“It’s all true. God is an astronaut, Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live,” or in my case, New York is where the werewolves live. And the Vampires. And anything else that you can imagine. But, unlike in Night Breed, they’re not just centralized in one location. You can find Garou, Vampires, and any number of other races in just about any city you care to visit. Most people just don’t realize that we’re among you. We work very hard to maintain the Veil. Or, in the Vampires’ case, the Masquerade. Of course there are a few who know we exist. Those who aid or hunt us being the most prevalent to know of our existence. We don’t want the world at large to know that we exist. It would be disastrous at best. So we hide ourselves from the rest of the world. We protect our secrets and we live our lives as quietly and secretly as possible. Still, somehow you managed to find me. You probably have no clue who I am. Not really anyway. You know that there’s something different about me. You know that you want to learn everything you can about me. But I’m going to forewarn you, there are things in my story that aren’t for the faint of heart. I’ve lived a life that very few can even comprehend. Really, the only people who can understand it are the other Garou that make the up Garou Nation. But I’m gonna do my best to give you the story that you came here for. I’ll share my life with you as best as I can. But don’t come crying to me if it makes your pretty little world disappear. Although you’re more than welcome to think that I’m just some nutjob with too much time on my hands. Whatever the case, settle in and I’ll do my best here. I’m a Ahroun, so I’m not the best at storytelling. If you want a real story, you might want to go talk to one of the Galliards. They're the bards. Logan might even be able to tell this story better than I can. To start off this story, you should probably know who I am. My name is Lexa Artemis Miklos. I was born on January 4, 1984, under the full moon. I was the second born of twins. Although I never knew my brother while I was growing up. No one was certain about what the future would have in store for me. The only thing for certain was that – if I had the gift – then I’d be destined for great things. There was no way around it given who my mother was. As it turned out, I was born destined for great things. But, before we get into those things, I want to tell you about my mother. Or rather, I need to tell you about my mother. She’s the reason I am what I am. And she’s the reason I had such big shoes to fill. My mother was a woman by the name of Alexis Miklos. She was a beautiful woman, and she was also Garou. From the time of her first change, until the time she became pregnant with my brother and me, she was one of the best warriors the Garou Nation had ever seen. She was an Ahroun, as well. And she led her pack with both wisdom and a ferocity that hadn’t been seen in the world since Fenris himself had wandered the Earth. There were epic battles that the bards are still singing about. And it was her pack that saved Greece from the Black Spiral Dancers back in the early 1980s. As a reward for all she’d done for Greece and the Black Furies, she was given a kin of her choice to marry. She chose my father – Victor Santos, and they were married in front of the whole tribe. I won’t say that it was love, but it was certainly lust. I’ve seen pictures of my parents together. They were an outstandingly beautiful couple. My brother and me had no choice but to grow up into beautiful people. For three years my parents spent as much time as they could together. It wasn’t that they wanted to get to know each other better or anything. They were just having fun sleeping together. And after a gruesome battle, I can agree that there’s nothing better than going home, getting naked, and having some wild sex. It was after one such gruesome battle that my mother got pregnant with my brother and me. It was unexpected to say the least, and from the accounts I’ve heard, she wasn’t all that happy with the idea of being pregnant for nine months. It meant no more battles for the duration. And then she wasn’t looking forward to leaving her children with their father so that she could go back out to war. But she didn’t believe in abortion. And she loved my brother and me despite the inconvenience. So she stayed home. She taught my father how to be a good father to the children that he’d be raising. At that point my mother didn’t know she was having a boy and a girl. She figured she’d have twin daughters. I guess that was just her pride showing. But nine months goes really slow when you’re yearning to get back into the fray of things. So my mother was glad when, on that night in January her water broke and she went into labor. Because my mother was pregnant with twins, the doctors went ahead with a c-section delivery. They didn’t want to risk my mother’s life by one of us getting stuck. My brother was born first. I’m not real sure on the birth stats, but I know that he was a good sized baby. As for me, well, somehow I managed to get stuck anyway. It took the doctors a good 15 minutes of surgery to get me out of the womb. By that time they weren’t sure that I was going to survive. And if I did, they said there might be brain damage. Still, they got me out, and I weighed in at a meager 4lbs, 9oz, and 16 inches long. The doctors found that my placenta hadn’t been attached properly, and at some point shortly before birth, the umbilical cord had become wrapped around my neck. It was a mess, and my mother cried many tears over the idea that her daughter might not live a full life like the one she was living. I spent my first couple of months in the NICU. My mother was by my side