Page 122 of Wicked Witch of the Wolf

I hung a right and went to Red’s—not grave. Resting place? No, that still sounded like a grave. Roots? Home?

Home sounded right.

The cactus had visibly grown since I’d seen it this morning. Another inch at least. I decided to walk to the other graves—cactus homes—to see if there’d been any effect on them.

Mom had named the cactuses for the colors of the rainbow, and when they’d died, it had been in order—Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Except for Red.

He’d been the first saguaro to grow and the last to die. The day of his death was seared into me like a brand that would never stop burning.

I stopped at Orange, the cactus that had once stood proud and tall outside of Señora Cervantes’s trailer. I bent down to peer at the soil and nearly upended my wine glass.

A sprout, no taller than Cecil’s ear, was poking out of the soil.

Joy burst in me, and I ran to the next cactus, Yellow. He, too, had sprouted. I downed my wine and ran to the next one and the next, until I was standing outside Ida’s trailer staring down at the teensiest sprout yet. Violet.

I let out a whoop of joy so loud it brought Ida to her window. She slid it open. “What are you hollering about?”

I tipped my head up to her, my face shiny with happy tears.

“The guardians. They’re back.”

Epilogue

Ronan

“Iknew he’d push you too far. I knew it the day you showed up, Ronan.”

“It’swhyI showed up, Rory. I was full of anger at the people who’d treated my mom badly, and I wanted revenge. I saw Floyd as the final target.”

“What stopped you from going after him?” Aurora asked. “Was it the pack?”

“No. If it had only been the pack, I’d have done it and walked away. Half of those wolves would have patted me on the back for it.”

“Then why? Ronan, you almost died. Why didn’t you do it sooner?”

“Because I found something even more important to me than revenge.”

“What?”

“A littlesister. Family.”

“Oh, Ronan.”

I smiled and pictured her immediately lowering herself primly into a chair and pushing her glasses higher on her nose. Rory looked like her mother, who I’d only seen in photos in her room. She was short and skinny, with warm brown skin and hazel eyes like mine—and Floyd’s. It was the only feature we shared if we didn’t count the family trauma.

“If Floyd did one thing right by me, it was giving me a sister like you.”

She sniffed. “I was really hurting when you came into my life. I spent all my time in my room studying. I wanted so badly to earn a scholarship to a school far away from him. The things I witnessed him do, Ronan.” Her voice warbled, and she sniffed again. “And that was only what I happened to see. I heard much worse. Much, much worse.”

“You okay?” I asked, knowing she wasn’t and that I was too far away to hug her.

“Yeah,” she said. We both knew she was lying. “Better since you showed up. And better since moving far away from Floyd.”

“You’ve stopped calling him Dad.”

“You know, I’ve never thought of him that way. Not since Mom died and I saw the truth.” She inhaled through her nose in that way that told me she was getting control of herself. “Once Mom wasn’t there to hide the nefarious things he was doing from me, I saw it all so clearly. And yet there was nothing I could do.”

---