After Dawn, What Came Next

Her father had tried to explain the way things were in the pack. That this was the life she was born into and right or wrong this was just the way of it. She didn’t care. She didn’t agree with bludgeoning an opponent to death to determine the fate of over four hundred souls. She was not going to blindly accept and stand there and do nothing when there was so much that was in her power to do. Oh, she wasn’t blind enough to believe she held the power of life and death in her hands. As a physician, there were things she could do to stave off death and preserve life. Ultimately though, life and death were under the control of a higher power than one thirty-something female with a medical degree.

She had lived in the world…the real world for ten years before her mother and she were found and brought to the pack. Again in medical school, she had lived away from home to study in the city. In fact, she had lived out there in the real world of people longer than she had lived in here in the world of tradition and magic. Her mother understood her abhorrence to violence and covertly supported her daughter’s opinions.

Erica Grey had been born and lived in the human world as a human, never knowing the legacy she had birthed her daughter into. Sometimes, Fallon wished she didn’t know of her heritage or the strange world of her father’s pack. She wished…well, there were so many things she wished for, most of which she would never get.

Her mother was aging, gracefully, but still aging. Gray streaked her hair at the temples and crown. Laugh lines creased the corners of her eyes and edges of her mouth. Her mom was a far cry from elderly. Erica Grey was not the kind of woman to succumb to the effects of time. She gave the passing of years a real fight for their money. Fallon did what she could to keep her mother healthy and strong. Her father wholeheartedly agreed with keeping the woman they so both dearly loved whole. Despite the advances in medical science, there was only so much Nana’s tea and the prescription bottles lining the shelves of the medicine cabinet could do though.

It was odd to see her mom and dad together. Stranger perhaps now than it had been in the beginning when she had been a much younger version of herself. At the age of ten, learning that she had a father who loved her and of the wolf that shared her father’s skin had been both exciting and a little scary. Learning that it would someday happen to her and she would share her body with the spirit of a wolf was both terrifying and exhilarating.

Her father was a powerful wolf, a pack master, and yes, he had killed his own father for the rights to the title. Fallon knew well of the story. When she was finally of an age to understand the whys behind the things he had been forced to do. He had told her all of it. She understood what it had cost him to kill his father in a fight to the death to free the pack from her grandfather’s rule. Once the truth was out. She had never asked her father to repeat the tale again.

Her father was a strong and virulent male. An alpha although he lived under Nash’s rule. He had never wanted to be pack master. He had never wanted to be a leader of men. Fallon didn’t see it as a weakness in his character. Her dad simply wanted the one thing he had been deprived of his entire life, peace. He had his peace or at least some version of it. She saw the strain of this life, how much it had cost him, and the price he still paid, haunting the depths of his eyes.

Her mom would age and die, no matter what attempts were made to preserve her life. Her dad hadn’t appeared to age more than a handful of years in the past two and a half decades. He would go on, healthy, strong, and whole long after her mother was in the grave.

It was a burden the three of them had to live with. They rarely spoke of it, but the truth was there, overshadowing their lives. Most of the time they could ignore it and pretend the eventual wasn’t going to happen. But, when her mom and dad stood side by side. Her mother, graying and wrinkling around the edges and her father, tall and strong without a hint of the effects of the passing of time, it was more than something they didn’t discuss. Rather it was something they couldn’t afford to ignore. It was a fact that would come to pass, sooner rather than later.

A wolf could live far beyond the two hundred year mark. Fallon couldn’t explain the science behind the magic of what the pack was. She had tried through careful research. She covertly studied the pack’s DNA and her own in an attempt to unearth the truth that made them what they were and had come up short. She had no answers. The pack…she and her wolf…simply were. The gift was inherited. Of that, she had no doubt, having experienced the shift and the magic of the wolf first hand.

Sometimes, she hated the furry beast that shared her skin. Sometimes, she was simply taken aback in awe of the raw power and magic of the spirit wolf that lived within her. Her abilities were somewhat different than that of her distant full-blooded relation. She aged a little quicker than the purebred pack. She had more difficulty shifting from one form to another. As a side benefit though, she could go for longer periods of time, months on end without returning to the pack to recharge her metaphysical batteries.