the entire time. She refused to leave me, because she said that I needed her strength to get through those first couple of months. Of course my father was right by my side as well. As for my brother, well, shortly after birth he was handed over to a Get of Fenris family. Black Furies don’t generally keep male children. We’re a tribe of women, and men come into the picture from other tribes, or as kin. My mother was certain that my brother and I would have the gift. So she sent him off to be raised by a tribe that was similar to her own. After those first couple of days in the hospital, I wouldn’t see my brother again for another 26 years. After those first couple of months in the hospital, I was sent home with my parents. I’d gained some weight, and I was starting to do things that other infants my age were doing. I was a little bit slower, but nothing that was alarming. I’m not going to tell you much about the first couple years of my life. They’re actually all quite boring. But I will tell you some of the milestones. My mother saw my first steps when I was about 18 months old. And she heard me call her “mama,” when I was about 14 months old. But, beyond that, my mother didn’t get to see all the wonderful things that her child was doing. It wasn’t because she was off in battle or anything. It was because my mother was killed in battle when I was only just barely two years old. Her pack was ambushed, and she didn’t survive. The Galliards say that she went down in a blaze of glory, and I believe it. Knowing what little that I know about my mother, she wouldn’t have gone down any other way. After my mother’s death, my father didn’t know what to do with me. He knew that he was in no way prepared to raise a child into adulthood. He knew that he couldn’t raise me to become a good Fury the way another woman could. So he did what he thought was best for me. It should probably be noted here that my father could have handed me over to my Aunt Ayliana. He could have asked her and her lover to raise me, and they would have gladly taken me. Instead, my father decided that the best answer to not wanting to raise me himself was to kill me. Shortly after my mother’s death, he packed me up in the car one night at bedtime, drove me out to a dump, slit my throat, and left me for dead. I remember everything in vivid clarity. I remember my Daddy telling me that it was “better this way,” and I remember him kissing my forehead before he laid me across his lap on my stomach and ran the cold steel of a knife across my neck. I remember the sound of a gunshot, and the dull thud of my father’s body hitting the ground, and then world going black. I remember waking up in a hospital with doctors and nurses standing over me. The doctors said that I survived almost 60 hours out in that dump before I was rushed into the hospital. Two and a half days. They said I only survived because I’d kept my head down with my chin against my chest the whole time. It was the only thing that kept me from bleeding out. No one thought that I’d ever talk again. Again, I managed to surprise everyone. Three weeks after being rescued, I was talking in a hoarse whisper. Within two months my voice was pretty much back to normal. I even managed to train my vocal chords for singing once I was a bit older. None of this is to say that I was in a really good place when I woke up, though. Or during those weeks and months when I was learning how to talk again. My Aunt and her lover got custody of me. At two years old I was an orphan who’d been given over to almost complete strangers. I was scared and confused. I don’t remember those times very well, but my Mama said that I cried a lot at first. I cried for my real Mama, and I didn’t want anything to do with my new parents. Hell, I even cried for my father, even though he’d tried to kill me. It took a while, but I adjusted. Gradually they began to get smiles out of me. And, over the course of about nine months, I began to switch from not calling them anything, to calling them “Mom” and “Mama.” I guess I realized that my real Mama wasn’t coming back for me. I accepted my new family, and we really became a family. Throughout my life I was raised as an only child. My parents wanted more children. They desperately wanted to adopt kids and bring them home to live with us. But there’s something you should know about Greece. That’s the way the government looks upon gay and lesbian couples. Being gay or lesbian is considered a mental illness in Greece. Gay and lesbian couples aren’t generally allowed to adopt unless it’s special circumstances. That was the case with me. I was being given over to my next of kin because I was an orphan. That’s the only reason they were allowed to adopt me. So, instead of adopting other children, my parents did the next best thing. Mama got into psychology and became a child psychiatrist. Mom became a social worker who dealt with troubled kids. They helped as many children as they could through their work. And when they weren’t at work, they were trying to help me. By the time I got into kindergarten, it became very clear that I had problems that needed some attention. One of them was an anger problem. I got so angry so fast that it was astounding to most people. And once I got mad, it was incredibly hard to calm me down again. I think that’s what told my parents that one day I’d inherit my mother’s gift and become Garou. The other problems were different. Those problems were with reading and writing, as well as mood problems. At the age of six I was diagnosed as dyslexic. I had severe problems with learning how to read. And by the age of seven I was diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder II. It was then that my parents decided that they were