27. Logan
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
logan
Inside the Void
The Ritual Hour
We executed our strike at the blind hour, the time chosen by Marcus.
Forty of our alliance’s best moved through dead country, their jaws set in determination and their eyes flashing with deadly intent.
Ville Platte was the tip of the knife because I’d promised Garrick and the whole camp that the Steeles would risk their own bodies on the whisper we trusted.
Della ran point for the cats with Marcus a pace off her flank, one hand resting on her shoulder.
The clouds boiled overhead, dropping low over the heavy fog in the Void. Lightning flashed, barely illuminating the forest around us. Thunder cracked two seconds later. The earth rumbled beneath our feet, and I wished I could glimpse Emma through our bond.
Behind us, Torbin held Six-Mile. Olivia ran at my side, where she’d been for years.
I’m making sure you have a home to come home to… I pressed the thought toward Emma, but my bond with her had disappeared. Not closed. Gone. My insides churned.
Shit. She must have run herself to the end of everything I could sense, into some deep warding. There wasn’t even the wall between us left to find. Just distance, and the echo of where she’d been.
Trust me, love.
I trusted her, and I went to war to make sure there’d be a world left when she climbed back out of whatever hole she’d dug herself into.
“There they are,” I barked.
Della bared her teeth and hissed.
We had returned to the drowned cypress flat, which rose up out of the Void exactly the way it had the night Jasper and I had first discovered it. It must have moved north with the Void. The flat wasn’t a place at all. It was the wound’s eerie shadow, and it went where the wound went.
Black water stood so still it seemed solid, the ribs of dead trees rising from it, and above the flat, the gash wept its bruised light.
Robed mages ringed the water in rows, their heads down, droning, carving runes into dead trunks, and all around them, sunk into the ground like oil into a rag, the horde stood dormant.
Marcus’s sister floated over the middle of the bog, but she had told the truth again, which meant she was either the finest ally we had or the finest bait Acheron had ever tied to a hook. I’d led forty souls out here to find out which.
Hundreds of shadow-shapes swarmed in the cloud, but I hadn’t yet located Acheron’s hollow court.
The husks of shifters that Acheron had linked with, repurposed, and used to fuel his extermination.
Perhaps they were with him wherever the coward hid.
Perhaps they were the jaws and teeth of the trap we were being led into.
“Charge!” I whisper-yelled, and the command echoed up and down the front line. “For the multimorph!”
“For the multimorph!” they rippled back as we bolted toward the center of Acheron’s Void.
“For my sister!” Marcus cried as they moved ahead. His cataract eyes matched the Void-fog we marched into.
My scar burned like a brand. I breathed in, and I gave the order in a bellow that carried. “Every clan. Go. Go. Go.”
They all shifted into their animal forms while I stayed human. A cacophony of animal sounds split the unnatural silence.
Ravens went first. They lifted off the dead canopy in a black spread, our eyes in a sky that had no birds of its own. They called the field down to me. Mages here, break there, the soft place in the ring at the north edge where the rune lines guttered.
I’d learned to trust them. That was Emma’s doing too. A month ago, I’d have called a raven a feathered lawn ornament to its face, same as the others in our company would’ve. Tonight, though, I bet forty lives on their abilities and never blinked.
Then the squirrels cut through the mage-line.
Levi led them, East Nuttal’s sharpest mouth and best climber, and they attacked the ritual by chittering from above and being everywhere all at once, dropping onto the rune-carved trunks and shredding the fresh marks before a single mage could lift his head.
The ritual was a jobsite. Cut the lines feeding it, and the whole thing stops.
The mages broke their droning to defend, and the bears broke the shell.
They came in low and unstoppable, Torbin’s cousins and the brown giants of Bear Trees.
They slammed into the ring of robed figures like a semi hitting motorcycles.
No finesse. None was needed. The shell of mages around the black water came apart under a wall of muscle and fury while the squirrels rained chaos.
Into the torn-open gaps, the cats and the wolves poured.
I was on the front line. I went in with Della’s cats on one side and my own wolves on the other into the gap where the ritual halted, and I stopped trying to be the biggest asshole on the field.
I’d been trying to match Emma. That was the mistake.
