32. Emma #2
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’ve been alone so long you’ve forgotten what people are.
You believe keeping them, using them is loving them.
A creature that kneels, smiles, and never leaves is not better than a mate who laughs with you, slams the door when they’re mad, and comes back on their own two feet because they chose you for love.
” I gestured at his hollow court, his rotting bear, his empty fox.
“That’s not a household that’s good enough, Acheron.
That’s a shelf. You’ve got a shelf of taxidermied creatures where your family used to be, and you’ve decided that’s love, and you want me to come dust the knickknacks with you forever. ”
The storm in him went very still, and his tattered robe drooped.
“I’ve saved a lot of lives,” I said. “I’ve also been gifted the responsibility of allowing lives to end, and here’s what years of that teaches you—barely breathing isn’t the finish line.
Alive with the light still on is the finish line.
You want to hand me a Willow Creek full of people I love with the lights switched off and call it a gift. ”
Acheron’s eyes flashed. “What if I told you, Multimorph,” he spat my title, “that I chose this? I sought the old wizard and begged to join with him.”
Jasper grunted and settled into a ready stance.
I blinked as Acheron’s words sank in. “What are you saying?”
“I wanted to live until I could consume your kind and your mate and you. This cycle must end. You must end. The multimorph will never be allowed to hurt anyone else, and joining with the wizard was the only way to become strong enough.” His tired, pleading voice went out like a snuffed wick, and the hurricane hit, full force, as the truce cracked.
He flicked his fingers, and a black tendril shot out of his palm.
It struck the bo staff and knocked it to the ground beside me.
The atmosphere changed, and the hollowed-out shifters took a step closer, shrinking the circle around us. Acheron’s robes fluttered in the rush of wind.
I took a deep breath. “Well, then, respectfully, and I do mean this from the absolute depths of my multimorph heart, go fuck yourself. Sideways. With a shelf. In the ass.”
Jasper guffawed. “Aye, lass, ye tell ’im.”
Somewhere, a hundred yards back, over brown winter grass, across a line he couldn’t cross, I felt Logan bark one shocked laugh into the bond, half horror and half helpless love, and it was the best sound I’d heard all day.
Acheron did not laugh.
Here we go. I sent the warning to Logan, hoping he could still sense me, despite the surrounding Void.
Sic him, love.
God, I love you. I drew a flood of energy into me.
A blackened gorge raced out from beneath Acheron’s feet, and the white flag on my flung staff withered to frost and ash, and every hollow thing in his court turned its wrong-colored eyes on me at once.
The gorge yawned wide. The pressure dropped so hard my nose started to bleed. My nose, blood. I was standing dozens of yards from my mate… God, I knew that image. I’d seen snippets of it in my own head, and the ghost of it in Logan’s eyes.
I crouched and did not step back. Standing my ground was the one thing I had left.
“I will take them all from you,” Acheron shrieked, and there was nothing tired left anywhere in him. “In the order you love them.”
“Do your worst, jerkface,” I snarled.
“Ye ready?” Jasper asked.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I muttered.
“I will start with the smallest and the brightest,” he said, his voice rising two octaves, “and I will make you watch the light go out of each one. The child and her cat. The red-haired girl. The mother of three. Your own mate’s dear cousin behind her bar.”
Feigning nonchalance, I shrugged. This was a part of the gambit. I had to keep my trembling to a minimum and piss him off royally. “Holy hell. Why do all bad guys have to monologue so hard?”
He leaned toward me, spittle flying. “You will build my dome under the Cold Moon, Multimorph, and you will lose. When you are unmade, I will still have all of them, and I will keep them, and there will be no one left who remembers they were ever anything else. I will live forever.”
“Tomorrow, then. Not before,” I said. “Under the fullest point of the Cold Moon. I’ll build the dome, and we’ll see who’s still standing when it comes down. You’ve foretold it, asshole.”
I turned my back on him, on the hurricane, on the shelf of dead animals, on the tired, evil creature that wanted me to fill the hole in its heart.
Then Jasper and I marched out of the Void the way we had walked in, one foot in front of the other with our spines straight.
