Final Edge

EPILOGUE

Dawson, Alaska, five months later

Lucas sat stiffly against the Aurora Nights Inn bed, his bandaged body still making the occasional complaint-a sudden lightning attack of pain about his ribs, like a knife jab. The painkillers hardly touched it, and so he had begun to self-medicate with the old herbal solution- peyote. The room had filled with the smoke and tangy odor.

Meredyth breezed in from outside, a rattling ice bucket in her hands. She poured him wine to go with sliced cheese. After chilling the wine and handing it to him, she toasted with her own plastic cup. 'To roughing it. From Skagway to Dawson at last."

'To this trip's not finishing me off," he grumpily responded.

"You're getting stronger every day, Lucas. Come on!" She yanked at him, and he gasped at the jolt of pain it caused in his upper torso. "Sorry, but the lights are running wild again tonight. You were right about them getting better as the week goes by. You've got to come out and see, Lucas. They're beautiful. Alaska is beautiful."

"You're beautiful, especially when you're happy."

She pulled at him, and he froze up a moment, fighting down the pain. "All right, but let me get up under my own steam and in my own good time."

"But you're missing the show." She rushed to the window and tried to see all that was possible from there. "There're chairs on the roof tonight for the viewing. Come on! You promised, remember?"

"I promised to bring you to Alaska to-"

"And you have!"

"— to see the northern lights a-runnin' wild. I didn't say I'd be sitting on the roof of a hotel with a moon pie in one hand and a plastic cup filled with wine in another."

She kissed and held him. "God, when I think how close I came to losing you, I could just… just…"

"Don't, don't!" he warned. "No more tears. You promised, remember?"

Lucas recalled nothing of his time in a coma or in critical care, but he recalled hearing her voice. "Gotta live. Gotta make plans…go to Alaska, remember? We've got a lotta living to do. Stay with me. Draw on your inner wolf, damn you! Come back to me."

He recalled seeing his grandfather before he had gone into the coma, the kind and gentle medicine man holding his palms open to Lucas in the universal gesture of welcoming. It had been while Meredyth had held him in her arms there at the cabin home on Lake Madera.

When he came out of the coma, Meredyth was there, her head lying over him where she sat alongside his bed, having fallen asleep, her hand around his. He ran his fingers through her hair, and dry-throated, he muttered her name and added, "Wanna see…the lights… with you."

She came awake, her eyes filling with happiness and tears. She grabbed him about the neck and hugged, and she called for the doctors. He'd had a full recovery, but he had a lot of healing yet to do. She had argued it was too soon for him to travel, but he'd stubbornly refused to listen, telling her it was their reward for surviving.

During his two-month-long stay in the hospital, she came daily, and each day she told him more and more about the final moments leading up to Lauralie Blodgett's death, and the details that Chang and Nielsen had learned from the crime scenes and how Lauralie had dispatched her various final victims. She told him about the near murder of her parents, and the death of the young security guard whose worst crime had been gullibility and a too affable nature thai led him to suspect nothing untoward about the vampire girl he had literally opened the door to. Lauralie had booby-trapped the house, somehow learning of the day Paul and Caroline Sanger were due home. Regardless of her fate, death or arrest, execution or incarceration, Lauralie Blodgett had meant to leave Meredyth Sanger with no one.

Once Lucas had been brought up to date, and after a parade of visitors had come and gone (the Tebos, Jana North, Captain Lincoln, Chang, Nielsen, Stan Kelton, and others), Stonecoat told Meredyth, "I gotta go to Manitoba with Maurice Remo, and from there we, that is you and I, we could zip over to Alaska to see the northern lights together."

"Forget about Manitoba. Jana North's going to Manitoba with Remo. It's all been taken care of. Lincoln's footing the bill. They'll get that creep Lyle Eaton for you."

"There're some things a man's got to do himself, Mere."

"You're in no shape, Lucas, to go anywhere right now, and Lyle Eaton's time is up in a week. You have no choice."

"Remo's not even a cop anymore. I mean, he's not on the force."

"Lincoln's made him a special deputy of some sort. It's all worked out with the Canadian government."

