16. Emma #3
The change hit her sideways, half-invited. Colors burst out of her, a body caught between girl and cat, claws out and eyes blown. She came off the tailgate in a tangle of limbs that couldn’t decide fast enough what they were, and she came down three feet from a row of kids too young to shift.
The yard exploded in shouting. Garrick’s wolves surged forward with their hands wide. Force was the old answer, pile on and pin, but force was going to get someone horribly hurt.
“Hold!” I bellowed, and everyone froze.
Then I did the thing I’d promised myself I’d ration.
I reached out with the part of me the gym event had taught me to fear, found her jagged, screaming frequency, and linked with her.
Not a wall. Not a cage. I flowed into the channel beside her panic the way I’d once flowed beside twelve bears and a squirrel in a training clearing.
I hummed her own energy back to her, steady, until the static had lessened.
You’re safe. You’re whole. Come back.
Surrounded by a wash of colors and wind, her body found the girl version of her again. She crumpled to the ground, gasping, human, and unscathed.
Nobody bled. Nobody was even scratched.
I’d used less power than what it would take for a healing, no more force than a hand on a shoulder, and I stood in the ringing silence of my own camp.
Half of the spectators looked at me like I’d hung the moon, and the other half remembered, visibly, in real time, that I could reach inside a shifter and turn them like a dial.
A little boy jumped out of the van. He was seven, maybe, gap-toothed, raccoon-clan by the look of him, and he broke the silence first.
“Do me next!” he said, pumping his arm in the air. “Woo!”
Laughter cracked through the crowd, and the humor saved the afternoon.
But it didn’t save all of it. As the shifters returned to their regularly scheduled programming and the young woman’s people gathered her up, I caught Garrick and the raven speaker with their heads together, and I didn’t need shifter hearing to guess at the shape of it.
She can do that to any of us. She did it to that girl without asking. Salali never saw the blade coming either.
Salali’s shadow cut long through the clans, and after allowing her beheading, I had put it there myself. No amount of gap-toothed applause was going to erase it.
I found the girl afterward, wrapped in one of my mother’s quilts with cocoa she wasn’t drinking. Up close, the youngling reminded me of Riley. They all looked like Riley to me lately.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have asked. There wasn’t time, but that doesn’t undo what I did. Permission is a big deal to me.”
She gaped at me. “You’re apologizing? You’re the multimorph.”
“That’s exactly why I’m apologizing.” I tucked the quilt around her the way Sophia would have, the way Sophia had on the nights when I’d been the one shaking.
“Nobody reaches into you without asking, kiddo. Not Acheron. Not me. If anyone ever tells you the second one is different, you send them to me, and I’ll explain it slowly and with more teeth. ” I winked at her.
“Thank you,” she said. Her face relaxed, and she nodded, taking a sip of her cocoa. She frowned at the chocolaty liquid and then glanced up at me. “You’re not what I expected, Multimorph.”
“Seems reasonable that I’m not like anybody else,” I said.
“You’re more… regular… than the alpha of the alphas should be.”
I laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Her cheeks reddened, and she climbed to her feet and returned to my mom for more hot cocoa. Mom waved at me and went back to doting on the young woman.
It was enough, a piece of civility in the shifter world. I wasn’t going to turn into Acheron, even if I had the power to do so.
Then I jogged back to the gym to continue training.
At dusk, the air turned chilly, and I munched on a fish taco while I climbed the rise at the northern edge of the property alone. Marcus hadn’t come along this time.
Below me, the impossible thing I’d built glowed.
Torchlight, convoy headlights, guards rotating east with the last buses.
My mother’s kitchen lamps threw gold squares across the frost collecting on the blades of grass.
It was an ongoing miracle. At least one hundred fifty warriors and a few hundred frightened civilians behaved as one clan whether they’d meant to or not, and it was a helluva thing.
Beating Acheron wasn’t assured, but we were going to give it our best shot.
We had so few days to pull it together. The onslaught had a schedule, and so did we.
I reached through the bond, south, past the fence and the parishes between us.
The sensations through our connection had gone thin, a candle in a window through miles of dark. He was barely there, but he moved. He was afraid, and he was furious. Yet he was alive, and somewhere under all of it, faint as a bell heard across a battlefield, he charged home.
Half a day, Logan Blackwood, I pushed the words into the link, using the last of my voice where nobody could hear it break. You promised Olivia half a day. Don’t make me come teach you what happens to men who are late for Thanksgiving.
The candle flame flickered in the back of my mind.
I could have sworn he laughed.
But had it been Logan… or Acheron?