22. Emma #2
“That’s not on you, girl,” Giselda said harshly. The woman didn’t have gentle in her. She had truth. “You don’t get to grieve like a woman and heal like a god in the same breath. Pick one. The dead will wait.”
“Reckonings rarely do,” I said. I didn’t realize I was quoting Marcus until it was out of my mouth.
She cackled softly, and it was the ugliest, most welcome sound I’d heard all night.
By dawn, there was nobody left in that tunnel who was going to die.
Twenty souls, and I’d bought nineteen of them another sunrise, and it had cost me everything I had and a good deal I didn’t.
I crawled away on my hands and knees, glad Logan had gone.
The air had turned thin and colorless with cold, and I made it as far as the roots of a half-fallen cypress before my body simply laid itself down without asking permission.
Not tired. Empty, the way a well ran dry, scraped clean, down into the part of me that had never been so parched, not since a mountain lion taught me what I was in a state park so long ago.
And a vision took me.
It didn’t come like a dream. Dreams I knew.
I’d been running from Acheron’s nightmares for weeks, always recoiling from Riley’s stolen scream. This was the opposite of running. This was reality yawning around me as though it had been waiting for this moment.
I stood in an ancient dark, the air older than the cypress, more archaic than the dens or the wards we’d built to fence the world. My bare feet rested in the hollow of stone worn smooth by water, in a light that had never once needed a sun.
The rocks matched the linking stone. It must have been where the linking relic had been born, fashioned in preparation, where the square stone that had turned to crystal beneath me had first been formed.
Below Wolf Moon Cave, the primal, instinctual part of me understood, though no one had ever spoken of the place to me. This was where the first shifters raised the Veil.
In the glow, a figure waited.
The shape was me in a mirror. Each form I’d ever held rested in her eyes, and every form I never would, rainbow, shadow, feather, and fur, folded down into the one who turned her face to me and spoke with a voice I felt in my own marrow before I heard her.
You are the culmination, she said. Every emergence since the first. The old power seeded down through all the blood, finding its long way home. You were born to save. You were born to end.
“I know what I’m for,” I answered. Multimorph first. Terrified woman second. “I’ve known since before the squirrel alpha lost her head under my watch. Tell me the part I don’t know.”
She gestured with an expression that might have been approval and might have been grief. With time, I was learning it was usually both.
What Acheron breaks can be mended, she said.
The Veil can be healed, the harvest unmade, the taken who were never truly consumed set free, but mending is not unmaking, child.
To close what he has torn, the one who mends it must give a thing she cannot get back.
The old ground took its price from us once.
It will take one from you. This is not a threat.
A shiver went through me that had nothing to do with cold. I’d stood in enough exam rooms and delivered enough impossible news to enough trusting faces to know the sound of a diagnosis that didn’t have a good ending. I’d just never been the one on the table.
“What price?” I asked.
That is yours to meet, not mine to name, but the road, at least, I can lay plain. The road has rules, and the rules will keep you alive long enough to reach the Choosing.
She stepped closer, and her light came with her.
The way opens only to you. Blood of the culmination, and no other blood at all. Hear this and carry it whole. You may take no one his hand has ever touched. Not the mate whose mind he burned a version of the future into, she said.
Logan’s face moved through my mind… Logan on his knees in No Man’s Land with a premonition seared into his mind, me dead in a dome of my own making, him unable to reach me. He watched as I died.
Oh, fucking hell. My heart twisted, and my knees threatened to buckle. How had he been carrying the weight of this nightmarish future alone? He knew about my nightmares. How had I not learned about his?
But I didn’t have time to work through it as the figure went on. Not the uncle who carries his sister’s link in his skull.
There was Marcus, blind and proud, his fractured mind entwined with someone else.
Every soul he has marked is a thread he can pull. Bring one, and you carry his eyes into the one place he must not see, his hand into the one lock he must not reach. The road that saves becomes the road that ends. Do you understand?
