28. Emma
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
emma
Six-Mile loomed in my chest before I saw it with my eyes.
My home and my mate. When we neared, the bond snapped back into place like a rubber band that had been stretched to the breaking point. Logan waited on the other end of it. The wall still rested between us. We weren’t far now, and I couldn’t wait to wrap my legs around Logan.
That’s right. Definitely going to start with my legs. We can hug afterward.
While I had driven us the last half of the way home in the Subaru, Dr. Wise had dozed in the passenger seat with her satchel clutched to her chest. She’d driven until the roads began again, and then she’d given up the wheel.
Earlier, she paused long enough to hand me a picnic blanket from the trunk without comment.
“I budget for wardrobe attrition now,” she’d said. “Historians learn.”
“Thanks, Doc,” I said, and tucked it around myself as I took the driver’s seat.
Then Dr. Wise had climbed into the passenger seat for some shut-eye before she parked herself at her desk and set about transcribing her firsthand experiences with the multimorph. Jasper now snored in the back.
We reached the high fence perimeter at dawn.
No doubt we’d been spotted as we made our way down the road, and our presence had been radioed in.
A dozen shifters stood in a huddled group on the other side of the gate, next to the long drive.
One of them shouted, and the activity in Six-Mile halted. It stopped completely.
Warriors paused training, crossed to the fence, and hooked their fingers through it, watching us roll in.
Cooks carried pots across the porch of the mess hall, dropped them off, and made their way toward the gate.
Others climbed down ladders and drew closer.
Each gaze, every single eyeball trained on me.
Dr. Wise scowled. “What’s going on?”
“Fuck if I know,” I muttered. “It’s a little creepy.” Then I turned toward the back seat and slapped the lower portion of the fox’s leg. “Hey, Jasper. Wake up.”
He snorted and sat up. “What the hell, Emma?”
“Check it out. Something’s changed.”
“Changed?” he echoed, peering out the window.
“Indeed,” Dr. Wise agreed.
He turned to me. “Ye smell different. I told ye back at the cave.”
I frowned. “When you told me I’d changed?”
“Aye. That’s what I meant. Still ye, but different.”
“Ah. Well, I did not pick up on that, Jasper.”
He shrugged. “Apologies, lass.”
Whatever I’d become down in the cave, all the shifters seemed to sense it.
As we eased to a stop in front of Six-Mile Manor, bears bowed.
Cats dipped their chins. A whole line of northern wolves who’d wanted me detained for an imaginary infraction days ago dropped their eyes to the frost, and it wasn’t respect, or at least it wasn’t only respect.
Awe with fear laced right through it, the two threads run so close I couldn’t pull one without the other.
Carefully, I climbed from the car. Dr. Wise slipped out next, and Jasper bounded out. He disappeared almost immediately.
A month ago, I’d have made a self-deprecating joke to break the intensity of it. Something about the irony of their prophesied savior not knowing a thing about shifter hierarchy.
I opened my mouth to try to crack the joke, but it died in my throat. My stomach dropped. This was going to be one of the costs nobody had bothered to razor out of a page because it was too small and too quiet to include in the details.
These shifters… What had happened to them while I was gone? What had they seen since I’d been gone? Had they felt the change they now smelled? Were they trying to make sense of it?
I’m still Emma! Don’t be afraid! I wanted to yell at them. God, Logan, where are you? I needed a friendly face, but I couldn’t bring down the wall. Not yet.
I’d gone into a cave and refused a crown. I’m the one who unites. Not your queen. I’m Emma, the rainbow vet from Willow Creek, adopted daughter of Sophia Carter.
I couldn’t announce that I was still myself. At least not until I found out what happened to them while I was gone. Instead, I lifted my chin, and I let them bow, and I filed every lowered head away. I marched into Six-Mile like a stranger. Tears welled in my eyes.
Then Sophia stepped into the mess hall doorway with flour to her elbows and her whole face coming apart in a smile, and I stopped being anybody’s multimorph and ran into my mom’s arms.
My mother caught me the way she’d caught me at seven, at seventeen, at twenty-seven. She threw her arms all the way around me and squeezed. She didn’t bow her head one single inch. She grabbed my face between her hands and studied me like she was checking me for fever.
