Epilogue

It was three weeks later, and most of the town was cleaned up. The werewolf meat that was salvageable was primarily used by the creatures of the veil. Space had been negotiated for them, and slowly, the creatures dispersed, although the centaurs and the fairies both chose to stay and inhabit the forests just outside of Sedona. The federal government made that area, a private reserve.

The dragons and other council members of the veil agreed to re-cage the rest of the werewolves, and worked tirelessly to do so. They chose to place those less than lovely creatures on a small island on the West Coast, called Kir’nu. Kir’nu was already a gateway to hell, and had a very attendant guardian who was willing to work tirelessly to maintain the werewolves, who were now surrounded by both the veil and an electric fence.

Dina and her family reconciled, and when she explained how she had been kidnapped after leaving her father’s house — that she had never intended to run away at all, her parents instantly forgave her. Dina begged daily for her father to turn her into a vampire, but as time wore on and her wounds healed, it became more of a joke than a request.

Oddly enough, Dina championed a statue of Broon-dy-kao to be built in the center of the town. He would be hailed as the savior of Sedona, both for killing the janitor who started the whole thing, and for inadvertently bringing the two sides together to prevent casualties from the onslaught of werewolves.

Angela and her husband, Charlie visited the centaurs on a regular basis. They would exchange stories, as always, and Angela was working to record the centaurs’ verbose history into a volume that would be labelled as fantasy by the general public. Although sometimes, Charlie found himself uncomfortable and not quite up to size when compared to the centaurs, he saw that the new friends made his wife happy, and so, was content with the centaur-human friendship that had emerged.

The country received a very altered version of the truth. To the country, it was merely an earthquake and chaos in Sedona which had triggered the nationwide emergency, for fear of aftershocks and other disasters. Most of the creatures had been contained to Sedona, but the few outliers, mostly within the state, were quickly relocated to their new homes. The people who had seen them and refused to be quiet were relocated to Sedona, itself, and either allowed to establish themselves within the public sphere, or confined to the mental health hospital.

The vampires were enrolled in a Green Tech research program, and most of them were public with their conditions. The antics of George — the vampire with an alcohol problem — were stopped as soon as the vampires outed themselves, and George was arrested for criminal mischief. Oh, and don’t worry, the nail biters? They found their cure.

All in all, after a few weeks, most things had returned to normal. The fairy statue, the occasional howler monkey sighting, and the centaur stories that came from Charlie and Angela Johnson were the only overt reminders of how close Sedona had come to the destruction of the world.**

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