There were myths to explain why they were what they were and where they had come from. All wolves were the descendants of the Great White Wolf, the father of them all. That she could believe. Her genetic research was not without proof of that simple fact of nature. What their wolves did when they were not in control of the body she simply didn’t quite grasp. When her wolf was at the helm, a bulk of her consciousness went to a shadowy world of absolute perfection. She was still present, the rudder to the ship, but not completely aware. When the wolf wasn’t driving the bus of their shared body. It was said that the wolf guarded the borders of the goddess of them all, Kokumthena’s territory, the misty boundary between the living and the dead.

She had never seen a ghost or a spirit. She had never felt the brush of Kokumthena’s mystical hand or seen evidence of Her influence in her life. Nash reassured her that just because she couldn’t feel it didn’t mean it wasn’t so. When she got into heated debates with her father on the subject. He would simply shrug his shoulders and mumble that Nash’s answers were as plausible as any other. Whatever it was, the magic beyond the science of what they were. Although, she wasn’t certain of what she believed or didn’t believe. There was something to it. Perhaps, all living beings contained just a spark of something other. As to what it actually was or was not, she simply didn’t know.

Maybe, it was that spark that kept her clinging to hope when she had no reason to. She had made a promise once, over twenty-five years ago, whispered in urgency and desperation to a fractured boy. A boy that was so lost and perhaps would never be found. She had been thirteen at the time, a foolish girl in love. At nineteen, Daniel had seemed larger than life to her, unapproachable and unobtainable. He had left home a boy eager for adventure and returned home a meager shattered shadow of his former self. But, the things that had happened to him during those long months of his absence in the city had transformed him into a man.

She had a basic understanding of the events, but no one, not even his father knew the whole story. At the time, Daniel saw her as a little girl. At the time, she had been so desperate to reassemble him she had made it her personal mission in life. Everyone tiptoed around him out of fear of his explosive moods and pressing him too hard for answers. Those were dark days filled with checker games and baked cookies in an attempt to ease the void within him.

In the end it hadn’t worked. The week before Christmas, he left again for good and hadn’t been back since. He simply walked out on his family and left everyone and everything, including her behind. That night was the night she had gotten her first real kiss from a boy. She crouched at the windowsill in the den, watching him retreat in a swirl of cold, darkness, and snow. With her lips and fingertips pressed to the frosted pane of the window she promised, with all the vehemence a girl of her age could muster, to wait for him. He had turned and walked to the window with the grace only he could possess and bent down low. His eyes had glinted through their haunted shadows with understanding and perhaps, no small measure of sympathy. He pressed his palm to hers and his lips to her mouth. To this day, she could still feel the hardness and the coldness of the glass against her lips and taste the frost from his kiss on the tip of her tongue.

Daniel’s kiss was the first kiss she had ever received and of all the ones she had marginally enjoyed afterwards, the only one she truly remembered. She had endured her fair share of suitors over the years. At thirty-seven and still unclaimed, her mom and dad had almost given up on her ever falling in love and tying the knot. They wanted grandchildren desperately, something of themselves to pass on from generation to generation. She would be happy to oblige the notion, but she simply hadn’t found the right guy. Not that the men she acquiesced to go out on dates with weren’t worthy in their own rights. They were. It was she that was the problem. None of the men were Daniel and therefore, in a way beyond explanation didn’t do it for her.

At thirty-seven and still a virgin Fallon considered herself just a little pathetic. Practicality would insist that if she were going to start a family she had better get on the ball and do so. She was part wolf and part human and as to when her biological clock would run out of time was anyone’s guess. So far, she had held up pretty well. There was not one strand of gray in her fiery hair and not one wrinkle on her freckled skin. She was healthy as a horse as was the standard for the majority of the pack. But, she was still human or at least fifty percent human and which parts of her were human and which were wolf was still up for debate.