Emma was the multimorph. She became all the clans at once, the shifter universe in one body. I’d felt that power and thought it meant I was supposed to be another one of her, a rival sun. “Death becomes me,” I’d said, and I’d believed it because I didn’t understand the tool in my own two hands.
I wasn’t a second multimorph. I was the other half of one.
In the Void, with cats reading angles, wolves running lanes, and the shadow work clawing at all of us, I quit trying to be everything and became the anchor.
Silvery light wrapped around me, and I reached out with clean power, linked the energies of our warriors, and guided the current. Each warrior glowed as they joined.
Inch by inch, the black water shrank, and we advanced toward the middle.
Mages swirled around us. In the heart of the roiling mass, Marcus’s sister flicked her hands and sent Acheron’s ilk toward us in small bursts.
Her fighters slammed against our shifters, the shared illumination cutting through them easily.
We were outmatched five times over, but their attacks did little.
Intentionally? I couldn’t tell. I scanned the battlefield, searching for Acheron. The evil wizard was nowhere in sight. What a coward.
To my left, a cat overextended, and a blackened tendril caught her. She yowled in pain.
I barked and reached for the inky whip of power and soaked it in, absorbing the discharge. The shadowy rot ran through me and back into the ground, leaving her untouched.
A wolf whined to my right, and I brought my hand toward him and steadied his resolve. I shared my calm with the link, and the wolf lunged at the closest shadow mage. When his teeth closed around our enemy, I took the ruin and returned it to the earth beneath us.
I stabilized our army and gave every group of mismatched fighters a place to send the overflow, so it didn’t destroy them. The complement. The anchor. The ground wire.
Emma was the lightning. I was the rod that let the world survive it.
And God, the relief. I stopped being afraid of the fire in my chest the second I understood it wasn’t a crown. It was a tether. I was becoming the one who held the fight together.
Della shrieked and dove at a trio of mages that circled Marcus’s paws. He showed his teeth, snapping and growling at the shrinking onslaught.
“Leap forward,” I barked.
Marcus didn’t hesitate. He set back on his feline haunches and sailed out of the circle as I dove toward his would-be attackers. I landed on my feet and summoned a burst of energy that shot out of me like a grenade made of light.
The figures shattered, and the shards sank into the soil.
Levi’s forces broke the rune-line, and the dead earth stopped birthing misshapen shadows, and the Void stopped growing. Still no sign of his hollow court, and we were quickly running out of shadow mages.
Ten, eleven, twelve more times the fully formed creatures attacked our line and fractured against our united power. If Marcus’s sister was the bait, Acheron was sacrificing his forces to spring his trap. Perhaps she had masterminded her own escape.
Marcus shifted to his human form, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “We’re almost there.”
Her face twisted, but she sent the final contingent zigzagging across the ground toward us. We converged on them and ripped them apart. With a roar, we bested the last of them, and the fog pulsed around us.
The last of the rune-lines went dark under Levi’s warriors, the shells of mages fell to bears, and the great droning wrongness that had been chewing at the seam of the world simply… slowed to a stop. The Void over the flat guttered and shrank, and the general dropped into the black water.
All around us, the Void lurched as it diminished, and forty of the alliance’s best stood in the wreck of it, alive. Together. One beast with one spine.
She’d been at the heart of the Void. She had been the still point the shadows ran around, Steele musk gone wrong under the stink of mage rot and grief.
Della’s cats rushed in and plucked Marcus’s sister from the gray interior. The second they pulled her clear of the rune-ring, something tore loose in my chest, and warmth spread through my torso.
Marcus felt it worse. He made a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life. His yowl cut off mid-shriek, and his knees buckled.
Ville Platte dragged our prize out of the black water puddle.
Yet what we hauled onto the shore of the bog wasn’t one woman.
Two were wearing one body and fighting over it.
At least half of her was still Acheron’s.
One iris was black, the other was green.
Half of her contorted mouth shaped words in a voice with Acheron behind it.
The other half of her cried out. “Where is my son? Where’s Eli?”
“Cora, Cora. Don’t worry. We have you.” Marcus dropped to his knees beside her.
In all this time, he’d never spoken her name.
Unerring, he found her face with his hands, and he pressed his forehead to hers. The two ruined Steeles knelt in the wreckage. He held her as she shook, rolling and fighting against Acheron inside her. For us, the fight had ended. For her, it still raged.