Maurice Remo had been standing just outside and had overheard the exchange. He had then stepped in and assured Lucas that he and the lovely Detective North could handle the Eaton matter just fine. "Been a long time since I've been on a trip with a beautiful cop," Remo had finished.

Now here they were in Alaska and Lucas meant to enjoy himself, despite the fact the pain felt like ripping stitches. "Throw me my shirt, baby."

Meredyth did so. "Can I help?"

"Sure."

She buttoned him up, hefted his coat to him, and put her own over her shoulders. Holding onto one another, they made their way out and down the hallway to the stairs going up to the roof. In the crisp night air, couples all around them stared up at the purple, blue, green, and snow-white swirling mix of glittering colors against the black night sky.

The northern lights looked like the work of God at play. Lucas settled into a chair with Meredyth holding his arm, delighting in the carefree, gentle, and nimble dancing lights. The fairy lights created an array of emotions in Meredyth and Lucas, who again felt the power of nature in these shooting excursions of feathery, weightless, buoyant beams. The iridescent glow of interstellar particles pirouetted and changed into a life form of tint, shade, blush, color, and effect. The aurora borealis was a living thing.

"Sight like this gives you faith in God and nature," he whispered, his tone signaling his reverence for the lights.

"It's like some force has captured the light and shadow that plays at all hours over the Grand Canyon," she replied.

He paused to kiss her. She pulled away. "Hey, I wanna see the show."

"Be my guest."

"I am, remember? You're paying."

He held tight to her hand and enjoyed the child in her as the enchanted little girl came out, delighting in the ballet of the heavens overhead. A kind of mystic swirl of lunar wind and particles swept down and around them, a kind of sparkling fog. For a time, it enveloped them.

"Ever give any thought to retiring from the force, Lucas?"

"And do what? Sit on my thumbs?"

"You love the horses and the ranch. You could run the place."

"What as? Your hired hand? Besides, your parents are staying there now."

“Their house'll be ready soon."

"I don't know, babe."

"What about turning the place into a real stud farm. You know a lot about raising horses, and there's money to be made."

"You talking about putting me out to pasture?"

"It hadn't occurred to me, but maybe it's worth a thought."

"Not likely. I'm a tracker, Mere, a detective."

She gnashed her teeth. "Stubborn Cherokee wolf. You'd be in charge, running the place as my husband!"

He pulled his eyes from the light show and stared into her eyes, seeing the Auroras reflected there. He pulled her into his lap. "I thought you'd never ask."

"Is that a yes?

He laughed. "Was that a proposal?"

"Call it what you will."

"I'll let you know when we get back from Alaska."

She punched him. "Damn you!"

He shrugged. "Come on, we both know it's a test, this trip. If we can survive one another roughing it from Skag- way to Dawson…then perhaps we can survive marriage to one another."

"You're awful."

"Awful good."

Meredyth returned her gaze to the concert of lights overhead, the firmament's toast to cheer and merriment and future bliss. She wanted to reach up and capture it, bottle it, take it home to Texas, where she might take it out whenever she wanted to look at it, like a snow scene in a bubble.

"Why can't life always be this giddy and carefree?" she asked, while thinking, Will living with Lucas be like trying to grab onto the ethereal northern lights? It can't be done, not even if I could bottle the energy and hold tightly onto him.

But what if I lightened up? she asked herself. What if I stopped trying to psychoanalyze Lucas, accept him with respect and love, as I did when I feared his leaving me forever? Then I could hold onto him in a sense. He was after all Lucas Stonecoat, a brethren to the Cherokee Wolf Clan, a hunter by nature and spirit with a long and proud tradition, going back to the ancestor who wore the first stone coat, a warrior who had killed a conquistador in battle for the stone-hard metal jacket he wore.

There would be no taming Lucas, but there could be loving Lucas.

"I can do that now without fear," she said aloud.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Be Mrs. Lucas Stonecoat."

"Are you sure you have no greater ambition?" he jokingly asked.

"No, none greater."

"If I'd known the light show would win your heart, Mere, I would have brought you here years and years ago."

The activity of the auroras had calmed; other couples, growing cold, began disappearing, and soon Lucas and Meredyth found themselves alone and enveloped in an eerie but fantastical whirlwind of stardust fog, within which they embraced and kissed.