2. Emma
CHAPTER TWO
emma
Six-Mile Manor
Monday
Early November
Naked, I stumbled across the lawn and reached the manor, blindly groping the exterior wall of the large house, which had become my home, my safety net. Overhead, lightning stabbed the sky, and thunder followed as I climbed the porch steps.
Sobs choked my throat, and I moved down the decking toward the front door. It opened with a creak, and I slammed it behind me, collapsing against the surface and sliding down until my ass landed on the cool of the hardwood floor. I pulled my feet inward and rested my arms on my knees.
Chunch! Splat!
The cut-off scream, followed by the scent of blood filling my nostrils. The sounds replayed in my head like a warped vinyl record stuck on repeat.
I hadn’t watched. No, I couldn’t look. Not with every other shifter observing me.
Salali had been beheaded under my care. Mine!
The beautiful, friendly, utterly enthusiastic… treacherous, deceitful, turncoat Salali. How had she been my enemy the whole time? How had I missed that? What if I could have rescued her from her fate?
My job as the multimorph had been to save her from Acheron, and I’d failed.
I’d given the clans the freedom to choose, and as one, they’d decisively chosen death. It sent a helluva message to anyone on the fence about their loyalty to me, but there had to be more traitors in our midst. Salali couldn’t have been working alone.
With a groan, I pressed my palm to the door, lumbered back to my feet, and staggered to the safety of the bedroom I shared with Logan.
Lurching to a halt in the middle of the spacious room, I let my memories play through.
Each moment of the recent day flashed in my head once more like a terrible, heartbreaking song stuck on repeat.
I shuddered and bit back a shoulder-shaking sob.
My stomach churned, and the room spun around me. My heart squeezed, and my chest ached.
Damn. My mother was somewhere in the compound, and there was no telling how she’d take the news of the beheading.
Fuck. I didn’t know how to explain it to myself, much less explain it to my mother in a way that she would be okay with.
At least I hadn’t run into her after I’d fled the scene behind the gym.
Another clap of thunder rumbled through the house, shaking the windows in their frames. The coming storm was going to be a doozy.
I scrubbed my hand over my face. The violence of it had been beyond shocking, and all the shifters had gone along with it as though it had been nothing, offering easy explanations for the way the local authorities would turn a blind eye. They’d all brushed it off, and it boggled my mind.
The emotional weight of it threatened to crush me, and I’d fled the minute after the blade fell. The finality of the chunch sound as the blade had split through Salali’s skin, her neck muscles, and her spine replayed in my mind.
I glared at the empty room. Another beheading wasn’t something I was ready to allow. No way I would let the shifters decide what to do with our criminals next time. More shit for a different day.
But I didn’t know what to do now, so here I was, hiding in the safety of my room, the mating den I shared with Logan, but it wasn’t an escape at all. No, I was still the leader of all shifters in the headquarters of Six-Mile pack, and in the middle of a war with Acheron.
So much to do, so little time. How to decide…
After I spun once in the center of the room, I grimaced. Dried tears made my cheeks feel tight, and my hands settled on my hips. Shifters had to survive, and I needed my mate.
He wasn’t here.
He was out there doing God-knows-what with all the energy he’d siphoned through me. Acheron had to be the cause.
Shit. I’m fucking exhausted.
I dropped to my knees, feeling all alone and broken into a million pieces. Lost, so lost, and confused by the turn of events. A fresh rush of tears fell then, pouring down my cheeks, my neck, and my chest.
I need you, Logan. I pressed the plea through the bond.
He didn’t answer.
Where had he gone? He had drawn so much energy, and I still didn’t know what he had needed it for, what he had been fighting.
When he’d reached through the fated mate bond between us, primal shifter magic had poured out of me, exploding from my chest and nearly destroying our conclave in the process.
Had Logan succeeded?
Yet my mate still hadn’t returned to Six-Mile. He wasn’t dead. Surely, I could tell that much, but he was raging and maybe as broken as me. We’d both suffered wounds in the last twenty-four hours, but we still had so much to do.
He had to lead Six-Mile, and I had to lead the whole damn shifter world.
My shoulders shook, and my heart twisted in my chest. How did we come back from this? How did having an alpha beheaded for her treachery unify the clans?
I didn’t understand any of it. Back in Willow Creek, I would have never expected to see a beheading, not in modern times, not today.