enrolling me in a special school. I hated the idea. I didn’t want to go to a school where everyone else was “special.” I knew that I’d be picked on in the neighborhood to no end. But my parents insisted, and I was sent to a school for children with special needs. They also enrolled me in martial arts classes. They hoped that learning how to focus would help with my anger problems. Most kids would start off with Tae Kwon Do, but I was started off in Jujitsu. I don’t know why, but I was learning how to beat people up with the martial arts classes that I was starting. For a couple years I dealt with the picking of the children in my neighborhood. And by “dealt,” I mean that I beat the crap out of any kid who picked on me. I was constantly getting into trouble, and I had a police record by the age of eight. My parents really didn’t know what to do with me. My grades in school were terrible, and I was constantly being sent home for getting into fights. By the end of fourth grade I had been expelled from my special school. My parents had no choice but to send me to a public school for fifth grade, even though I could barely read and write. They knew that a public school would just pass me to the next grade without teaching me anything, but they didn’t have any other choice. So they did the only thing they could think of, and that was to get me tutors for almost every waking hour outside of school. The only really good thing to come out of my “special” school was that I had to learn sign language along with Greek and English. Right from the beginning I was taught how to sign, and it would become an essential skill later in life. One that’s helped with my children, as well as with a lot of the missions that I’ve gone out on with my pack. Eventually I did learn how to read well, and I learned how to write with fairly neat penmanship. Although I still had problems with turning letters around and spelling words backwards. I learned once I got a computer to rely heavily on spellcheck. It became my friend very quickly. But learning how to read and write didn’t stop the fights. I was still getting into trouble at every turn. I was being suspended from school about once a month, and expelled towards the end of the year. My parents would always get the school to take me back before the beginning of the next year, but I didn’t stop getting into fights. Then the school decided that I had to take summer classes to make up for all the classes that I’d missed from being suspended. You can bet that made my temper even more wonderful. Sitting inside a classroom all day, during summer vacation when I should have been outside swimming with my friends. Yeah, the temper problems just got even worse. By the time I got to junior high level classes, my reputation had preceded me. Teachers groaned when I walked into their classrooms for the very first time. And everyone did everything they could to try and control me. It was just that nothing worked. By that time hormones were starting to kick in. I was starting to go boy crazy, and I wanted nothing more than to take some cute boy home with me and to my bed. I was 14 when I got my first boyfriend. His name was Lucas, and he was the hottest boy in my school. He was the same age as I was, and he liked me from the moment he met me. I was hot, but I wasn’t the cheerleader type. He hated the cheerleaders with a passion saved only for truly disgusting things. We got along great. At least until my parents came home one evening to find us in bed together having a good ole time. Mom ripped Lucas off of me and sent him running out of the house with his clothes in his hands. Then my parents laid into me with lectures and severe punishments. I was grounded to the house for two months. Only allowed to go out with one of them or when I was going to school. All of my most prized possessions were taken away until my grounding was over. Mom also beat the hell out of me quite regularly throughout my punishment. She wanted to make sure that I never brought another boy home again. For about six months I hated my parents with a passion. I didn’t talk to them, and I went out of my way to make their lives miserable. I’m really surprised now, as I look back on my life, that my parents could have loved me as much as they did. I was a terrible child. But they seemed to love me anyway. I thought their love knew no bounds. I would be proven wrong before I got too much older. Two years goes by really fast when you’re getting into trouble all the time. The next thing I knew, I was in summer school again and things were going normally I thought. It was just a typical Friday in summer school when I decided to skip again. One of my friends and me went out walking and just wandering our neighborhood for a while. Then, as I headed home, I saw cop cars sitting outside my house. By then I’d been in trouble with the cops quite frequently. They knew who I was, and I knew that I’d probably done something to have them called to the house. I tried sneaking away from the house, but then this Asian woman seemed to come out of nowhere. She took me into the house, and the cop told me that my Mama had been taken to the hospital. She’d been beaten up by some money laundering guy. I had no clue what was going on, and the cop said the Asian woman was an FBI agent. Suddenly I was actually afraid of what was going on. Afraid that my parents had gotten into something that none of us would be able to handle. As it turned out, it was more than I could have ever imagined. The “FBI agent” was the one who took me to the hospital to see my Mama. And it was there that I found out about werewolves and that I was possibly one of them. I’d never heard anything about werewolves up to that point. I was completely unprepared