Blood ran down my lip. I did not let him see my shaking until I’d crossed the line back into the living world.
Logan’s arms clamped closed around me, and he turned so the line of the living couldn’t see my face. Then I shook. Fucking hell. I convulsed.
Well, I’d done it scared… which Mom always said was the only kind of brave that counted.
That night, I couldn’t get warm.
Logan built a fire in every fireplace, including the one in our bedroom, and piled every quilt in Six-Mile on our bed.
Then he wrapped himself around me. Front to back, his heartbeat against my spine, he tucked his arm across my ribs.
Still, I couldn’t get the Void out of my bones.
He just held on and let me find the words in the dark.
“Why didn’t he attack me?” I whispered.
“Maybe the full moon is when his strength is strongest. He keeps eating shifters, and that’s true of our kind. Our magic is always strongest under a full moon,” Logan murmured. “His vision of winning happened under the full moon.”
“After he refused to give in, he should have attacked me.” My teeth chattered, but I forced the words out. “He chose to be what he is, Logan. He found the wizard, and he wants to end the multimorph cycle. He thinks he’s doing the right thing.”
Logan rubbed my back and pulled me more tightly against his chest. “Every villain is the hero of his own story.”
The silence stretched as I trembled in Logan’s arms.
“I keep waiting to be afraid of losing,” I finally whispered into the quiet.
“That’s the fear you’re supposed to have, right?
The night before. That he’s stronger, that I’m not ready, that I’ll make that dome and he’ll wrap his hands around my throat like he showed you a hundred times and that’ll be it.
” Scooting back into his warmth did nothing to ease the shivering.
“But that’s not the one that won’t let me sleep, Logan. ”
His arm tightened. “Tell me.”
“I’m afraid I’ll win.”
“Afraid you’ll win?”
“I’m terrified I’ll do exactly what I made the trip to the cave to learn how to do.
I’ll close the Veil, send him back to the dark, and save every human town he wants to hollow out…
” I paused long enough to try to swallow the boulder in my throat.
“But I’ll do it the only way the histories show, the way the last multimorph did.
I’ll pour myself into the gash in the Veil to hold two worlds apart forever.
” My chin quivered, and my teeth still chattered.
“I’ll win, and I won’t be here to know it. ”
“Oh, love,” he whispered, his breath feathering over the back of my ear. “I won’t lose you.”
A flood of hot tears came, soaking into the pillow. “That’s my biggest fear. Not that he takes everything I love. That I save everything I love by giving up myself. I walk in as Emma, and I win as a thread for a wound that needs stitches.”
For a long time, Logan didn’t say anything. He only held me while I sobbed. He pressed one hand over my heart. Then, low, against the back of my neck, he said, “No.”
“Logan—”
“No,” he repeated. “Dr. Wise said the price had been cut out of the histories because each multimorph chooses their own, so we choose a different outcome. It’s that simple.
You’re the multimorph, Emma.” His lips found the top of my spine.
“You are not walking in there to be mortar or stitching. You’re walking in there to win as Emma Carter, DVM, Rainbow Vet of Willow Creek, the most stubborn supernatural being in Louisiana.
I’m going to be on the other end of that bond the whole time. ”
“What if it’s not that simple, Logan?” I breathed, allowing hope to bloom in my chest beneath his palm.
“Both of us come home. I already told Dr. Wise to shut up about any other option.”
I laughed, half hysterical. “You told Dr. Wise to shut up.”
“I did. She listened, mostly. Then she scribbled furiously in her journal. Can’t let our histories be boring, can we?” He shoved his other arm beneath me and pulled me even closer. “Sleep, love.”
I shimmied my ass against him. “Nothing else?”
He sighed. “As much as I’d love to get lost in our bed for days, tomorrow you build that dome. Tonight, you’re just my mate, and my mate is going to get some damned rest because I’ll be damned if the multimorph faces down the end of the world tired.”
I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I slept.
During our last shared night, the two of us promised to build a world where everybody came home, even the heartbroken wizard in the Void. Especially, maybe, him.
Because I wouldn’t snuff life out while there were any other options available.
I was the vet who vowed to always try to heal first.
I am the multimorph.