22. Emma
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
emma
Red Tail
The Fallen Earth Dens
After Sunset
The homes of Red Tail had kept foxes safe for hundreds of years, and it had taken Acheron’s reaching hand to turn them into a grave. I hated Acheron. Fucking hated how he ripped apart every good thing. What had Red Tail ever done to him?
But even as I mentally railed against Acheron, I knew that Red Tail had always been in the crosshairs. The clan had always been a target. Jasper was one of my staunchest supporters, and his brother was too.
Shaped as a wolf, I loped across Flynn’s territory. Once through the final copse of trees, I shifted into my human self in a burst of color and wind and stopped short at the main complex. Destruction surrounded me. This was the result of aiding the multimorph, of supporting me.
Logan had been worried, so I’d stayed to take care of what I could back in Six-Mile. Maybe I was avoiding responsibility. A finger of the horde had reached deeper than any map said it could, punched into a place we’d sworn was safe, and pulled the roof down on the people I’d promised to save.
Logan and Flynn had been in charge of the rescue. Runners brought news as it happened, and the recovery had gone famously. Logan’s new skills as a magic flashlight wall kept the shadow mages at bay.
“Multimorph.” A dusty Flynn met me at the mouth of the deepest run.
Dirt clods clung to his regrowing beard.
Lately, grief over his still-lost fated mate had scoured everything easy out of his face.
Then this attack happened on his home ground.
These were his injured, his dead. Being an alpha wasn’t an easy path, despite Flynn’s nonchalance.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“I’m happy to do what I can, Flynn. I only wish I had known Acheron intended to stab us here, done more to prevent…” I gestured to the devastation. “This.”
“You can’t know everything, Emma.”
I pressed my lips into a tight line, unwilling to add arguing with the multimorph to Flynn’s to-do list, no matter how incorrect I believed he was.
“Glad you were safe in Six-Mile when this happened,” he continued.
“I should have been here.”
“The multimorph is worth every life in every clan.” When I opened my mouth to argue, he shook his head. “We have the ones we could carry moving north. Logan’s taking them to Six-Mile behind the warding there.” His throat worked. “The rest can’t be moved. Not yet. Maybe not ever, not without—”
“Show me,” I said.
He offered his arm, and I tucked my hand through his elbow.
Logan found me as I worked the wounded. He eyed Flynn’s proximity.
I bit back the flash of a grin. Once an alphahole, always an alphahole. Logan hated it when any shifter was closer to me than eighteen inches. “Flynn’s escorted me to the wounded.”
Logan scowled. “Is it wise to use your energy healing?”
I stopped short and glanced up from the shifter I’d been healing. “Why wouldn’t healing the wounded be wise?”
“Acheron is amassing troops, and you should be saving all your strength for the impending battle.” It might be the final one, my love.
“Not yet.”
He squatted next to me. “Come north with the convoy, you’ll be safer,” he murmured into my ear. “You’re already nearing empty, Emma. Today’s training took it out of you. I can feel it.”
Flynn loitered nearby and kept his gaze on the ground.
I pulled back far enough to place my palm flat on the scar in the center of Logan’s broad chest, appreciating the hardness of his muscles and the way his pecs flexed as he moved. “There are foxes in that tunnel who won’t see morning if I get in a truck,” I said. “You know I can’t.”
He wanted to disagree, to argue, and to put me on the truck anyway, but he knew he mustn’t. His knowing echoed in our link, and I loved him so much.
“Then I’ll escort the others and get them behind the old magic,” he said. “You stay and help the ones who’ll die without you.” His forehead came down to mine. “There will always be an after, Emma. That’s still the only promise I’m keeping until I die.”
“Race ya home,” I whispered.
His grin flickered, ghost-pale in the ruin, and I followed Flynn toward the makeshift triage.
In the connector, Giselda was already moving through the groaning wounded, more youthful than she had been when I mediated between her and an old loner cat.
The aged she-fox crouched over a male Ville Platte cat with her gnarled hands buried wrist-deep in a wound that should have already killed him.
Her long gray hair had been pinned back for once.
Her forgotten cane rested against the dirt wall.
She’d been a fixture of Red Tail long before I was born, and I was certain she’d be a lingering rumor long after we were all dust. The wily thing who’d once bargained for a burial plot and told me to my face she meant to die where her life had been happiest. The border den she’d won sat a half-mile south of these runs, close enough to count as home turf. This ground. These trees.