For twenty-five years she had been carrying the torch for a man that was more ghost then flesh and blood. It was a little girl’s notion and a fool’s errand to keep her word. She had not heard from Daniel in all that time, not one whisper. Why she still felt the necessity to uphold her vow was something not even she could fully explain.

Life had gone on for everyone in Daniel’s absence, for everyone except for her. Hunter and Gina had a daughter, a half-sister Daniel had never met. Marianne and Evan were married and had two kids, two beautiful little girls as innocuous in their behavior as their father and almost carbon copies of their mother.

Fallon had a sister and a brother, one born on her fifteenth birthday and the other years later after she had left for college. She wasn’t exactly worried about the task of carrying on the family line. Her sister was the Suzy homemaker type and chomping at the bit to finally settle down and make lots of lots of babies. As for her brother, he was a player who wooed the females in the pack almost to the point where he had risked a shotgun wedding more than once. The family tree was definitely in no danger of dying out anytime soon.

Fallon had absorbed herself, at first in her studies and then afterwards, in learning the craft of healing under Doc and Thomas’s careful instruction. She was far from knowing everything she needed to know, but skilled enough to no longer be considered a novice either. Her life was full and complete, but still a piece of it was missing. A part of her wanted to give up, find the first eligible bachelor she came across, and get busy making babies. Make up for all the years of lost time she had missed. She just…she just couldn’t do it. Daniel was still out there somewhere and she was still a little girl standing by the window on a cold December night…waiting for him and keeping her promise.

She checked and rechecked the supplies in her bag. Had she thought of and planned ahead for anything that might happen? Claws and razor sharp teeth could do a lot of damage. One swipe of a massive paw or bite delivered by powerful jaws could prove lethal and in the end there might not be anything she could do to stop death from coming. Damn it though, she had to try.

She hoped like hell she wouldn’t need the meager contents of her emergency bag. Nash was older, but he was a crafty wolf and experienced in combat. Mouse was younger, not the stronger of the two though, but definitely youth and speed were on her side. Mouse, Marianne, didn’t want to kill her grandfather and most likely Nash didn’t relish the thought of killing her either. In the end the wolf would take over in an attempt to defend itself. There might be nothing either one of them could do to prevent the spilling of blood. Death might come and there would be nothing she could do to stop it, but she was sure as hell going to give the Grim Reaper a run for his money.

In the pre-dawn stillness of the house, sequestered in her room, the room that had once belonged to Daniel, Fallon squared her shoulders and exhaled a breath of steeled determination. In her world there was no such thing as advanced directives. The fight to save a life wasn’t over until it was over. As long as there was a heartbeat and perhaps afterwards, there was still a battle to be won.

The rumbling sound of an engine idling up the driveway broke the silence. Stirred by the noise, the house around her drew its first timid breath of the day. Her brows furrowed at the clamor of a gas powered combustion engine breaking the quiet and jarring the pack awake. It simply couldn’t be. The car was a classic car, an antique, roughly seventy years old. Yet, she would recognize the sound of that particular engine anywhere. She had been listening for it for twenty-five years and now it was in the driveway. Her heart sped from a sudden surge of adrenaline. She was transported back to the little girl clinging to the words of a promise. Daniel had finally come home.

Chapter 3

Thomas crouched at the foot of the grave. His mind was given over to the task of remembering the man slowly turning to dust in the ground beneath his feet. Mack deserved a warrior’s pyre, but he had chosen a more conventional end to commemorate his life. He had a funeral and was laid to rest in the old cemetery at the edge of town. Mack’s plot was right beside his son’s. Samuel Brown, the man Thomas had never met. His father.

The only thing he had of his dad’s was the memories his mom and his grandfather had shared with him. Thomas supposed he looked a lot like his father, or at least that’s what his mom told him. It was odd, standing at the foot of two occupied graves and staring over at the headstone beside them. The empty grave belonged to his mother, but despite what the marker read, Barbara Sterling wasn’t in it and wouldn’t be for a very, very long time.

