23. Logan #3
I didn’t make her choose. Couldn’t. I was an alphahole, not a monster.
Instead, I crossed the room and put my arms around her, and she stepped into them, trembling. We stood in the aftermath of our own honesty and held on to the only thing left that Acheron hadn’t yet found a way to poison…
Our connection. Our fating. Our forever.
“There will always be an after,” I whispered into her rainbow hair. It was still true. It was the only true thing I had left to give her.
She didn’t answer, but it was enough, and I held her tighter, glad for the separation between us as more fear crept into the corners of my being.
Beneath the Rise of the Beaver Moon
The moon rose over the mess hall. Each decorated table had its own Thanksgiving theme, and each place setting had been constructed into a work of art. Red and yellow autumn leaves had been scattered between the plates.
That had been Sophia’s doing, and Phil’s, and more than a hundred frightened shifters who had needed something productive to do, anything that wasn’t waiting while the warriors prepped for war. They had obstinately prepared the only way they could.
If the horde was coming to crash our holiday, then, by God, we would have the holiday first. Trestle tables ran the length of the mess hall, end to end to end, dressed in makeshift tablecloths, foraged from a war camp…
drop cloths, mostly, from my own trucks.
Emma’s table was the only one with a white linen tablecloth.
Every seat had been filled. The raccoon alpha’s menu had been executed to the letter under protest, and nothing on it had been washed after cooking, which I counted as a personal victory.
Dinner rolls by the washtub, Phil’s shifter-famous banana pudding, and the controversial sweet potatoes with Sophia’s marshmallows browned on top.
The exact dish the shifters had bickered about a lifetime ago, back when the worst thing coming was a raccoon with opinions.
Nobody ate.
No one spoke.
That was what I’d remember. Hundreds of warriors and many of Louisiana’s frightened civilians sat at a Thanksgiving spread that stretched a football field long under a fat orange moon, and not one fork moved.
The camp held its breath so long the food went cold, and every soul in that clearing sat with their eyes turned south. We could all feel it now. The Void tide climbed through the last of the parishes toward a compound that smelled of woodsmoke, good food, and fear.
My mate sat beside me at the head of the longest table, close enough to touch but still behind the separation. Her mother sat on Emma’s other side and piled food on Emma’s plate.
Down the tables, I took in all of it. Torbin still as a mountain, Marcus with his blind face lifted toward a moon he couldn’t see, wearing the golden, ruby-eyed bat pendant that Emma had returned to him in honor of Thanksgiving.
Levi not saying a word, Fern pale and upright in a chair she should not have gotten out of her cot for.
Jasper found Olivia’s hand on the table.
Even Garrick’s northern wolves had gone silent.
One people.
Emma had promised them that from a flatbed trailer. Here it was. It had just taken the end of the world to build it, and it turned out one people looked like a whole lot of scared strangers refusing to touch their food. Together.
I found Emma’s hand on the bench between us. I grasped it and held on. She let me, small mercy.
The lower portion of the moon cleared the tree line. The warding vibrated its warning through all of us as our enemies arrived at our boundary, the deathly pressure cresting at the edge of our lives. We all shared a single indrawn breath running the length of the tables like wind through wheat.
Right on time. Exactly on the feast it had promised to eat.
And then every relic in Six-Mile screamed at once.
The trove behind the manor, in the back of the gym where we kept the old magic objects—the healing medallions, the linking stone, the katana that had taken a traitor’s head, every anchor and artifact the pack had gathered in hundreds of years.
They all cried out at once with a sound that struck above and below hearing and cut through bone and tooth.
The once-dead scar in the center of my chest caught fire.
Dr. Wise was on her feet before the echo died out, her spectacles flashing, her satchel clutched to her chest, and her face gone the color of the white linen tablecloth.
“That’s the Veil,” she called. “Every ward in Louisiana is a knot from the same net, and he’s just taken hold of the net.” Her eyes found Emma, then me, and then the moon. “It’s begun. He’s tearing it down.”
Beside me, my mate rose. The closed door in the bond blazed with something she wouldn’t let me see, and the rainbow tattoo on her hip lit up, and every relic in Six-Mile went on begging with the same word. Over and over.
Now. Now. Now.
The feast, untouched, glowed cold under the Beaver Moon.
And the war we’d prepared the table for came to dinner at last.