Hi all, this is the end of Book One of this series. I won't be posting the rest of the series here, but you can find the next book on my AO3 (name again is Unstoppablei) if you'd like to keep reading. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed!

Epilogue: The Place Beyond

"I'm so sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Kerr."

Joanna wailed and buried herself in her husband's sweater, while Broehain looked stoically ahead. "Is my daughter dead, doctor?"

"She… is close," Doctor Hunt said gently. "The knife hit with uncanny precision and force. It nearly severed her spinal cord. She is functionally brain dead; any minor activity that she had before, the ability to breathe, for example, is gone. There is simply nothing left. She is stabilized and sustained by a ventilator, but she won't last long. You must say your goodbyes."

"How long?" Broehain asked, and the doctor looked surprised.

"Excuse me?"

"How long can she last like that?"

"A few days, a week at most - but she will keep crashing and we will continue to have to resuscitate her. I'm so sorry to say this, but it's not worth the effort. She's gone."

Broehain suddenly lashed out, pinning the doctor to the wall. "She's not gone," he growled. "There must be a way to bring her back."

"Broehain, please," Joanna cried, trying to drag him away. "Stop it."

"I'm sorry," Doctor Hunt said again, fruitlessly. "We can't save everyone. At least the doctor who did this is in a secure institution—"

"It was NOT a doctor who did this!" Broehain roared. "You weren't there! God damnit, man, he's telling the truth when he says he remembers nothing! It wasn't him, I saw it! He didn't stab my daughter!"

Joanna grabbed him again. "Broehain, please—"

"No!" He shook her off. "I lost Anna, I will not lose Errol, not when I can fix this! You saw it too, you heard them! That was not a doctor, it was someone in his body! It was possession!"

"Maybe we should discuss this in my office," Doctor Hunt said delicately, rubbing his shoulder where Broehain had pushed him into the wall. "You're making people uncomfortable."

Broehain stalked to the doctor's office, hating how caged in it felt, how stuffy, the stupid, useless degrees hanging from the walls. His daughter, his precious, baby girl was lying there dying and this bastard was saying there was nothing he could do about it. Bullshit. He knew what he had seen. He had eyes. His daughter had woken up and spoken to that man and said her goodbyes with a clarity in her eyes he'd never seen before. She'd spoken of strange and wondrous things, spoken of one day coming home again, and then that man had stabbed her, and Broehain's whole world had fallen apart.

The young doctor with blood drenched hands had immediately shaken his head as if coming awake from a dream and started to scream. It was magic, it was possession, Broehain knew it. Errol was involved in something bigger than her. He was Scottish, he knew the stories, he believed what his grandmother had told him of the Fae and the Selkie and the Will O' Wisps. He hadn't been able to save Anna, his dear sweet sister who looked so much like Errol that sometimes he thought she was Anna come back to him, but he would save his daughter if he had to walk into hell itself.

Doctor Hunt closed the door behind him. "Mr. Kerr, I'm not sure what else you expect me to do," he started. Broehain took a deep breath and willed himself to calm down.

"Please, Doctor, I'm willing to do anything," he said.

"There's nothing you can do. Sometimes terrible things happen. Sometimes people just die."

Broehain gripped the edge of the huge oak desk that took up most of the room. "There must be something," he said. "Someone you send the hopeless cases to. The ones who are willing to try anything. The ones modern medicine won't work on. Something. Someone. Anyone. I'll do anything, no matter how crazy it may seem."

Doctor Hunt hesitated. "You mean… like a faith healer?"

"Anything. Voodoo, priests, faith healing, dancing naked in the moonlight, animal sacrifice. Anything."

Joanna took a sharp breath. "You can't be serious."

Broehain ignored her. "Do you know of anyone?"

Doctor Hunt sat behind his desk and rifled through one of his drawers. "There is… someone," he said slowly. "I'm not… supposed to do this anymore. He doesn't want to be contacted. But he… he worked. Whatever he did, it worked. Normally I would never, but—" He looked Broehain in the eye. "I did review the security footage, Mr. Kerr. I saw what happened in that room and it wasn't normal. I will try to reach him, if you like."

"Do it," Broehain said immediately. "I'll give you anything you want."

