24. Emma #2
I realized, standing in the ruins of a holiday with my mate’s shaking hands still on me, the journey had to be made. Tonight. While the horde still licked its wounds, the patch still held, and there was opportunity to slip away.
The way opens only to you. You may take no one his hand has ever touched.
Every night I delayed was a night the patch thinned, and Acheron’s army grew, and Louisiana filled up with more names for the casualty list. Nothing like a near death experience to solidify what had to happen next… like right now.
There was no version where I could stay and hold Logan or be gently talked into a better plan. There was only the hard path ahead and the fact that I had to be on it before the man beside me realized what was happening and stopped me.
“Emma?” As the cheer diminished, Logan turned to me, and his eyes narrowed. He’d felt my decision, maybe, or the sense of one. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I lied, forcing a jubilant smile onto my face.
It was the most hated lie I’d ever told in my life.
Thunderclouds built in his bright blue eyes. Somehow, he knew.
It took me until the wee hours before dawn to get free.
Logan wouldn’t leave my side while the camp needed rallying, and the camp needed a morale boost badly. We helped reinforce a fence, convinced the warriors that tossing the enemy back into the forest counted as a victory, and triaged and healed the wounded.
I let him alpha while I stood at his shoulder in the moonlight.
We made rounds through Six-Mile, making promises I’d never forgive myself for making, saying ordinary things to people who were about to feel abandoned.
Their trust in my decision-making had to carry them through to the end.
Whether that was when I returned or when Acheron won, I didn’t know.
We ended up in the study.
Logan sank into the chair at his desk and leaned back, studying the map on the wall. “Need to update the pins.”
“Want me to get Olivia?”
“Sure.” The adrenaline in Logan had finally dwindled, and he covered a wide yawn. “I’ll wait here.”
I dragged my fingernails along his forearm. “I’ll be right back.”
“Mmmm,” he answered. “I’ll… be… here.” Emma.
A sputtery snore followed. When I glanced over my shoulder, Logan was already slumped in his desk chair, his chin to his chest, guarding a war he thought I was still standing in the middle of. He was fricking exhausted, and I should have made him spend an hour or two in our bed, getting real sleep.
Logan still slept in his chair, his dark hair fallen over his forehead, the scar in the center of his muscular, hairy chest rising and falling under his shirt. I stood over him and let myself look for as long as I dared.
My mate. My home, for as little or as much time as we were granted. “Mine,” I whispered, hoping he’d hear a hint of it in the air when he woke.
Logan’s slack hands twitched beside Torbin’s snowflake doily.
I was running out of time to get out of here without interference from the alpha of Six-Mile.
If I woke him, he’d suss out the truth, and Acheron couldn’t be allowed to see even the smallest glimpse of our plan.
I refused to be the crack that let the monster in.
I found a pen, and on the back of one of Logan’s site-plan sheets, I wrote him the only true thing I allowed myself to leave behind.
There will always be an after. Trust me, love.
I placed it against Torbin’s doily where Logan would see it as soon as his eyes opened, and mentally, I pressed my hand to the partition in the bond one last time. Goodbye.
This was my only chance, so I blew my mate a kiss and left to find my two clean souls. I trudged out of the manor house and into the last of the dark, hoping desperately that I would make it back. However, my escape had to happen now, or it wasn’t going to happen before another day rolled by.
Jasper was awake in his home away from home, Olivia’s cabin. Thankfully, Logan’s beta was nowhere in sight. After I knocked, he threw open the door. “Why, ’ello, lass. How…” His words died away as he read my expression. “It’s like that, then?”
I offered one decided nod. “It is.”
Jasper didn’t answer with a single joke.
“Let me see your arms,” I commanded.
He stuck his arms straight out and pushed them toward me without asking why. When he’d shadowed Logan across the boundary, the Void had torn him open there, and they’d both barely gotten clear. His torn forearm had been half-healed at the Red Tail dens.
