Part Four: End - o

“What in the holy hell just happened?” Felix asked, staring down at the two bodies on the ground. One was the goddess and the other was clearly Kendra’s mother, Helen. The old, frail woman had come out of nowhere and blindsided the goddess just moments after she had killed Drake. Everyone was just standing around, not sure what else to do.

Kendra was the first to move. She knelt down next to her mother but it was clear that whatever she had done, it had taken her life to do it. She wasn’t breathing.

“Mom?” Kendra asked. “Mom!”

She hugged Helen’s body closer to her, trying to do something, anything, to revive the woman but Helen had been so weak. Kendra reached out to her, trying to touch her mind with her own power but no matter how hard she tried, she was met with absolutely nothing. There were no signs of life. No spark. No feelings of love. The body was simply an empty husk now. She looked at the inert body of Bendis and reached out to her mind too, in her grief thinking that if she did find something, she would do whatever she could to hurt it. Although something was present in her, it was more like whatever had been there had been scooped out like the gunk inside a pumpkin. She had no idea how or where her mind would have gone but she knew her mother was the reason. Her mother had saved everyone in the end.

“Mom!” Kendra wailed again.

“Kendra,” Conor said. “I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t answer him, not even with her mind. He touched her shoulder and she could actually feel it but she didn’t respond to that either. She couldn’t.

I’m...numb, she thought to herself. Too much crap and now I’m numb.

She got up and took her mother’s body with her. Jenna was gone but her wolves were there. Deidre. Ian. Ye-Jun. Amara. Merrick. Alrich. All of them. She jerked her head toward Bendis as that sanity destroying numbness started to fade away from her. There was a part that wanted to stay numb. To hide in it like she had for nearly a month. But she wasn’t going to do that now. That would take away from the victory her mother earned and the sacrifice it had cost to obtain. She wouldn’t dishonor her like that or the others that sacrificed themselves for this victory. She had to live now for them. Her mother and father. And Conor. And all the others that had been killed in this petty war.

“Grab her body and do not let it out of our sight. I do not want the Order to possess it. If they try to stop you, do whatever it takes to keep it other than killing or severely wounding. My mother gave up her life to ensure Bendis can’t hurt anyone again and I’m going to make sure she stays that way. Understood?’

She looked at each of them in turn and as her gaze passed over each one, they nodded. Ye-Jun went over to Bendis and unceremoniously hauled her up to his shoulder. He was short but he bore the weight of the inert goddess with ease and walked without trouble.

“What now?” Amara asked. She was on Kendra’s left side with Ye-Jun and Merrick next to her while Alrich, Merlin, Ian, and Deirdre were on her right. The others trailed behind her.

“We don’t stop fighting,” Kendra replied. There was a strength and fierceness in her that almost immediately flowed into her wolves. “Look around. Each of you.”

She stopped suddenly, her mother still cradled lovingly in her arms. Her wolves stopped with her but there was hesitation on their faces.

“Go ahead. Take everything in.”

They did so. They saw the destroyed former hotel along with the corpses of vampires and people they had fought with. They saw wounded being loaded up into waiting ambulances that had just arrived. They heard moans of pain. They smelled blood, offal, and worse.

“Everyone here fought to stop Bendis’ evil from spreading. Some were hurt and others sacrificed themselves. We won’t let that mean nothing.”

She looked to where Conor stood as she said that last part and a tear slipped down her cheek. It fell from her face and landed on Helen’s shoddy mental institution wardrobe.

“We stopped an immensely powerful foe today but there will be more. I don’t know what that will look like but you can bet I’ll be there to rip its fucking throat out!”

That brought a spark of pride in each of her wolves and they shouted out a huge “Hell yeah!” The noise was strange in that desolate place full of destruction and death but not a wholly unwelcome sound. Some of the Knights still digging through the rubble heard it and even smiled, Jenna included.

“Let’s get back to work,” Kendra said.

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Jenna and Felix left to search through the rubble for any survivors. They found maybe half a dozen vampires that managed to stay alive and immediately executed them. There were a dozen knights and mages too. Four of them were dead when they were found but the rest were still alive, including her father. He was missing part of an arm but thankfully, he was still breathing. He was out cold and the two of them had some trouble getting him extricated. After they did, they immediately got him in an ambulance and sent to the nearest hospital. They continued searching, each one exhausting themselves doing it, but no matter how many bodies they pulled free of the rubble, they never found Abraham.

Across the street, hidden in the alcove of a building and wrapped in shadows was Gwen. She looked at the destroyed Hotel Lycaon for a long time, pondering this and that. After a few, she just turned and walked away, keeping to the shadows and never looking back.

Rescue crews and police arrived shortly after the building had been blown up. Despite how long the battle had felt, it had only lasted a couple of hours and only fifteen or so minutes after the building went kablooey. Most of the first responders, however, were Order members and those injured in the fighting were quickly taken away to a hospital the Order controlled. This included Elijah, accompanied by Jenna.

The losses were heavy but the vampire threat had been destroyed.

Bendis, thanks to Helen Henner, had been rendered catatonic.

The Hotel Lycaon and all its staff and whatever guests had been there during the time the vampires had used it as a home base were all listed as casualties in the unfortunate and tragic gas main accident it was officially labeled as in the weeks that followed. There were several memorial services, lawsuits by surviving family members, and more but as the months wore on and time elapsed, the harshness of the tragedy grew less sharp in everyone’s memory. People moved on because that’s what people do.

The regular folk, the normal humans, went about their days without any knowledge of how close they had come to complete annihilation by vampire horde and psychotic moon goddess. The losses had been many and tragic but humanity would go on.

