Vars put his hand over Jake’s lips when he tried speaking again, and pulled him close, into the welcoming arms that for once were cold as icicles.
“Thank you, Gray. I’m in your debt.”
Gray moved his head right and left over the pillow, and he raised his hand, weakly trying to wave off the declaration, but then the paramedic was back, and the two of them had to make space for Rev, who would be traveling to the hospital with his son.
As the ambulance left, soon disappearing between the trees, Jake leaned against Vars, watching the firefighters at their impossible task. After witnessing the inferno at its core, Jake found it hard to believe any of this could be successful. Soon, the clubhouse would topple like a house of matches and cards, burying everything he held dear.
Vars put his arm over Jake’s shoulders, somewhat easing the numbness inside him.
“I guess this is what family does for each other,” Jake said and closed his eyes.
Despite his physical home burning behind them, he’d found another in Vars’s arms already.
Epilogue - Vars
When Vars called Magpie about his second resurrection, the bastard had the audacity to tell him he didn’t know himself how exactly his own spell worked, and so Vars was left on his own with the phantom of a coppery aftertaste at the back of his mouth.
His only hope was that it would eventually pass. A few days on, he had other things to worry about than if he was becoming a bloodthirsty monster. His stomach hadn’t grumbled when he saw Nao scratch a scab off her elbow in the morning, so he was in high spirits about the whole thing.
When Jake’s parents had hastily arrived at the clubhouse in the early hours of the morning after the fire, they surely hadn’t expected to find their son in the arms of a man twice his senior. The meeting had been extremely awkward, but the fact that they both drove out as soon as they’d heard of the explosives to see if their estranged son was fine, told Vars that they still very much considered Jake family. And family was important, something he himself sadly hadn’t realized until it was too late.
Jake would only get so much time with his parents, brothers, and sisters before he’d have to go into hiding once his youth started to become suspicious, and Vars was intent on saving him from the mistakes he himself had made in the past. The whole conversation, while unbelievably tense, had resulted in an invitation, for both of them, for Sunday dinner.
So here they were—driving to Brecon in one of the cars that had survived the explosion in the garage. Neither of their bikes had. But Jake, the born optimist, had soon turned to thinking of it as an opportunity to get a new bike, this time the Harley of his dreams.
Still, with much of the club property turned to ashes, everybody found it difficult to remain positive as they spent days salvaging the affected rooms and corridors. It was the front of the building, where the Kings conducted their business, that had been hit the hardest. The secret workshop was toast, and while some of the stolen jewelry was kept hidden elsewhere, Rev’s equipment was no longer usable.
Some of the members, including Knight and Elliot, had lost the contents of their apartments, and as if the burning of furniture and other valuables weren’t bad enough, it was too early to tell whether the fire had affected the structure of the building itself. But no matter the destruction, Baal didn’t accept any excuses from Beast, so the party had to go on, and preparations for new rooms involved many resources that would have otherwise gone into repairs. The work was a bottomless pit where they all threw in their energy.
Vars and Jake’s room at the clubhouse was far from the planted explosives, and had survived, along with most of what they owned. It resembled a dark fridge, because the energy supply couldn’t be restored so fast, but they were warm enough sleeping together.
The visit at Jake’s parents was a welcome break from worry and constant work, even if Jake himself looked extremely nervous in his only button-down shirt.
“I don’t know what kind of bike I want. I like the bigass ones, but I want it to be nimble too, you know?”
Vars was pretty sure the topic was there to take Jake’s mind off how nervous he was about meeting with his family on their turf again.
Vars slowed down and drove into a quiet residential street when Jake told him too. The tidy gardens and large houses spoke of a certain wealth, a far cry from some of the run-down areas they’d passed on the way.
“You’ll need to try out several types and see what fits you best. I enjoy heavy machinery.”