Now I laid my fingers over the slices and reached into him the way I’d reached into nineteen wounded on a bad night, hunting for the soured flavor I’d found in each one of them, the cold gray-black fingerprint, the shadowy rot, the mark that meant Acheron had touched a soul and might be able to tug it open… like the end of a feed bag.
Miraculously, there was still nothing marring Jasper’s mind or his inner self. A shift or two of ordinary healing over ordinary hurt. Whatever had grabbed him in the dark had only ever grabbed his body, and his body had shrugged it off the way shifters do. His inner self was his own and unmarked.
“Well?” he asked quietly. “Did ye find the droids ye’re looking fer?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not his,” I said. “You never were, never have been.” Then I dropped my hands. “How do you feel about a very long walk you can’t tell anyone about? I need every ounce of loyalty you’ve ever had toward me, Jasp.”
“Aye.” A smirk worked its way onto his freckled face. “I wondered when ye’d get around to askin’. Flynn’ll skin me. Olivia’ll skin me twice more before she ever lets me back in her bed.” He studied me. “Where to, lass?”
“South. To Wolf Moon Cave, if Dr. Wise’s pages are right about how far south south goes.” I made myself say the rest. “And we go alone, the three of us—”
He quirked a shaggy red eyebrow. “Three of us?”
“Dr. Wise is going along, but I can’t tell you why until we’re out of the camp, and even then not all of it. It’s faith time, Jasper, the way you trusted your bell with Logan or the way you trust Olivia.”
“I’ve bled for that bell… and for Olivia,” he said simply.
“I’ll bleed for this.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“That historian’s already packed. Did ye know that?
Green Subaru’s been pointed south in the driveway fer hours, and she’s been loiterin’ beside it.
She’s just been waitin’ on ye to catch up to her way t’ thinkin’. ”
I chuckled and shook my head. “And they say history doesn’t repeat itself.”
“What’s that, lass?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Dr. Wise had known what we needed to do because of what had already happened with every multimorph before me. Life is twisty like that. Without knowing what had happened before, we couldn’t tell what would happen next.
We quick-stepped to the Subaru in the drive where Dr. Wise was, in fact, packed with her Subaru pointed south. She met me at the hood of her car with her leather satchel, her thermos, and her spectacles pushed up her nose. She took one look at me and said, “You’ve finally decided.”
“I have.”
“Why did you wait?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to do that to Logan.”
She said nothing. She’d had a mate once.
“But I’ve hardened my heart and come to my senses,” I bit out.
“Good. The pages don’t say what this little mission costs. I want that on the record before we go. I’ve read every fragment twice, and the multimorph who paid the price last time erased whatever it cost her.” She adjusted her glasses. “I intend to go with you and help as much as I can.”
My chest swelled with affection for my mom’s new bestie. I couldn’t speak, so I just nodded. There was one thing left to do, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done, harder than my own heart stopping.
“It’s a long go of it, Doc,” Jasper whispered. “Ye’ll make it when we have to walk?”
Dr. Wise reached into her pocket and pulled out a rounded stone, shaped and polished. “It’s a relic for energy and speed. It won’t function the same as a shifter using it, but it will work if the multimorph heals me while she holds it in her hand.”
“Guess it’s like a power-up in video games,” I said.
“Nice,” he said, taking a handful of steps toward the gate. “Subaru first?”
“Yep, until we run out of roads. Then we’re on foot.”
“Off we go.”
I climbed into the passenger seat of the car and slammed the door behind me, an exclamation point on our whole crazy mission. Then we drove south toward whatever had been razored out of history.
Behind us, the patch held the gash in the Veil together.
Ahead of us, it wouldn’t, so we had no choice but to go.
Race ya home, love. I pressed the thought toward the man who’d wake up alone, furious and afraid.
One backward glance at the beautiful historic manor I’d adopted as my home was all I allowed myself. Then I didn’t look back again because I wasn’t sure I could do it twice.