“There’s my girl,” she said. “There you are. I don’t care what any of them out there think they’re looking at. I know my own kid, though. I’m never going to get used to all the nakedness.”
I laughed and scrunched my nose. “Modesty has no place among shifters. One of the most in-your-face differences between shifters and regular humans.”
“Never going to get used to it.” She thumbed a tear off my cheekbone. “You went somewhere terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you make it back in one piece?”
“Most of me.” My voice cracked. “Mom, most of me made it back.”
She pulled my forehead down to hers, the way Logan did. “It’s enough,” she said. “Now come inside where it’s warm because I have things to tell you. Some of them are going to knock you flat, and I’ll be damned if my daughter’s going to hear them standing out in the cold.”
I let her lead me into the toasty interior. She poured coffee for us both before she began. The camp had held on while I was gone, but Olivia had been torn open and carried home in Logan’s arms.
Mom leaned forward. “One more thing?”
“What’s that?” I took a sip of coffee.
“Not sure it’s the best for last, but it’s the most important bit.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “Well? Is it bad news?”
“Not sure yet.”
“You’re scaring me, Mom. Go on. Out with it.”
“Well, they brought a woman back from the raid,” she said.
“She’s in a makeshift infirmary in the relic trove, behind warding.
Torbin says he added a triple-warding. They say Acheron can’t get to her, and the mage can’t reach her.
She’s… not well, sweetheart. Half of her is somewhere awful still.
But when she surfaces, she talks.” She reached for my hand, and her thumb moved over my knuckles, steady.
“She talks about a boy named Eli, and…” My mother, who had raised me alone through my father’s long dying and never once flinched, looked frightened for the first time in her life.
“Emma, I think you should go see her. I think you’ll know why when you do.
And I want you to know, before you walk in there, that it doesn’t change one single thing about whose girl you are. You hear me? Not one thing.”
I took a shuddering breath, placed my coffee mug on the table, and went to meet my birth mother.
The new infirmary was in the relic trove room at the back of the gym, and the thick warding slid over my skin at the threshold.
Acheron’s reach died at the entrance, and I could feel that too, now, the way I felt everything: the hole where his weight should have pressed in but didn’t. I pressed my finger to the scanner.
She lay in a bed at the back of the room, the restraints on her wrists padded with velvety fabric, and I knew her before I reached her. Not by her face, though her face was a wrenched, exhausted version of one I’d seen in Marcus. No, I knew her by scent.
Family. That was the only word for it. Under the rot and the sour reek of a body that had been used hard, there was a scent I recognized instantly in my bones. Blood of my blood. Though Marcus had never smelled like family, she did.
I’d spent years as the adopted daughter of a man and woman who had loved me as their own, and I hadn’t missed her, but my chest still ached. She was the reason I was here.
I pulled an overstuffed chair to the bedside. Her eyes were closed, moving under the lids.
“Hey,” I said, useless, a vet talking to a creature too far gone to hear. “Hey. You’re safe. You’re behind the warding. He can’t reach you back here. Nobody’s going to reach you here without asking. Not him. Not me.”
Her eyes opened. They were green. Mossy, emerald, the exact green I’d spent my whole life seeing in the mirror and never once seen in another living face, because Sophia’s eyes are brown, and my father’s had been gray. Before he’d gone blind, Marcus had amber eyes.
She swallowed, and her gaze found me, landed on me, unfocused, then focusing, then… For one whole breath, they cleared. She looked at me the way a drowning soul catches sight of a coastline after ages at sea.
Her mouth worked.
I leaned in. Around us, the multilayered warding hummed, and Acheron’s weight stayed outside the trove where it belonged.
“My son,” she whispered. “Where is my son? Eli. Is he… Did you… my boy…”
“We’re going to find him… Eli.” I used his name because he had one now.
I took her restrained hand in both of mine.
I didn’t weep, because she didn’t have time for my crying and neither did I.
“I promise you. I’m the multimorph, and I don’t make promises I won’t spend everything to keep.
We’re going to get your son back. Do you understand me? We’re going to bring Eli home.”
Her expression changed with recognition, maybe, or perhaps just from the comfort of a vow. She sighed, and the other half dragged her back under before she could tell me her own name or ask mine.