for what was being sprung on me. I even thought that my Mama had been hit upside the head one too many times before coming to the hospital. But Sarah, the “FBI agent,” confirmed my mother’s story. She also filled in some of the blanks. Then I was being sent off to New York to step into a whole new life. One that I could never have imagined existed. It was like stepping into a dream, or a nightmare, but one that I couldn’t wake up from. I’ll never forget my first change. I’d just met Jimmy that day, it was my first day in New York City, and we were going to get a girl who’d been captured by the Black Spiral Dancers. I thought that I was being smooth by sauntering up to the guards and flirting with them so that Jimmy could get inside. But then one of the guards decided to put his hands all over me. It pissed me off unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I was so mad that I was actually seeing red. Then all of a sudden I was furry and almost eight feet tall. I had claws and I was cutting open the guy who had been touching me. Jimmy and me rescued the girl that we were sent to get, and that was my introduction into the world of the Garou. The girl that we rescued was another Garou. A Fianna. Her name was Logan Ashlocke. At first I couldn’t stand her. We antagonized each other to no end. But slowly, over the course of a few years, I found myself more drawn to her. Then one night everything just changed between us. She came home with me and we made love for the first time together. It was her first time being with anyone, and she wanted to be with me. It was an incredible feeling. Unlike anything I could really describe to you. Just knowing that someone wants to be with you for their first time. Someone like me who’s always been so angry and hard to approach. It was a real trip, and one that I’ll never forget. I didn’t know it at the time, but it wasn’t as special to Logan as it was to me. I still don’t understand her logic, or why she chose me for her first time. Together – Jimmy, Logan, and I made a pack. We were sent out on all kinds of missions, and the caern that we were a part of took care of us. We were given penthouse apartments, no rent, and everything that we needed. Of course we paid our dues by putting our lives on the line three or four times a week. When we weren’t putting our necks out there on the chopping block, then we were working on our educations. Logan and I decided to head out to California together to get our educations at the University of Southern California. I was focused on a degree in kinesiology with a focus on martial arts. I’d been working on my martial arts since I was five years old, and over the years, I’d branched out beyond Jujitsu. I was a black belt in many different styles — mostly Asian styles. My degree was focused mostly on Aikido and Jujitsu, though. I worked hard to get as high as I could in those styles so that I could teach and make some money to put towards my own things. Two years into my college education, though, my life took a different turn. I never finished my degree, and we ended up moving out to the Canadian wilderness to start our own caern. There were reasons for it, and I’ll explain those in a minute. It was while Logan and I were in college that we actually hooked up. I can’t say that anyone actually approved of us getting together. There’s that whole law in the Litany about Garou shall not mate with Garou. But the Black Furies don’t hold lesbian relationships to that law. So while my tribe approved of our relationship, the rest of the world didn’t. At the time I was in love with Jimmy, but I didn’t think that we could ever be together. Logan was the next best thing. She was someone who I could fight with, then go home and roll in the sheet with after a big battle. But our relationship didn’t last long. One night, while I was home working on summer classes, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, I saw a group of Black Furies taking Logan from her apartment and towards the elevator. I got the idea that I shouldn’t get involved in the proceedings around Logan. Something inside of me said that she would have caused me a lot of pain if she’d stayed in my life. That night I called Jimmy to my apartment. We made love for the first time, and I had no doubts that it was meant to be. That everything would work out the way it was supposed to.. That night I became pregnant with Jimmy and my child. After making love for the first time, I had to convince Jimmy not to go to the Furies. He wanted to tell them that he’d raped me. That way I wouldn’t lose any of my rank for sleeping with another Garou, and getting pregnant by him. But I told him that everything would be okay. I promised that this was the path we were supposed to take together. Although I’m not sure how I knew that everything would work out, or that this was what was meant to happen. It was just a very sure feeling inside of me. A couple days later we went to his parents and told them that I was pregnant with Jimmy’s child. I can’t say that his parents were happy with us. Or that our decision to be together was one that they accepted easily. Our mentor, Sarah – Stars – told Jimmy’s parents that our baby would, in fact, be either the salvation or damnation of us all. She would be the Perfect Metis. A Metis child born without any flaws. It’s one of the impending signs of the Apocalypse. But Jimmy and I loved each other more than anything else. Even though it was against all the rules of our people, I knew that he was the other half of my soul. It took some trial and error, but it was made clear to us that we could be together just so long as we didn’t rub it in anyone’s noses. We could raise our child together, we just needed to be discrete. To