Now she was spending what was left of her very long life on a boy who wasn’t hers, and she didn’t so much as look up when I dropped down beside her.
“I thought you’d be dead by now,” I said.
She cackled at me. “Not yet, and you should be glad for it.”
“How many?”
“Nineteen and one vixen that needs primal. About time, Rainbow,” she crooned. “Put your hands here. I’ve stopped the bleeding. You do the shiny thing you do.”
I put my hands where she said, pressing my fingers in beside her gnarled, bony ones, and the wound glowed in multiple colors. The boundaries of the wound brightened, twisted, and moved together, linked by sutures of light.
With a gasp, the injured cat shuddered. “Oof,” he said. “That smarts, Gigi.”
I met Giselda’s gaze over the injured feline. “Gigi?”
“Easier on the dying than Giselda,” she muttered.
I’d been knitting creatures back together since I learned how to use sutures, first on Willow Creek’s fur babies and then on shifters, and I’d grown skilled in the art of magical healing.
But this big cat’s injuries resisted healing. Shadow-mage damage fought back. It rejected healing the way Marcus’s ruined eyes refused it, the foulness shoving back for every centimeter as it gave way. When we finished, I stood.
“Vixen?”
Giselda pointed to the far end of the prone bodies. “Over there. At the end. Hurry.”
When I knelt beside the dark-haired shifter, she beamed up at me as though any day she met the multimorph was a good day.
Her fast, shallow breaths made me regret not following the rules of triage and stopping here first. Only one side of her chest rose and fell with her breath. Death had almost claimed her.
Bloodied gashes covered her naked body, and her matted hair stuck to her.
I summoned my magic, reached through the shifting power and into the healing energies.
Then I shoved one of my hands into the earthen floor of the corridor and drew deeper, into the borrowed places. A rumble vibrated beneath us.
Multicolored magic rolled up out of the ground and slid over the trembling fox. Carefully, I worked through every inch of her, knitting her collapsed lung back together and drawing her wounds closed. Finally, I broke our link and sat back with a sigh.
“You’ll need to take it easy and rest,” I said, smoothing my hand over her hair. “Take care of your healing.”
I hoped it would be enough. If she was anything like the other shifters, the minute she could stand, she’d be one of the first back on the front lines.
“Yes, Multimorph,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Her eyes fluttered closed.
Not one part of me understood how the shifters didn’t blame me for everything. Their lives had been normal until I’d come along. Now the human world bore down on us all, and Acheron wasn’t far behind.
I moved to the next. There was an instinct in a mother wolf that understood how to close a wound with nothing but her tongue and her patience.
There was a power bears carried, a deep furnace calm, that could hold a broken body warm enough to keep its own soul from wandering off.
Foxes knew precision. Their little clever paws comprehended exactly where flesh had been torn.
Even the raccoon in me was good for something, all that maddening fussy dexterity turned to knots and sutures no needle could reach.
As I went, I held all parts of me at once, half a menagerie of healers braided into one, and I poured rainbow light down into flesh that drank it and gave nothing back.
Name by name. That was how I survived it, the only way I had found to survive any of it.
Every warrior, each name an instrument, the whole tunnel became a song I refused to let go quiet.
The Ville Platte cat with Della’s cheekbones.
A Red Tail kit too young to shift, whimpering for a mother who was already three names up my list.
Fern had gone gray at the lips and furious about the fuss. I knelt in the mud beside the quiet, brave fox and hummed her frequency back to her until her breathing found a rhythm it could keep.
“Told you,” Fern slurred. “Report first.”
“Shut up and heal, warrior,” I said.
Something that was almost her old grin slipped over her face before she slid down into real sleep, the kind that mends.
Giselda’s voice echoed in the dimly lit interior beside me in an old spellwork chant. Each time I’d run out of energy, she’d grasp my upper arm and rasp more light into me.
Then she’d say, “Put your hands here.”
And I’d find another handful of light. I lost track of the hour, and I lost track of my own knees.
We lost one, a young cat, too far gone before I reached him. The energy inside him went slack under my palms, and I couldn’t make it stay.
Giselda sighed. “Shame.”
I sat back on my heels and let two tears fall. No more… because the corridor was still full of the living, and grief is a tax you pay after.