Doctor Hunt shook his head. "Money is fine," he said dismissively. "Anyway, I'm not the one you pay. It's a friend of mine, he's the one with the contact. He's the one who said that this... healer doesn't want to involve himself in our business anymore. He's an odd one, a hermit from Norway. My friend met him many years ago. But I'll try to convince my friend to convince the healer… if your daughter survives for long enough, maybe—" He spread his hands. "I make no promises."

"Thank you," Broehain said, taking Joanna into his arms and letting the tears finally swell in his eyes. "I mean it. Thank you."

Doctor Hunt nodded. "I'll send the message now."

The archeologist was in Ushuaia, at the very tip of Argentina, when he printed out the email and its attached article and held it between his hands. The email simply read: "I know you said he didn't want to be contacted anymore, but if you could get him to make an exception for anything, it's this. Time is short. Hurry."

The article was a lurid story about a girl who hovered near the brink of death because one of her doctors stabbed her in the neck. She had mysteriously fallen into a coma while hiking on the day the Northern Lights flared across much of the Northwestern United States, and then woken unexpectedly three days later only to have a strange conversation with her doctor before he plunged a knife into her throat. Now she hovered on the brink of death while the tabloids splashed two photos of her over their pages: One of her pretty face, smiling and freshly scrubbed, blonde hair a cloud around her shoulders, the other of that same face with a ventilator and a feeding tube, blood crusting her nose and mouth, her hair a shorn, matted mess.

He stared hard at the first picture and then reached for the photo on his desk, the one that had haunted him since it came up on his server two days ago. It was a grainy shot from the explorer cam, the one his winter team at the Antarctic base had dropped into that mysterious cavern deep under the ice, the one they'd only found through x-rays. The x-rays had suggested some interesting rock formations, but instead the camera had shown much more, fragments of an actual lost civilization: worn statues around a huge intact mirror, with actual live flowers blooming at its base. And it had been in the dead of night, when the team was sleeping and only he was monitoring the images from far-off Argentina, that the mirror had opened and flooded the room with blue light, and the camera captured the image he now held in his hand.

Two women, as different as night and day. One with raven hair in little more than a black bra and a draping top, with a leather skirt and boots and one long sleeve, her eyes golden like a hawk's, the other with sun-blonde hair and upswept green eyes in leather leggings and knee high boots, with a long silken shirt and a vest that laced beneath her breasts and rose high to brush her jaw. Both looked like something out of a fantasy story, but they were real, staring out from inside the mirror a mile underneath the ice.

He looked back at the article and confirmed it: Somehow, impossibly, the blonde in the mirror was the girl lying in the hospital in Seattle.

This was it. He paged through his old journal until he reached the long spread of numbers, then balanced the old corded phone on one shoulder as he dialed and waited for the international call to go through, the line silent but for faint, fuzzy clicks.

He'd convince his old spirit healer friend to save the girl if he had to hogtie him and carry him to Seattle himself. It was the hermit that had spurred his interest in the occult years ago - a grumpy old man living at the fringes of society in Norway who spoke no English, and who claimed that the Northern Lights gave him visions and powers. The archeologist hadn't believed it until he saw it for himself, and once he did he set up a nice little moneymaking system, coaxing the healer to travel far and wide to lay his hands on the sick and injured. Unfortunately, age had finally caught up with the geezer a few years back, and he gave up on his wandering ways and moved in with his family in Longyearbyen.

That was the end of the relationship, and the archeologist had been forced to continued on alone in his search for more magic, more power. But the healer would come this time, no matter what it took. It shouldn't take much - he was owed one last favor, after all, and thank whatever Gods people believed in that the old man was in Longyearbyen now, with cell phone access and an airport. The archeologist wouldn't even have to go anywhere, just make a call. One call, and it would be done. It would have to be done.

The phone picked up, the voice on the other end aged and grainy. "Hallo?"

The archeologist took a deep breath. "Jeg trenger din hjelp."

He had to save this one. It was important. She was it, the one he'd been told about, the one who would change his life, who would change everything. He had to make sure it happened just right, and stay here for now, at the tip of Argentina, for more instructions.

For it was only here, under the Southern Lights, that he dreamed of wolves.