“Let it go, Pick,” she said softly.
Pick went silent, absorbing the impact of her words. In her arms, Harper stirred. The little girl was growing heavy, but Nest refused to put her down. She was reminded of the time she had carried Bennett home from the cliffs of Sinnissippi Park fifteen years earlier after saving her from the feeders. She hadn’t put Bennett down either that night, not until she was safely home in bed. She would do the same now with Harper. Maybe this time, it would make a difference.
“You better get going,” Pick said finally.
She nodded. “You better get going, too.”
He hesitated. “Don’t you be second-guessing yourself later,” he snapped at her suddenly. “You did everything you could! More than everything, in fact! Criminy, you should be proud of yourself!”
He jumped from her shoulder and disappeared into the tangle of the shrubbery. Moments later, she caught a glimpse of a barn owl winging its way toward the river through the snowfall and the night.
Safe journey, Pick, she wished him.
She turned and walked back toward the street, angling diagonally across the front yards of the old houses, keeping to the shadows of the trees and porches, holding Harper tightly against her. She glanced back once at the burning house, and when she did so, her eyes filled with tears. She began to cry silently, realizing what she was leaving behind, thinking of John Ross. She thought of all they had shared over the past fifteen years. She thought of what he had endured in his twenty-five years as a Knight of the Word. He had given everything in his service to the Lady. In the end, he had even given his life.
She brushed at her eyes with the back of her gloved hand. John Ross might have died for her and for the children, but he hadn’t died for nothing. And neither of them had failed in what they had set out to do.
She fought to compose herself as she crossed down a side street and came in view of her car. She wished he could have lived to see the baby. John Ross Freemark she would name him. He would be born next fall, another of those children Findo Gask was so quick to dismiss as unimportant. But this one could surprise him. Created of wild magic and born to a woman for whom magic was a legacy, he could become anything. She felt him inside her, deep in her womb, transformed into what he had sought to become all along—her baby-to-be, her future child. She did not know his plan, nor perhaps did he know it himself. Even the Word might not know. They must bide their time, all of them; they must wait and see.
She climbed into the car and placed Harper on the seat beside her. The little girl curled into a ball, her head resting on Nest’s lap. Nest started the car and let it warm up for a moment. She felt the inevitability of what had happened with the gypsy morph stir in her memories. She looked back and saw clearly all the workings of its transitions and of its journey to reach her. She could feel its final moments outside her body, pressing against her, then into her, then transforming for the last time. She could understand why Wraith had been such an obstacle to its needs. For the gypsy morph to become what it wanted, Wraith could not remain inside her. Her body must belong to her unborn child alone. It had needed to know she wanted this as much as it did. It had needed a sacrifice from her that she herself did not know until tonight she was capable of making.
Why had it chosen to become her child? There was no answer to that question, none that she could discover for a while, if ever. It must be enough that it had made such a choice, that its need matched her own, and that their joining felt good and right.
A child. Any child. It made all the difference in the world. Findo Gask was wrong about what that was worth. One day, he would learn his mistake.