Humanity would survive.

||| ||| ||| ||| |||

“How is he?” Kendra asked. She was wearing a black dress and had just come from her mother’s funeral service. Conor was next to her but he was uncharacteristically silent now. She figured he was just giving her whatever space he could considering he was locked inside her mind. Space for the two of them was not exactly easy to come by.

A doctor looked over at her but the look on his face suggested he did not have any good news.

“No change, I’m afraid,” he replied. “His natural healing factor is the only thing keeping his body alive but the venom is very destructive. Once it came in contact with his brain stem, it was essentially a lost cause. He’s been clinically brain dead ever since.”

Kendra nodded to the doctor.

“Can I get some privacy?” she asked.

The doctor nodded and then finished checking the vitals before leaving the room. Once he was gone, Kendra took a step forward. She looked down at the man on the hospital bed and took a deep breath. When she was done, she took another. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and when they opened, they were glowing with white light.

Pope.

She spoke directly to him but the connection she usually felt when she used her power was conspicuously absent. But she didn’t let that deter her. She had to at least try everything she could to bring him back. Whatever else people might say about Pope and the rest of her betas, they were good people. They had made terrible mistakes, or had that forced on them like Ye-Jun, but ever since she freed them from their blood hungers, they had been loyal to her and the Bane Pack. None of them deserved that torturous half-life. So she tried as hard as she could, pushing outward with her mind to find some semblance or flicker of Pope.

Conor came to stand next to her.

“He was a good, decent man,” Conor said quietly. “I didn’t care for the obvious crush he had on you though if I’m being honest.”

“Not the time,” Kendra whispered back, her voice harsh.

“What?” Conor shrugged his shoulders. “When all a man can do is sit back and observe the world, he notices things.”

“And gets jealous?”

“I may be dead but I still feel things,” he replied with a small, sad smile.

“This is weird, right?” She turned to him. “What do we do about this? You can’t stay inside my head forever, Conor. You’ll go insane. I’ll go insane.”

He grabbed her hand.

“I know,” he told her.

The question hung in the air between them, unanswered. The truth was, Kendra had no idea at all what she was supposed to do about it. She had a somewhat basic grasp of her powers at best, even though she had spent the last few weeks testing them out and trying to get better at them. Most of the time, things ended...not in the way she hoped. It made her wish her mother was still alive to help her.

“We’ll figure something out,” Conor told her, grabbing hold of her hand.

“Yeah,” she replied, unconvinced.

She gave one last look at Pope lying there, unmoving. She felt a deep sadness fill her at knowing that no matter how hard she tried, there was nothing she could do to help him. She didn’t like failing and by leaving him, that failure was practically shoved in her face. The loss of Pope hurt. It hurt the same way every other loss of a wolf hurt but all she could hope for now was for time to heal those wounds and blunt their pain.

She gave one last look at the man lying on the bed, a tear slipping out of her eye and rolling down her cheek. She reached out with a hand and cupped the side of Pope’s face in one last gesture. Then she turned around and started to walk out. She got all the way to the door before she realized Conor wasn’t behind her. She looked back and found him standing there, stock still. There was an almost pained look on his face, like something was hurting him. It was clear that he couldn’t move, and his jaw was clenching and unclenching rapidly. His mouth was closed tight but it moved around as if he were trying to speak. His frozen lips, however, were preventing any words from coming out.

‘What…,” Kendra was on the verge of asking, but then some huge, indescribable pain erupted inside her head. It was so bad, it even brought her to her knees. She clutched the sides of her head and fell over just a brilliant, white light exploded out of her eyes. It was so bright, it would’ve blinded anyone nearby but, thankfully, it winked out. Once it did, Kendra immediately slumped onto her side, unconscious.

||| ||| ||| ||| |||

Kendra dreamed of nothing but a deep, velvety blackness. There were no monsters lurking in it. No ghosts of dead loved ones, metaphorical or literal. No insane goddesses hellbent on destruction. It was almost peaceful in a way. She wasn’t sure how long she was out for but at some point, a voice started penetrating through that tempting, peaceful darkness.

“Kendra?” it asked. It asked that over and over again but she was having trouble pushing her way through that blackness. She wanted to stay wrapped in its calm embrace but that voice wouldn’t go away. In fact, it was getting louder and more insistent.

“Kendra!?” it nearly screamed. There was worry laced through it. Her eyes fluttered rapidly and then opened. Everything was hazy and a steady thumping pulsed at her temples. There was a moment when she thought she might vomit but, thankfully, it passed.

“That’s it,” that voice said. It was a familiar one but for some reason, it made her feel uneasy. Something about it set her on edge. “Try to sit up.”

Then it clicked and she knew why the voice made her uneasy.

It belonged to Pope.

That simple fact cleared away any cobwebs still lurking inside her head and everything cleared up. Her vision even stopped being blurry and the face of the person hovering in front of her came into focus.

It was Pope.

“Pope?” she asked, her voice full of confusion and awe.

“Uh...not exactly,” Pope told her. He stood up and reached down a hand to her to help her up.

She adjusted her dress and smoothed it down. Then she looked at Pope, the awe still quite evident on her face.

“Wh…” she tried to ask but she stopped suddenly. She finally got a good look at his eyes and what she saw there was enough to make her heart skip a beat.

They were Conor’s eyes.

“Yeah,” Pope told him, seeing her recognition. “It’s me.”

He held out his hands and gestured them at his “new” body.

“Conor,” he added.

“H-how?” she asked, breathless.

Before Conor could even say anything back, his eyes suddenly switched and were Pope’s eyes now. He blinked several times before he saw Kendra. He looked around and saw the hospital room, his eyes full of confusion.

“Kendra?”

Then the eyes switched back to Conor’s eyes.

“What is happening?”

Kendra stared at Conor...and...well...Pope...but there was no answer that came to mind.

“I have no idea.”