I stared at her. “Did you just call him ‘Doggy’?”
Ethan lifted a brow at Gabriel. “Do I even want to know how she knows that?”
Gabriel grinned. “Magic is magic.”
“Doggy!” Elisa said again, this time with more force, and bounced on her butt.
Connor blinked at her, then looked up at Gabriel for support.
“She’s not wrong, son. Technically.”
Elisa looked at the toy in his hands, her eyes widening. “Doggy?”
Connor frowned, hugged the toy to his chest. But much like her father, Elisa was bound and determined to get what she wanted. She scooted forward on her bottom, touched a finger to the giraffe, and lifted those big green eyes to his. “Doggy?”
Connor’s eyes narrowed, a toddler not quite ready for sharing—or a shifter trying to distinguish enemy from friend.
“Doggy!” Elisa said, clapping her hands together. Then she laughed like she’d told herself the world’s funniest joke, and tossed her head around. “Doggy doggy doggy.”
“Not a dog,” Connor said with a burgeoning smile, and held out the giraffe. “Giraffe!” He said it with a hard “g,” so it came out more like “graph.” But close enough for Elisa’s eyes to widen with the thrill of a new word.
“Graph!” she said, and took the toy, mashed it against the rug like it was running. “Graph! Graph! Graph!”
“And I apologize for that,” Gabriel said.
“Graph!” Connor said with a grin, and they took turns marching the giraffe up and down the rug, Elisa occasionally laughing in that utterly selfless, completely happy way.
“The beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Ethan said with a smile.
Gabriel made a rough sound. “Now,” he said, gold and amber swirling in his eyes. “But you just wait—”
I knew where he was going, so I cut him off with a pointed finger. “No. No more prophecies unless you’ve got a time and place I need to be to keep my daughter safe. Barring that, she lives her own life, ‘tests’ or otherwise.” I didn’t want the pressure. Not anymore.
Gabriel went quiet, and for a moment I was afraid I’d pissed him off. But he was watching Connor and Elisa, brow furrowed in contemplation. “No one’s future is written completely. Not in stone. There are always choices to make, roads that could be taken. Life is in the choosing of them.”
Ethan reached out, put a hand at my back. “And they have to make their own choices, just as we did. Just as we do.”
Gabe grunted. “This got philosophical quickly,” he said, then glanced at me. “You sure you don’t want details?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Just tell me this—is there a happy ending?”
Screams erupted from the floor, and we all looked back again. Elisa had made the unforgiveable mistake of putting the giraffe on top of a plastic dollhouse. Because toddlers.
We all sighed.
“I guess that answers that,” Ethan said, and we went to separate our screaming children. “On the other hand, I’m pretty sure our first meeting looked fairly similar. And look what we have now.”
I glanced at the crying child, plastic giraffe in her mouth, now kicking at the shifter who was trying to take it back from her. It didn’t get any more real than that. Or any more perfect.
“Everything,” I said. “We have everything.”
Don’t miss the first novel in Chloe Neill’s Heirs of Chicagoland series!
WILD HUNGER