that end the elders told us that we needed to set up our own caern in the Canadian wilderness. We were allowed to take 10 people with us. Most of those who came with us were kin, but my brother and his pack were among the few Garou who decided to come with us. It was here, in Canada, that I gave birth to the child Jimmy and I created. March 1, 2007, was the day when Shiloh Ayliana Marshall came into the world. She was less than a week early, although I’d been expecting her to come early for a couple weeks before that. I rushed to the hospital several times during those couple weeks with labor pains that turned out to be false starts. Then, when the real thing happened in the afternoon of March 1st, I thought it was another false start. I didn’t realize it was the real thing until my water broke. Twenty minutes later, with Jimmy by my side and our doctor delivering, our daughter came into the world. She was gorgeous from the moment of birth, and perfect in every way imaginable. Not a single flaw or birthmark. The perfect metis. At 8lbs, 9oz, and 21 inches long, she was a pretty good sized baby, although she still seemed so small when I held her in my arms. She looked even smaller when Jimmy held her. To put it simply, Jimmy and I were, and still are, in awe of the life we brought into the world together. It was shortly after Shiloh’s birth that we became a pack of four, instead of a pack of two. Jimmy and me couldn’t take on great threats by ourselves. We needed more members in our pack. That’s when Grayson came to us. He was the sole survivor of another pack, and he was in need of somewhere to go. The three of us meshed well together, and then Grayson told us about his best friend who’d been trapped in the Umbra. I decided that I couldn’t leave her there. We had to go find her and bring her back into the world. So we set off on a dangerous mission into the Umbra to rescue Rowan. It was a treacherous mission, but we were successful in getting to Rowan and leading her out of the Umbra. She joined our pack, and the four of us were able to continue building the caern together. We were told that the birth of the Perfect Metis would be the harbinger of the end. We knew that the apocalypse was coming, but we thought we had until Shiloh was grown. We thought that the end times were still years away. That didn’t turn out to be the case. The birth of our daughter came right in the midst of the apocalypse. It was already raging around us and we didn’t realize it until it was almost too late. There were small battles here and there. We were fighting and guarding everything that we held dear, but we didn’t realize those small battles were leading up to something big. The end came when Nicodemus Grianne called on us to close the portals that had been created between hell and Earth. We answered that call. My pack raced off with hundreds of others to see that those portals were closed. The only reason our pack survived was because of something that happened a couple months earlier when we were captured by Pentex. The experiments they put us through, that we somehow managed to survive, made us immortal. We should have all died during the apocalypse, but we didn’t. We survived and went home to our daughter and caern. Building the caern was our main priority both before and after the apocalypse was over. Our caern was destined to become a Memory Caern, and I had very ambitious goals set up for it. At this caern we wouldn’t just remember the Garou who’ve come before us. This caern was to be dedicated to all the Fera who’ve come before us. We wanted every breed we could get living peacefully, side by side, so that no one is forgotten. We’re all tied together in ways that go deeper than just fighting for survival. We’re entwined in each other’s histories. It was difficult to begin the building process – to convince those other Fera that this was a place where they could belong. Over the course of eleven years we recruited other shifters from everywhere we could think of. There were only a couple who flat out refused to come to Canada for the memory caern. And, of those that didn’t come, I can completely understand why they didn’t. Races like the Rokea don’t belong away from water in the Canadian wilderness. Eleven years of hard work, traveling the world, and teaching everyone how to live together found us all in a good place. Gaia’s Memory is a strong caern because we were so diverse. That is what I was meant to do with my life as a Garou, and I think I may have helped to create something that will leave me a legacy just as impressive as my mother’s. Jimmy and I never talked about expanding our family. We decided not have another child together, so we just didn’t give it much thought. Then, on July 15, 2014, we had the conversation about giving Shiloh a new baby brother or sister. Neither one of us had a problem with adoption, so I called the caern in New York and inquired about any small children who’d been orphaned. There were three. A four day old boy, a six month old girl, and a five year old girl. We decided on the boy. I left immediately to go get him while Jimmy set up Shiloh’s old crib and brought down everything we’d need from the attic. When I got home, Jimmy held his son for the first time and we decided on a name for him. Alexander Logan Marshall. He was born on July 11, 2014, under the full moon. If he’s true born then he’ll be an Ahroun just like me. I don’t care what the other Furies would say about me raising up a true born boy. He’ll be taken into the Glasswalker tribe of his father if he decides he wants to be part of the Garou Nation. We weren’t planning on adding to our family again after adopting Alex, but sometimes fate has different ideas for you. At the beginning of