The vacant plot next to Mack’s grave sometimes gave him the creeps. The empty square of ground roughly measuring four feet wide by seven feet long was waiting for him to occupy it. Now in the twilight of his life, Thomas realized someday, sooner rather than later, he was to get the chance to finally meet his father.

He was not a fool to think he could cheat the hand of death forever. Nobody ever did. Lucien’s headstone was proof of that. Vampires could and did die. Jan hated it when he retreated to this less than happy place in his mind. She didn’t like to be reminded of his mortality. In his mid sixties, although he was pretty sure he had plenty of good years ahead of him. It never hurt to think to the certainty of the future. He was going to end up here, pushing up daisies as the saying went, eventually. Besides, he wasn’t exactly mortal, a piece of him would go on and on and on forever on down the line through his children and their children, so forth and so forth, for all eternity.

Funny, before meeting Jan, marriage had been the last thing on his mind. Saving his mother’s life had been the only thing that mattered at the time and it had driven him to desperate, almost insane measures. He had managed to preserve his mother’s life. Not quite in the orthodox treatment of the day, but rather by more unconventional means. She had stayed alive for him while he struggled to find a cure for the cancer eating her from the inside out. He never had found a cure, but rather a solution to the problem. She had become a vampire for him.

Strange, he had spent his life living solely for her and she had struggled to hang on to her life for him. Now, their roles were quite reversed. Thomas could feel the clock ticking faster and faster as the days passed and his time was almost up. He was aging and she was the one frozen in time. Barbara Sterling was as beautiful as she had been on the day she ‘died’ and he was the tottering old man with stiff joints, balding hair, and wrinkled skin. Thomas didn’t regret it or his decision to stay exactly as he was. Nope, joining the ranks of the fanged was not for him. It had never been for him. Oh, his mom would have been thrilled to do the deed, if he had ever asked. But, there were some things decidedly worse than death and perhaps cheating the Grim Reaper out of his prize albeit temporarily, was one of many.

All in all, he supposed he was lucky. He had the life he always wanted. He had a loving wife. Jan had bore him four sons and three daughters. He had held out hope for an eighth addition to the family, but at sixty something, it was probably best to let that ship sail. Seven kids in total wasn’t such a bad legacy to leave behind. Their oldest, Barbara Eloise, named after his and Jan’s mothers, was turning twenty-seven this May and their youngest, little Gracie, had just turned eleven.

The time he had been allotted in life had been well spent. People in this town trusted him with their lives. In his almost thirty years as a physician, he had ripped plenty of souls from the Grim Reaper’s bony grasp to live another day. It was strange, really, how the past caught up with a person. Wasn’t it only yesterday that he was a kid himself? Surely sixty years hadn’t passed so fast. He still pulled odd shifts in the ER and covered occasional office hours for the young pups still teething on their stethoscopes. It was a world for the young and he, unfortunately, had somehow managed to transform from one of those hungry young lions into an old goat.

Fallon was going to be a hell of a doctor once he broke her of the habit of following the prescribed treatment regimens she had learned in medical school. Sometimes, A simply didn’t lead to B and B to C. The human body and especially the paranormal universe into which she had been born simply didn’t work that way. There were plenty of detours on the way from A to B and curves in the road from B to C. He had seen patients that he didn’t think would live until dawn get out of bed and walk out the hospital without so much as a limp or gasp for breath and he had seen patients go from absolutely fine to coding beyond the point of return in less than a blink of an eye.

The patients who died for no apparent reason. He used to think they were the unfortunate ones. Standing here on the brink of his own demise in another ten or twenty or so years, he realized that the ones who simply fell over dead were the lucky ones. Being long lived, as he undoubtedly would be, had its fair share of drawbacks. Time was never a certainty for anybody. Especially not for those who are and would always be one hundred percent human, like him. And getting old was a bitch.

He had no particular problem with dying today or tomorrow or with living well into his nineties or even his early hundreds, as long as he was still him until the time came. It was the unknown how of how it would happen that broke him out in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. He had seen enough medical horrors, tubes, wires, and equipment to know that was not how he wanted to go out.