Page 69 of Twisted Fates
Once Orville and the other ghosts were soothed, I rushed up the stairs and into my beloved Damian’s arms. I jumped on him, waking him up. He woke laughing, and I didn’t hesitate to take his mouth with mine.
“I love you,” I admitted when I pulled back.
He studied me for a moment and then smiled. “It’s so much more than love that I feel for you. I don’t even have the words, Owen. I’m completely and utterly devoted to you.”
“Mmm,” I said, “Could be worse things than having a Legacy Wizard devoted to you, huh?”
He smiled and kissed me. “Could be worse things than having the one and only Re’em unicorn loving you, huh?”
“Truth,” I said and ground my cock into him. “I say we should celebrate our good fortune.”
Before I knew it, Damian had magically flipped me onto my back. “I couldn’t agree with you more!”
We made passionate love for the rest of the afternoon. Then, we slept in each other’s arms until the following morning.Both of us were utterly exhausted from the previous day’s encounters.
Dreams for me were different now—more like visions. I was awake but not. Something I guess came with being the Re’em. I saw when Molly and Shadow left the house. Shadow stopped just before leaving, turned toward me, and winked, letting me know she could see me. I also think she and Molly had made up.
The vision of her and Molly living in Illinois, where Shadow and I had sat this morning as their main home, filled me with joy. Then, the vision of three little ones, two girls and a boy running through the wild fields, caused me nothing less than happiness.
Epilogue: Owen
“Do wizards and unicornsneed to get married?” I asked, frustrated with all the hoopla Cary was tossing at me.
“Yes, they do, and you shouldn’t be announcing you’re a unicorn.”
“I blocked the office when I came back to work. Jeez, I’m the freaking Re’em. I know basic shit,” I said, causing Cary to chuckle.
I’d been antsy since Damian had proposed in a grand, spectacular way. We were in the Mt. Pleasant graveyard, the only place where the ghosts felt comfortable being with the witches, even though Damian had brokered a peace agreement between them over a year earlier.
We wanted to have a party with all our friends, but the ghosts still refused to let the witches into our home, saying it put the wards at risk, which, ironically, the witches had said as well. The compromise was when we wanted a party, we had it at the cemetery and at night when we could have privacy.
Our lives certainly were strange. Damian had surprised me, which as a unicorn, is freaking hard to do. I knew he had done something with Shadow to keep it a secret—something I’d given her a shit ton of grief about afterward.
Our sweet grandmother had passed away just a week after I’d met her. She smiled at me when I met her and said she’d waited for me, and I couldn’t have been happier that at least before she’d passed on, I’d had the opportunity.
Since then, Shadow and I had grown closer. Shadow was, in every way, an environmentalist. I didn’t know until our grandmother told me that she’d finished her Ph.D. in Environmental Studies. All her music was about saving the Earth.
Now that the dark forces were so determined to create an imbalance, our focus, both Shadow’s and mine, had been on reversing the darkness created by humanity. Not all things dark came from the magical community.
If we didn’t reverse the climate change and other horrors created by fossil fuels and polluting the oceans, there would be a much greater risk of destroying the balance of life on earth than anything Balthazar had tried to create. Luckily, my being an attorney and Shadow, an influential performer, we had significant impacts, even if they were subtle.
Life was busy as we all took to our duties. That didn’t mean we weren’t a close-knit family. Even the ghosts allowed Cary to visit now without getting pissy about it. On top of that, Caryintroduced Cook, also known as Lucious, to some ghost they’d met on the Illinois prairie, and the two had hit it off.
Now, Lucious adored Cary, although he was still leery of him. Alexander, the old man ghost who allowed himself to revert to a younger version when he met Lucious, now lived together in our armory, next to the kitchen.
I’d never been in the room and hadn’t even remembered it was there until I got home and felt it with my Re’em senses. Luckily, now that the worst of the dark forces that threatened us had disintegrated in their attack against me, there wasn’t much need for weapons.
So, Damian had created a strange sort of dimensional pocket where the weapons were stored in case we needed them, freeing the armory for the two ghost lovers to have their own privacy. Which, at least to me, was entirely appropriate.
I allowed Cary, and now his accomplice, Mrs. Patterson, to dress me in what seemed like an outfit better suited for a freaking cosplay event at some con.
As I stared at myself in the mirror, the bright white, wildly out-of-date tuxedo looked pretty sweet on me. Begrudgingly, I admitted that.
The wedding was quite an event, but I refused to have my fucking wedding in a graveyard, so we rented a downtown cathedral, where luckily, the priest was a witch and a friend of Mr. Stages. The witches agreed to leave our ghost friends alone, so they, too, could attend. I think having both Shadow and me being rather insistent about that helped persuade them.
Shadow and Molly had refused to let Damian and me see each other before the event. It felt weird they were both so committed to a conventional wedding, considering theirs had been in the middle of an Iraqi desert, where Shadow had told us all that every Karkadann wedding had been held since the beginning of time.
As her brother and the Re’em, I knew that was total bullshit, but I didn’t contradict her. It was a beautiful ceremony, convened by a powerful djinn, who I suspected was the real reason Shadow had wanted to get married there.
