26. Emma #3
You were born with the key to the Veil in your blood, they said.
You are the only living creature who can lay hands on the boundary itself.
Here, you can mend what the corruption has torn.
Here, you can close the wound and send Acheron back to the dark that made him.
Or, if you choose, you can finish the tearing he began and let two worlds bleed into one.
The key opens both locks. It always has.
“I’ll mend it,” I said. “Obviously. Tell me how.”
They drew out the spellwork task thread by thread, bit by bit, and that was when I fully understood why the page had been destroyed.
Mending the Veil was not a spell I could cast. It was a thing I had to become. To close the seam, the culmination must give herself into it and pour every drop of the gathered power back down into the boundary. Here. Now.
All the bloodlines that had found their way home to me would come apart again along the seam of the world, and the woman they’d become—the vet, the rainbow, the daughter, the mate—would be the mortar in the wall.
Emma Carter, spread like a bandage across the boundary between two worlds, holding them apart forever…
They had paid it themselves, once, the first ones. When they raised the Veil, one of them had gone into it to hold it up. That was the cost. That was the great sacrifice the vision had warned me about. Not death. Worse than death.
To save everyone I loved, I would stop being anyone at all.
I recalled the bar where I’d met Logan, the mountain lion attack that had triggered everything, the burned multimorph’s tree from the previous Gathering Place, and the note I’d left on his desk against a crocheted doily made by a grumbling bear.
So much life had come before… What would come next?
Logan living with an empty mate bed. Sophia losing the last family she had. Riley and Shannon in Willow Creek, never understanding what it had cost to stay ordinary. All the warriors in Louisiana with a doctor and a fox waiting at the mouth of a cave…
Dr. Wise, with papery hands and fierce eyes, at the foot of the old oak, had told me, “It’s an invitation to write a different ending.”
I didn’t know yet how I would accomplish it. It was an equation that didn’t have a solution. Unbalanced. Shit. I didn’t have a better answer, not yet, not with the light in my hands and the cost laid out plain and true and terrible.
Maybe there wasn’t a better way. Maybe the price was the price, and I would walk back into the war with my eyes open, the way one of the last multimorphs had walked into hers.
She’d begged to be killed rather than be used, and I finally understood it wasn’t despair.
It was her writing the only ending she could fathom. The multimorph’s tree…
But I wasn’t at the ending yet. I was at the beginning of the end, which is a different part entirely, and Dr. Wise had spent her whole widowed life teaching shifters the difference between a story that was finished and a story that had been hidden.
“It’s not over yet,” I finally answered, and I stood up. I let the light return to the seam where it lived, still torn, still bleeding, still mine to close whenever I chose to stop being Emma.
I turned my back on them… for now.
You will come back to us, they said, but they didn’t drag me back. They whispered with what sounded like… approval. You will return.
“Oh, maybe,” I said, “but not today. Not here. Not yet. I’ve got to work on an after. I promised a guy…”
To mend, or to end. The way will open whenever you’re ready to pay.
“I’m the multimorph,” I told them, climbing, human, empty-handed, and lighting my own way. “I’ll decide what it costs and when. That’s the whole secret, isn’t it?”
They didn’t answer, but the way up was easier than the way down, and I chose to take that as a yes.
Iexited Wolf Moon Cave into muted daylight, and Jasper was there. Of course he was there, red, rumpled, and upright in the frost, exactly where he’d sworn he’d be.
He took one look at my face and didn’t ask. “Ye’re changed,” he said, which was true. “Ye’re still ye,” he added, which was also true.
Dr. Wise rose from the roots of the old oak, her satchel already on her shoulder, reading me over her spectacles.
“Well?” she prompted.
“They showed me the price.” My voice came out strong and steady. Behind me, the mouth of the cave breathed its old cold breath, patient, in no hurry at all. The spirits inside knew I’d be back. “And you were right. The other ending’s been destroyed because this one is mine to create.”
“Mmmm,” she said.
I peered north and west, back toward Six-Mile, a horde, and a man I’d left sleeping at a desk. “We’re going to go write a different one all the way to the last page.”
Then the three of us turned north, toward home, toward the war, toward the after I had promised Logan would always come. I went the whole way with the cost laid quietly in my chest like a name at the top of a list I fully intended to cross off.
Trust me, love. I’m working on our after.