you eat.”

“It’s true today, buster, because you’ve had half the pizza in about five minutes and you need to stop. Now go get your beach stuff.”

He and Tommy dashed off toward Lewis’s bedroom, still clutching their last pieces of pizza. I sighed and closed up the box and put it away in the fridge, retrieved a six-pack of bottled beer, and added it to my always-ready beach bag.

Then I went into the office, unmuted the call, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention?”

The voices fell silent. Twenty Wardens, all waiting for me to say something profound.

“Go enjoy your holiday,” I said. “We’ll pick this back up tomorrow. It can wait.”

Nobody argued. There was noticeably more good cheer in their voices as they signed off.

Cherise had brought her car—a sedan, not a Mommy-van; even if she eventually had a dozen kids, I didn’t think she’d ever go to that extreme. It was a brand-new Ergani, the sleek electric one, and she seemed to like it. I missed the feel of the engine, but I had to admit that hers was more planet-friendly.

We spent a few blissful hours at the beach, sipping our beer and watching our kids play. As the sun began to sink toward the western horizon, we packed up, whistled for Lewis and Tommy to drop whatever arcane thing they were doing with shells and sticks, and piled back into the car, tired and happy.

Cherise drove us to the restaurant where we always seemed to congregate for these types of events: Fuego. It was full to capacity in the dining room, with benches of people sitting outside admiring the sunset and waiting for tables, but Cherise strolled right up to the desk and said, “Warden party.”

“Right this way,” said the flawlessly decked-out greeter, and led us past all the mildly resentful people to a private dining room along the side of the building.

It was already full, which confused me—I’d just been on a long-distance conference call with most of these people, and yet here they were, in Miami. Marion Bearheart in particular looked smug. She was sitting near the end of the table in her gleaming wheelchair, resplendent in black leather and Navajo turquoise. She inclined her silver and black head toward me—more silver than black, these days—and smiled a warm welcome at all of us.

Other friends were at the table, too. Peter, the new head of Weather operations; Anjali, who was over Fire; Carl, fresh from getting his hands dirty with Earth powers; a few others, too.

“How . . . ?”

“We had help,” Marion said, and nodded farther down the table, where a very small blond girl sat kicking her feet in a chair too big for her. Venna inclined her head gravely. On the other side of the table, so did Rahel, with an absolutely enigmatic smile that still managed to be terrifying.

And at the end of the table, standing, was David.

Lewis ran to him immediately, and David whirled him around and picked him up in a close embrace, then immediately let him slide down when Lewis started to wiggle. I didn’t go to him immediately; I loved seeing the two of them together.

Cherise shoved me from behind, pointedly. “Well, go on, jump the hottie, or I’m all over that!”

“Mom!” Tommy protested. “That’s disgusting.”

“I know, kiddo.” She kissed the top of his head and shooed him off to join Lewis in picking out seats where they could cause the most mayhem possible. David reseated them next to him, which was very smart.

I walked over to my husband, no longer leader of the Djinn, and stepped into his warm, sweet embrace. I rested my head against his neck, touched my lips to his ear, and whispered, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Lewis says hello. He’s renovating Jonathan’s house. I think he likes the challenge.”

I had to laugh. Lewis would like trying to knock out walls in an eternal structure. Maybe he’d manage to put some paint down, though.

“Hungry?” he asked me.

“Starving,” I whispered back. “Let’s go home and do something about that. A whole lot.”

“Later,” he laughed, and did terribly provocative things just by drawing his fingers lazily up my back. I shivered in total delight. “I promise you, you’ll get your fill.”

“And you?”

“Never,” he said, and tipped my chin up so I could meet his eyes. “You know that. Now stop flirting and sit.”

As if it had been my fault. Hardly.

The servers were already circulating, putting out trays of appetizers and pouring wine and other drinks, and we were all sitting down together, human and Djinn. It hadn’t seemed possible, just a few years ago; some of the Djinn had wanted me dead for bringing back the ability of humans to claim them.

Lewis had simply broken the ability. No more claiming. And now, no more reason for us to hate—other than the normal reasons people always seemed to come up with.

Sitting down to a meal with them still felt . . . ground-breaking, somehow.

I kicked it off by picking up the glass the server filled up with red next to me, lifted it, and said, “To Lewis.”

Everyone looked up, and one by one, they lifted their glasses in response, and drank.

“To humans,” Venna said, when I was about to sit down. I looked up, startled, to find her smiling. “You may learn something yet.”

With my hand in David’s, I looked around, and I couldn’t help but think we already had.

There was always tomorrow to worry about, but for now, I was focusing on tonight. And so I lifted my glass, inclined my head, and toasted the human race—flawed, fallible, crazy, and wrongheaded as it usually was.

We all did. Just this once.