January 2018, Jimmy and me went to the Wingrider community to see a doctor there. We’ve been working with the Wingriders since we settled in Canada. They’re the closest community to the caern, and they have medical technology that’s much more advanced than human medicine. They’re the reason that Jimmy and me haven’t had another child in the intervening time since Shiloh was born until now. But, we were starting to talk about wanting another child. One that was our own, born of our love, and to us. So we went to see Caleb McAllister to find out if it’d be an option to get another perfect metis without the dire prophecy that went with our first. Caleb said that he could alter our child’s genetics once I conceived, if we did it early enough, so that the child would be another perfect metis. It wasn’t something we were going to do immediately, but it was something that gave us hope for our future together as a family. We decided, after talking to Caleb, that we wanted to leave the Garou Nation and live with the Wingriders. We wanted to live our lives openly and without consequences. So we uprooted the kids and moved to the community, where we became Wingrider citizens. We’d no longer be bound by the spirits and Garou laws. We were Wingriders in everything except shifting abilities. We’re still werewolves, and neither of us is willing to give that up in favor of the Wingrider blood oath, but we’re no longer bound by the Litany and other Garou laws. The kids will also have the choice of whether or not they want to join the Garou Nation after they go through their first change. That was something I desperately wanted for Shiloh. I didn’t want her to be forced into a life that could kill her before she’s even 15 years old. The kids don’t really understand the changes in their lives right now. They’re both still young, but I’m hopeful that they’ll understand as they get older and be appreciative for the decisions that Jimmy and me have made. But it was living in the community that brought about the latest change in our lives that expanded our family by one more. Jimmy and me were out on a walk when a little girl ran right into us. She looked like she was about four years old, and we discovered quickly that she was deaf. Because I learned sign language when I was young, and while it’d been a long time since I used those skills, I was able to communicate with her. She was running from the newly built orphanage in the community because she didn’t realize it was a safe place to be. Very few people in the community at that point knew sign language, so no one could tell her that she was somewhere safe. We learned the child’s name was Max, and she desperately wanted out of the orphanage. When the staff learned that I knew how to sign, they asked Jimmy and me to foster Max until she could find a home. We agreed to take the child into our home. During supper that night, Max asked a question that made a decision for me. She asked if Jimmy and me were going to be her mommy and daddy now. That’s when I knew we had to adopt her. I couldn’t let this child be passed around, or worse, come to love us and then be taken to another family. Two days later we adopted Max. Shiloh and Alex seem to like their new sister. The kids get along well, and so far there hasn’t been any jealousy. Jimmy and the kids are quickly learned sign language so that they can communicate with Max. The rest of the community is also learning how to sign. So our family has expanded by one, and hopefully it’s the last addition for a while. I want to raise the kids to at least their teenage years before Jimmy and me try for another of our own. There are only a few loose ends to tie up here. One is my brother. I met him for the first time in New York, just before Jimmy and I were sent out to the Canadian wilderness to start the caern. I won’t say that Nicholas and I got along well at the beginning, but we were intrigued by each other. He had stories about our mother that his parents had told him. I was eager to hear those stories. I’d never grown up with stories about my mother. I only knew her from the Galliards’ songs after I joined the Garou Nation. It was nice to hear actual stories that Nicholas knew. Stories that weren’t horribly embellished for inspiration and to enhance glory. Nicholas and his pack decided to come to Canada with my pack when we set out to start the new caern. I’ve gotten to know my brother over the course of years. He’s a good man, although we’ll never be close. He’s a Get. I’m a Fury. The two just don’t mesh very well. The only other loose end is Jimmy’s parents and mine, and how they feel about our move to the community, and our citizenship as Wingriders. Jimmy’s parents are less than thrilled and quite cranky with him about it. They don’t understand why we don’t ask for help before going and doing something ourselves. But the truth of the matter is, neither one of us thinks of going to our families for help first, because it’s been drilled into both of us — at one point or another — that we have to rely on ourselves. My parents, unlike Jimmy’s, are furious and have once again disowned me. They want nothing to do with me or my family. I hate that they do this. Shiloh loves her grandmas, and so does Alex. They don’t understand why their grandmas won’t talk to them or come to visit. The best I can do is explain that they’re mad at me, not the kids. But I don’t know that this wound will ever heal. But at least Jimmy’s parents were there for all three kids and our wedding when it happened. Yes, Jimmy and me got married in the Wingrider community. Both of Jimmy’s parents walked me down the aisle and blessed our official union. And this is where we are now. Getting used to our new lives, and raising our three kids.