29. Logan
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
logan
Six-Mile
She was going to accept Acheron’s challenge, and I had weeks to make something of the hate building inside me.
So I did the only thing I could come up with when the feelings were nearly too big to carry. I turned it into a job site with one purpose—frame it, brace it, and fashion it into something that would still be standing when we weren’t.
“Time to train,” I told her, staring at the wreckage from three ravens that hadn’t been birds at all.
“Train?”
“You have a few weeks before you face him. He’s hundreds-fucking-years-old… Hated me, my family, forever, but he doesn’t want to take you to hurt me. Maybe that’s what it was before, but he’s gone beyond that. He’s evil now, but I won’t let him have you.”
“Logan, we can’t pretend we didn’t know this was coming. This was always the end of my story.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re the…” I paused. “No, we are the multimorph, two parts of the same whole, and we’ll decide how this ends.”
She crossed her arms and studied me with a wan smile. “How do we do that?”
“We have to make you harder to kill.”
She dropped her arms. “Lead the way.”
We headed to the training gym. Once inside, I marched to the center of the shifter-filled gym, the sparring mats squeaking under my bare feet. Midmorning was the busiest training time in Six-Mile, but none were as important as keeping Emma alive.
“Everybody, out!” I bellowed. “Private multimorph training for the next two days. The entrance will be locked, and you will continue your drills outside. Be thankful it’s not July.”
Code for no bitching.
Shifters lowered their practice weapons in confusion, murmuring and sharing glances. Nobody moved.
“Logan, let them finish,” Emma began.
“Out!” I roared. “Anybody in here in sixty seconds will have to answer to me!”
That set a fire under their feet. A brave few returned their weapons to their spots on the walls, but most placed them on the mats and fled. The door opened and closed a hundred times before they’d all gone.
With the building emptied, I locked the door. Then we took the training gym, just the two of us on the mats where, a lifetime ago, she’d sparred with Olivia and learned to fight with a bo staff.
“Choose your weapon, love.”
She grimaced at me, picked up an abandoned bo staff as though she’d been thinking of her first training, too, and twirled it. “Not sure I want to fight with this panicked version of you.”
“Can’t be panicked if we’re training.”
She raised her stick in a defensive position. “Not sure that’s true.”
I trained her how I had schooled raw recruits for decades, except she wasn’t raw, and she wasn’t a recruit.
She was the culmination of every shifter who’d ever lived.
However, I still made her drill the boring maneuvers to prove her feet knew how to move without asking her brain. Sweat dripped down her.
“Again,” I demanded after she dropped her weight incorrectly coming out of a shift.
“The dome’s going to be small. He wants it small.
No room to run, no clan to tag out to, no me.
Just you and him. It’ll come down to however fast you can change your mind about what shape you are.
” I circled her, correcting the drop of a shoulder and the angle of a heel.
“You’ve been fighting like you’ve got warriors at your back.
In there, you won’t. In there, you’re the army. So you move like one.”
“Fucking bossy,” she said, breathing hard, resetting.
“Alpha,” I corrected, earning the ghost of her grin for it before I made her do it again.
She was extraordinary. I’d always known it, but watching her up close with no war to distract me…
She shifted from cheetah to bear to fox and back before my eyes could catch up, the colors running together, faster and cleaner than I’d ever seen her.
I understood I was training the most dangerous living creature in Louisiana, but it did not make me feel one degree better.
Acheron was not a living thing, and the rules were different for the dead.
We went over the ugly stuff too. We reviewed how to take a hit and keep a shape; how to fight hurt, fight tired, fight scared, because she was going to be all three; how to make the small space work for her instead of him.
A dome was a room, and I’d built a lot of rooms. I knew where the load-bearing corners were.
By the next dawn, she could put me on the mat four falls out of five, and the fifth I only took because I cheated like Acheron probably would, and she laughed, real and bright. For several seconds, the Cold Moon wasn’t coming. Then we switched to swords, reset, and went again.
At midnight, we turned to other work. I had Cora moved to the infirmary in the manor and asked Torbin to have each of the clans multi-ward her there.
“That’s a helluva risk,” she said, watching as they moved the thrashing, whimpering woman out of the gym.