Shifter culture was brutal and at odds with human culture.
Salali’s consequences had been so violent, so archaic, and so foreign to everything I had grown up believing.
Finally, my sobbing faded. Although I was no closer to a solution, at least my weeping had washed out some of the pent-up emotion. Unfortunately, it left my nose stuffy, my face swollen, and now my chest sticky and tight from more dried tears.
Another deeper wave of weariness spread through me, and I pushed off the ground. The shifters would have to take care of themselves while I got some sleep.
Can’t take care of them until I take care of me…
Gingerly, I covered a hiccup yawn as I padded across the floor.
I clutched the corner of the comforter on our bed and rubbed it between my fingers and thumbs.
Someone had made the bed since we’d left the bedding twisted and tangled the last time we’d been here.
The corner of my mouth twisted into a half-smile.
Making the bed was probably not something he did as an alpha. After we’d gone, Olivia, Logan’s right-hand beta, had probably had our room cleaned.
Olivia took care of so much. I needed to make a point to thank her soon. At least she had been loyal since the beginning.
Instead of settling on my half of the bed, I climbed onto Logan’s, if only to feel closer to him. I pulled the duvet back. Logan wasn’t here, so I wrapped myself in the cover on the side of the bed that smelled of pine and smoked whiskey.
My shoulders drooped as I slipped between the buttery-soft sheets, wishing desperately for Logan to be by my side. I tucked the bedding around me. My head sank into the pillow. I’d probably regret not showering first. I don’t care.
The mattress felt almost warm, as though he’d been there recently, as though it was a promise he was coming back.
I melted into the mattress, and the thick comforter enveloped me.
How long had I been the multimorph? How long had I been leading all of the shifter clans?
I couldn’t be sure I was who they needed, but I was what they had, and I was smack-dab back to believing I wasn’t enough.
Thunder rumbled again, through the house, through the surrounding forest of Louisiana, and I imagined the rain falling, dripping on the leaves outside. It’d been ages since I’d been camping at Site 52 in Magnolia State Park.
Dad, I wish you were still here.
Maybe he wouldn’t know what to do with the news of magic and people who could change into animals. Hell, he’d accused me of wanting to be an animal often enough as a kid. Still, he would have been able to help me sort out what I needed to do next.
As I pressed my head into the pillow, sobs returned. Heavy, hot tears slipped down my cheeks and into the fabric beneath my head. It was too much. It had always been too much. I was exhausted, and I still didn’t know how to process a fucking beheading.
The rustle of a noise at the threshold filtered through the room, and I lifted my head.
My mother, Sophia, eased into the room. “What happened, love? What’s wrong?” She approached the bed and stopped beside me.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I sighed, my breath catching as I settled my head back onto the pillow.
“Maybe you need to talk about it,” she said, fussing with the covers around me, tucking them in and adjusting them the way she always had when I was a little girl frightened by a nightmare. “Tell me.”
“Mom, I can’t. I can’t talk about it. It’s too awful.”
“Did you do it?” she asked. “Was it something you did?”
“No, nothing I did. Not really. But I was still responsible.”
She shook her head and offered a soft smile. “I don’t think that’s true, sweetie.”
“You’ve seen what I am, Mom, but you don’t know half of what’s going on here, or what I did or didn’t do.” I sniffed back snot and sobs. “It’ll take days to unravel.”
She patted my leg. “You think I’ve done nothing while you’ve been gone? I know about Acheron and a great deal of shifter lore.”
I froze. She’d seen shifting with her own eyes. But Acheron? “They told you everything? Even about him?”
“Dr. Wise took me to a late lunch, and she explained a lot. Sheila helped.”
My frown stretched across my face as I tried to process my mother’s words. Sheila wasn’t a shifter, but she was Logan’s cousin.
“Sheila helped… what… exactly?”
“Explain it all.”
“So, you know everything now?”
“I know enough to know there’s a lot on your mind, the whole weight of this world we knew nothing about, and I know enough now to understand why I’ve been on the back burner for you.
” She pressed her lips into a straight line.
Finally, she added, “I’m not sure I fully grasp the majority of what’s going on, but Dr. Wise has agreed to teach me as much as she can while you’re off fighting Acheron and whatever else you’ve been up to with Logan. ”
“Oh.”
Mom knew… and she didn’t hate me for any of it.