27. Logan #2
Her voice rose two octaves, and she screamed, “Where is Eli? Tell me. Tell me.” She whimpered.
“He’s not here anymore,” Marcus said. “He hasn’t been with you since the plantation, has he? Acheron split you up and keeps him somewhere else now. That’s the collar. That’s why you…” His voice broke. “That’s why you did all of this.”
She sobbed. “It’s the only way to save my son.”
The truth came out in pieces. Acheron had taken her long before the creek, had sensed the origins and the genetic strength of the multimorph, and had taken her son with her.
He’d kept the boy at her side until I breached the plantation.
After her treachery, he’d swallowed the child into the harvest as a leash for his leash, and she’d spent every hour since doing exactly enough to keep her child breathing and not one inch more.
The mis-tied knots. The warding smudged a half-degree out of true.
The map she’d let slip into Marcus’s head at the creek.
The knife she’d been trying to hand us for weeks.
All those stolen parts of a woman being used as a weapon and using every scrap of herself she could steal back to sabotage the one who held her leash.
Not a traitor. The longest-running act of resistance in the whole war.
Marcus reached for the thin chain at his neck and yanked until it broke. Then he unhooked the red-eyed golden bat pendant. I’d seen it in Emma’s hand and around Marcus’s neck a hundred times and taken it for jewelry. It wasn’t jewelry. It was hers.
“You gave me this, Cora,” he told her, folding it into her palm, closing her fingers over it.
“‘Bats see in dark places,’ you’d said the day they made me alpha, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
Then I gave it back when you gave her up for adoption, and I found it again at the creek.
I’ve carried it since. Every night his voice tried to tell me which whispers were his, I held this and listened for the ones that were yours.
Maybe the pendant kept us connected.” He pressed her fist to his chest. “I always knew you weren’t gone.
Though I couldn’t prove it to anyone. Eli’s not gone. We’ll find him too.”
Cora clutched the little bat against her heart. For one whole breath, the weeping half of her won. Both her irises cleared to a familiar green, as green as my mate’s, and she looked at her brother like a drowning woman surfacing from beneath deep water.
Then the other half dragged her back under, and she screamed, and it wasn’t grief anymore. It was Acheron, furious, feeling his weapon being pried from his grip. Both her eyes turned black.
“Bind her,” I commanded Levi and Della. “Gently. She can come home to Six-Mile. Maybe he won’t be able to reach her if we put her in the relic trove.
Torbin may be able to do something.” Then I turned to Marcus and lowered my voice so only he could hear it.
“You held the line nobody knew was a line. You kept the enemy’s own compass pointed at true north for as long as he held her, one whisper at a time.
When this is over, that’s the story they’ll tell about the alpha of Ville Platte. ”
He didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t.
Tears streamed over his cheeks as he held his sister’s bound hands around the gold bat. He was the blind man who’d been able to see reality the whole time.
I gave them the moments we could spare, and then we began the battle back to Six-Mile.
Acheron didn’t give up his weapon without a fight.
The dead flat resurrected as we pulled out. The dormant army tore itself up out of the ground all at once, no warrior-birthing ritual to feed anymore and nothing left to do but kill.
We’d suspected it. We’d drilled the withdrawal harder than the strike. Squirrels high, bears covering, cats and wolves folding back through the seam with the sister bound between them. My beta and I brought up the rear. Everybody moving, everybody accounted for—
A swell of shadow came up out of the remaining black liquid faster than I could react. It broke over the rear of our retreating forces.
“Duck!” I dove to the left, expecting the breaker to follow me, but the inky wave fell over Olivia and took hold.
Her eyes widened, and she screamed, “Get your ass home. Tell Jasper I love him.”
I bounded toward her, but the liquid slid over every inch of her, leaving no place to grab her where I wouldn’t have to touch the evil first.
“Fuck,” I bellowed, reaching for her anyway.
“No! Run, Logan! Leave me.” Then she went down under, darkness drenching her.
Hooks formed, punctured her chest, and split it open.
The shadowy rot poured into her wound, and my beta—my second, my right hand since before Emma was ever a rainbow smudge in Willow Creek—hit the ground and did not get up.
“Nooo!” Every instinct I had demanded I do something, anything, everything.
One breath. That was all I had. One breath to choose.
“Get out of here, asshole,” she groaned.
A month ago, hell, a week ago, I didn’t know what I’d have done. Three parts desperate, one part reckless. That was the man who had torn souls out of shadow mages in No Man’s Land and had scared the shit out of Olivia. I could have torn the darkness out of her…
But I wasn’t that man anymore.
Instead, I ignored the filth slicking her skin, dropped to the ground beside her, and shoved my arms beneath her.
I yanked on my side of the multimorph magic so hard I lit up the battlefield.
Then I hauled her up against my chest with the rot already crawling away from my hands, and I fled north toward home, carrying the woman who’d run beside me for years and told me the truth every single day I didn’t want to hear it.
“Don’t you dare die,” I commanded. “Don’t you dare, Reeves. Jasper’s not here to skin me if I lose you to Acheron, so I’d have to do it myself, and you know how much I hate paperwork. Stay alive. That’s an order.”
Her breath rattled in her throat, and blood spread over her chest. The gash exposed muscle and bone, but she hung on. Barely.
I didn’t slow down, and I didn’t look back. Not once did I regret letting our army sort itself back to Six-Mile. They’d been trained well, and they’d get themselves home.
We crossed out of the Void, and the world unmuted.
Insects sang in the breeze while night birds complained.
Carefully, I carried Olivia into Six-Mile, through the gate, past the fence, and beyond the Thanksgiving tables we still hadn’t cleared, straight to the secured relic trove in the rear of the gym.
I pressed my finger to the scanner, and the door hissed open. The amount of time between Olivia’s breaths grew longer, and her eyelids no longer fluttered. Her skin had gone paler than I had ever seen it, and her lips had lost all color. Her head lolled against my shoulder.
“One chance at this, Olivia. I’ve got one chance to keep Emma from killing me for letting you die,” I muttered.
Once inside, I laid my beta down onto the cold floor and put the oldest healing medallion we owned over the ruin of her chest. Then I summoned all the magic I could, hoping it was enough without having access to Emma’s.
Wind burst into the room, and white flames spread over my skin. Energy hummed around us.
Finally, the medallion absorbed the power, and I was able to spell-pack her wound. The poison fought it but lost by inches, and eventually, Olivia dragged in a breath that didn’t rattle, and I leaned back from her.
I knelt there in the relic trove with my beta’s blood all over my torso, and I replayed the events of the night. Choosing a single person was not the alpha’s weakness. It was the whole job.
We’d taken Acheron’s compass and brought it back to Six-Mile. She’d been fighting him from the inside the whole time he’d had her, and we’d given a grieving woman back the one thing that was hers, or at least started the process. Who knew if she was too far broken to be made whole. Time would tell.
Outside, the camp was already roaring the good news. Inside, in the dim light, I put two fingers to Olivia’s throat. Her pulse had steadied and strengthened.
Come home, Emma, while you still have one to come back to. We’re still standing.
For now.