“You’re worth the risk, Emma. If you don’t survive, none of us do.” I’d risk anything for Emma whether she liked the idea or not.
She didn’t answer.
“Time to practice the link,” I said, returning both of our swords to their spots.
She frowned and wiped sweat from her forehead. “The link? With the wall between us?”
“Won’t matter. You can link with other shifters, and you’ll link with me the same way you’d link with them. No heart-stopping stuff for you this time.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Are you?” I countered.
“Yes. Does it matter?”
“What do you think?”
She shrugged and covered a yawn.
I pressed my finger to the scanner, and the door popped open. We moved through the extra warding into the relic room.
The trove didn’t have windows. My father had built it that way on purpose, a stone box sunk into the back of the gym where the tobacco used to cure, cool and dark as the inside of a fist. The light came up slow when I crossed the threshold, and it never got brighter than a low amber dim.
The objects in there didn’t like the sun, and I’d stopped asking why a long time ago.
Shelves ran floor to ceiling down both walls, cypress gone black with age.
Two hundred years of everything the Blackwood pack had ever thought worth locking away sat on those shelves.
Healing medallions rested in a row like dinner plates, each one older than the last. A rack of blades nobody living had drawn in anger but one.
The ceremonial katana, sheathed and silent, that had taken a traitor’s head.
Along the north wall, cradled in a trough worn smooth by centuries of hands, the Death Rite cylinder waited.
The pale stone created the death shroud we wrapped shifters in.
It gave up a little of itself every time we returned one of our own to the earth and replaced the loss back by morning, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, as though the old rock could feel a death coming before the rest of us did.
Bundles I couldn’t name and boxes I’d never opened rested on the rest of the shelves.
At the center of the back wall, alone on its own plinth because it did not tolerate company, was the linking stone, a plain cube of hewn rock that had turned to a prism of clear light when my mate sat on it and pushed her magic through it.
I settled on the floor, eyeing the stains from Olivia’s blood with a few more newer drops probably from her birth mother.
Emma took a seat on the cube.
I braced for the rush of energy, hoping I wasn’t too tired to be her anchor. “Go ahead.”
She drew on her magic and sent tendrils of it into me.
Instead of letting it tear through her, I reached through my side of the bond and took it.
Sink the rod, take the current, give it somewhere to go that wasn’t her own nerves.
The lightning and the rod. Even with the wall she had built between us, power filled me, seeping through cracks in the partition between us.
Holy hell. She was glorious. Her abilities had increased since she had gone on her adventure with Dr. Wise and Jasper.
Emma flared bright enough to light the room through her skin. The rainbow tattoo blazed on her hip, and I held the line. She had to remain unbroken. She had to stay herself.
I wasn’t a second sun for her to burn beside. I was the grounding anchor.
Slowly, her glow dimmed.
“That’s it,” she whispered. The tears on her face had nothing to do with sadness. “Logan, that’s… I could hold twice that. Three times. With you, I can hold anything.”
“That’s the idea.” I shook from the effort but grinned like an idiot. “You’re the storm. I’m what lets the world survive you… I’m what lets you survive you.”
“Again,” she said.
We repeated the linking a dozen times, but there was still the wall in it.
There was still, after everything, a closed door in the middle of the bond, and every time we linked, I felt her power flow around it like water around a stone, careful.
She was keeping something on the far side where I couldn’t reach.
Yet it was enough.
I scooted toward her, and she leaned down toward me and climbed into my lap, both of us too spent to do anything other than rest. Later, we set up two cots, and she took one while I took the other. We’d be training hard again tomorrow.
Healing the rift between us happened the way it always had. Not with a conversation but with contact, honesty, and the stubbornness of two people who refused to let our relationship stay broken. Hands. Foreheads pressed together.
With each link, the wall between us weakened. Spiderweb cracks spread through it, but neither of us mentioned it.
Several nights later, in the quiet after another successful link, with me drained and wrapped around her on the relic room floor, she finally let me in.
Abruptly, she sat up. She took my face in both hands, and she studied me with those big green eyes, the ones I had nearly drowned in back in Vixen’s.