24. Emma
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
emma
Six-Mile
Night of the Beaver Moon
The relics still shrieked when the tree line came apart, exposing the advancing horde and its flowing tide. Shadows poured out of the woods on every side of the south fence at once. Dark shapes came from under the earth and over it.
God. I shouldn’t have waited…
They flowed over the cool ground. More rose straight up out of the dirt. Above it, the sky itself had a seam in it now, a wound weeping that same sickness I’d sensed in Marcus’s ruined eyeball.
Every relic in Six-Mile screeched the same repeated word into my marrow. Now. Now. Now.
I’d promised these people a feast as one people.
Instead, I was going to hand them a war dancing across their set tables, and there wasn’t one more second to regret it.
I should never have fucking delayed my trip to Wolf Moon Cave for Logan’s sake.
My sentiment was going to get us all killed.
Worrying about breaking his heart shouldn’t have kept me there.
“Positions!” I bellowed and put the power of the multimorph into my roar. It carried over the clearing.
Hundreds of warriors came off the benches, leaving cold sweet potatoes behind, and they morphed into the well-trained army we’d been building for the last five weeks.
Dozens of squirrels shifted and darted away from the table, skittering out the windows and up the nearest tree trunks. Wind burst through the table decorations, sending the red and yellow leaves across the mashed potatoes.
According to plan, Levi streaked along the ridgeline of the mess hall roof, his small paws sending scratching noises across it. Then the sounds disappeared as he leaped into the canopy of the forest, drawing Acheron’s attention upward.
Behind the squirrelly chaos, the bears lumbered to their feet.
Torbin’s people, with Otis at the center of them, moved to the perimeter of the mess hall and pushed the breakaway walls outward.
The barriers crashed down, and the night air rushed in.
Each bear took up space in an opening, roaring and slinging spittle over the ground.
The cats flowed outward. Della led the Ville Platte warriors while blinded Marcus waited in his seat, and a hundred silken cats rolled out of the mess hall. As Acheron’s forces moved in, the cats screamed and snarled. Claws and teeth tore open the shadow-mages’ throats.
Myriad foxes darted out into the spaces between. Flynn’s Red Tails sliced the evil vanguard into pieces, felling at least twenty oily shapes in short order. If the mages made it past the cats, the foxes and bears took up the fight.
Squirrels distract. Bears hold. Cats finish, and foxes lie.
I’d made it a camp proverb, a chant to give frightened shifters a mantra to repeat as we faced Acheron. Now they proved it with their bodies, and it was working. If I hadn’t already been crying, I would’ve started.
We didn’t stop the tide. We only slowed it. The seam in the sky widened.
So, I did what I always saved as a last resort, the primal Dr. Wise had begged me not to do until she’d read the last of her missing pages. Reaching out, I gathered the strands of energy from each of the shifters, and…
I linked them. All of them.
Not with a relic stone that did the amplifying for me. No. Across the battlefield, with only my magic, I located every clan’s frequency at once. The threads of hundreds of fighting souls joined with my power, and I pulled.
Energy tsunamied up my spine like floodwater with a purpose.
I stopped being myself alone. My own forms careened through my head, though my body didn’t physically change.
Colors bled together, cheetah to she-bear to fox to raven to…
to… something I didn’t have a name for. Light formed around me.
Borrowing the warding instinct from every being that stood between the threat and our home, I reformed all of it into a living wall along the south fence.
Not magic laid over the warriors. The warriors themselves, their strength and mine braided into one form, an obstacle that held.
When a bear planted their feet, I felt it in my own.
When a fox faked a move, I flinched to the side.
We were, for one impossible stretch, exactly what I’d stood on a flatbed trailer and promised them we’d become.
One people. One army. One.
Still, it wasn’t enough. The Veil groaned, and the seam in the sky yawned wider. Acheron’s hands twisted on the magical net of the world, and every ward tied into that net, every relic stone, hollow, and earth-den in Louisiana, my own barrier included, shuffled toward coming undone all at once.
That was when the revelation hit me. If the Veil went, our wall went. If the wall went, we all died. Simple as a horrible, terrible diagnosis.
“Hold the line!” Logan roared, his body enveloped in bright silvery white. “Emma, do it now!” He fought three shadows, slicing through them with his light.
I dropped to my knees and pressed my palms flat against the thin floor of the mess hall. My hands heated, and colorful magic boiled between my fingers. More… There had to be more.