“I understand,” I said, and I despised how well. “This is mine and mine alone. Heard.”
Then go and find your Choosing, Multimorph, she said, already disappearing. And whatever you decide, choose it as you have spent this night. Freely. This is the only way that has ever been power.
I came out of it with frosty tears in my eyelashes and Giselda’s cane prodding my shoulder.
“You were somewhere, somewhere other, girl,” she said, peering down at me with knowing eyes. “Was it a true one?”
“True one?” I echoed, my voice weak to my own ears.
“Vision.”
“Yeah, sure.” The sun rose gray and broke through the shattered trees. Nineteen shifters were breathing behind me. Somewhere north of there, my mate was tucking rescued children behind wardings and reaching through our bond for my warmth. “It was true.”
“Then you’ll do what it wants, and you’ll do it your own wrong way, same as always.” Giselda thrust a piece of dried meat and a heel of bread into my hands. “Eat. Whatever it asked of you, you can’t pay it fainting in the mud.”
I ate. The way opens only to me.
Fine. I’d marched into worse alone.
But I couldn’t walk it by myself. I would need someone who could watch my back, who could see, fight, and leave the enemy blind. I’d need someone who could read the old pages and tell me which trap was which, and I couldn’t take anyone Acheron had ever laid a hand on.
I ran the roster the way I ran the wounded, name by name, and watched the list burn down to nothing in my hands.
Not Logan. God, not Logan. The man who’d cross a collapsed grave to reach me was the wrong shifter to carry into the dark. Acheron lived in Logan’s head now in a burned-in little theater that played my promised death on a loop, masquerading as a foretelling.
Not Marcus, whose skull his own sister whispered through.
Not Fern, not any of the wounded I’d just knitted shut. Every one of them had been raked by shadow work that left fingerprints.
Not Riley, tortured, mended, and marked whether she remembered it or not.
Not Olivia, the beta Acheron had once held in his grip back at Site 52. Half the warriors I loved were threaded through with his touch, and the vision had just told me every thread was a leash.
What was left was almost nobody.
Giselda, a wily old vixen too near her own ending to spend her energies on a death march. I wouldn’t let her do it, even if she volunteered.
So, that left Jasper, who’d handed my mate a bell and lost no part of himself to the dark, and Dr. Wise, a bespectacled human historian who braked for archives and had never once been close enough to Acheron for him to notice she existed.
That was the shortlist. That was the whole of it. Two untouched souls in a war, and the horror of it sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.
I was going to have to leave. Quietly. Soon. Before the Beaver Moon, before anyone could talk me out of it or, worse, insist on coming. Insisting on coming was exactly what everyone I loved would do, and every one of them would be a knife I handed to our enemy myself.
Fuck. I was going to have to leave without telling my mate why. It would rip his heart out, but I had to find a perfect moment where I could escape.
Logan would demand. Logan would feel me pull away, and he would reach for me through the bond the way he reached for everything, his hand out, his whole self offered.
If I answered him honestly, if I told him where the road went and why he couldn’t walk it, I’d pour the map straight into the one mind Acheron might already own a window into.
The rule wasn’t just about who I brought. It was about who I told.
Since we’d cleared the air between us, we’d promised each other honesty. The connection between us had been the one place in the whole screaming world where I never had to perform as the multimorph. Now I had to lie my face off.
I found the warm, furnace-bright line of Logan, reaching for me the second he sensed me stir. Trust me, love, I sent. Then I built a wall in front of it. Gentle. Deliberate.
On the far side of our link, I felt him startle. His question rose, instant and afraid. Emma?
I didn’t answer. Instead, I mentally closed the door on the bond, a door pulled quietly shut in a house where we’d promised never to lock a room again.
“There will always be an after,” I whispered to the man on the other side. “This is the only way to get our after.”
Then I buried the ache down where it couldn’t slow my hands, and I went to find Jasper, but the war found me first.