Deeper than the conclave stone that had nearly killed so many of us.
Deeper than any drill I’d run on the training floor.
Deeper, even, than the warehouse where I’d once put friends on the ground because I couldn’t hold what I’d called.
At the edge of my vision, Blaze screamed in an equine neigh, and Izzie the swamp rabbit crumpled. John and Oliver howled. Risking the quartet of younglings I had brought into Six-Mile for shifter training nearly forced me to release the power I held.
“Culmination,” the woman in my vision had called me.
“Every emergence, all the old blood and magic finding its way home.” Standing over the well of power in the earth below with the Veil coming apart above me, I finally understood what it had meant and comprehended the price mentioned in the warning.
I did not have one second to spare for fear. I reached into the well of power with both hands and forced the energy upward to the gash in the Veil. My skin burned as though I’d stepped into a fryer.
I gritted my teeth and bit back a scream. Fuck, it hurts.
Logan turned to face me, and his eyes widened, his battle forgotten. His expression twisted, and pain pulled at his face. Emma! No!
I grasped the edges of the wound in the world and refused to allow the injury Acheron craved. I would heal what had been broken, remake what had been unraveled.
Multicolored light came up out of the earth, out of me, and out of every linked soul on that fence line. The light exploded in Six-Mile, streamed into the atmosphere, and coalesced into a great sphere… a second, closer rainbow moon.
Then it slammed outward in a ring that lit the underside of the boiling clouds and zapped frosted grass to steam.
The detonation threw the entire horde back off our ground and into the forest beyond our boundaries.
Our magic circled the laceration, and I threaded strands at either end, stitching it as best I could.
Then I shoved it full of knots of magic, as though I were packing a wound.
Then I smiled. It was enough. For now.
The seam in the sky didn’t close, but it had stopped widening. It caught on my double stitch, and the edges held. I’d managed it. The patch, the stitch, and the magic it had taken to give us more time.
I released the flood and sagged.
Then the well collected its price, and the light went out, and so did I.
Oh. My heart stopped.
The drum in my chest halted. The sensation of a flurry of movement around me followed. Yelling. Screaming. Crying?
The camp roared.
Olivia muttered curses.
“Aye,” Jasper whispered.
Over it all, Logan’s voice pulsed in my head in time with the heartbeat that should have been. Emma, Emma, Emma. Hands moved over me, magic worked through me.
One lurching beat at a time, my chest moved, and my heart was forced back to beating.
“Emma. Emma. Come back. Come back to me. Come back. Don’t you dare…” Logan’s palms wrapped my face, and tears slid over my cheeks. His? Mine? I couldn’t tell.
But I opened my eyes to the Thanksgiving wreck. The long tables were kindling. Sweet potatoes, Phil’s banana pudding, drop cloths, decorations made of autumn leaves, all of it flung and trampled. Waiting had caused this… Avoidance had been my mistake.
Above me, blotting out the moon, was Logan. His face was ashen, and his hands had moved to my chest. “There she is,” he breathed, and his relief in it nearly finished what the well had started. “There she is.”
“Did it hold?” I rasped.
“You threw them out into the forest. They’re regrouping somewhere out there. Levi’s out locating them.” His thumb dragged gravy off my cheekbone. “You did it, love. You held the line.”
He helped me sit up, and I let him believe we’d succeeded. He’d earned three seconds of thinking we’d won. We all needed to believe we’d been triumphant.
“Take it easy, love,” he whispered close to my ear.
“Need to stand,” I managed. “Our people need to see me standing.”
“You sure about that?”
“I am the multimorph.” My wink seemed to settle Logan’s concern.
As I climbed to my feet, the truth filtered into me. The patch would not hold for long. My stubborn double stitch across the seam of the world bulged. It was a bandage over a wound that kept bleeding underneath. I’d triaged the sky and bought a night. Maybe two.
Acheron would test it until he broke it open again.
I could pour every soul in this camp into it a second time, a third time, and it would only ever buy nights, because I would be treating the symptom. The tear itself lived somewhere else, somewhere old and to the south, and it required surgery.
When I swayed, Logan tucked his arm around my waist. He raised his fist over his head. “The multimorph lives!”
All around us, shifters, warriors and civilians alike, cheered. The sound grew to a deafening rush. They believed we’d won, too.