32. Emma
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
emma
The Void Edge
The Eve before the Cold Moon
Two Weeks Later
As planned, I called a truce in all the packs and clans, and I’d forbidden any aggressive action toward Acheron. I wasn’t going to walk into a room to fight a man without first seeing where he stood.
After Logan read through the emails Olivia had been keeping from him, he was about to tear the local sheriff a new one.
Or Olivia. He hadn’t decided which. But I had extracted a promise of truce from him too.
He wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone else until after I got back from my confrontation with Acheron. Everything could go to shit later.
On the last evening before the rise of the Cold Moon, I had traveled to the edge of the Void under the protection of a white flag tied to a bo staff. I’d brought Jasper, Ahmie, Evie, Blaze, Izzie, John, Oliver, and a few others along.
Logan also waited at the center of the grouping, his jaw set. Torbin waited beside him, vast and grim. Marcus remained where Della had placed him, his blind face aimed south. She was next to him. The rest of the warriors flanked them on either side.
Now we stood at the murky edge of the Void. It had grown smaller, but it hadn’t disappeared, and darkness writhed inside it. A helicopter flew over, sending an airburst over me and the shifters who held the line of the living behind me, but the thick cloud blanketing the Void didn’t change at all.
I turned to my loyal fox. “It’s time, Jasper.”
“Aye, let’s give him your message.”
Are you sure about this, love? Logan sent.
No, I’m not, but we have to give him a chance.
We marched into the Void with our shoulders squared. Nobody stopped us or came running after us. When I summoned my magic, a cool breeze caressed my cheeks. Rainbow flames danced along my skin, and Jasper’s eyes glowed.
The gloom eased back from us as we moved through.
I’d seen the Void on Jace’s screens and smelled it on Fern’s dying fur, but standing inside it was another thing entirely.
It wasn’t fog, and it wasn’t smoke. It was the absence of life, and the wind that came off it carried the repugnant scent of decay.
Don’t. Don’t. I won’t be able to find you, Logan roared in my head.
I sent back the only thing that fit. I am the multimorph. Stay where I can find you, at least until it’s time for the dome.
Emma… He can’t be redeemed.
I must try.
Then take me with you.
This is the only way, Logan.
Without another word, I raised my flag, and we slipped deeper into the dead country to meet a dead man’s tenant.
Acheron sat in a clearing that had been a marshy cypress grove before he’d drunk it dry. His hollow court surrounded him. He had his hunched back toward me.
I’d expected robed mages, rows of them, their heads down, but that wasn’t what this court was.
These beings stood in loose ranks around Acheron, dozens of them formed a perimeter, shifters he’d kept and slowly hollowed out.
Men and women with black leaking through their eyes, standing too still, breathing when they remembered that they used to.
Some of them still wore their animal forms. A bear had a blackened muzzle, part of the flesh sloughed off.
Inky goo dripped on the ground in place of the slobber.
A fox had no cunning left in its face, no glimmer in its eye.
When I marched toward the clearing, they parted for me, smooth, silent, unbothered. The way a creature makes room for another of its own kind.
I shivered. That recognition was the part that got under my skin and threatened to stay.
Not the menace. His whole ruined household looked at the multimorph strolling into their master’s yard and didn’t tense or bristle.
None of them treated me as a threat because they probably believed I was coming home.
Logan had wanted to come with me, but I knew seeing my mate would disrupt any long-shot chance I had at reaching the man inside the evil. Dammit. What if destruction was the only way forward?
Steady. You’re the multimorph. Multimorph first. Terrified vet a distant second.
I stopped six feet from him and planted the end of my bo staff in the dead earth. “I’m here under a flag of truce.”
Jasper halted beside me and crossed his arms.
Acheron’s assembly of twisted souls closed ranks behind us.
Then the old wizard turned around. Up close, he was an evil hurricane in a tattered robe, the edges constantly shifting in the wind.
He was ancient corruption wearing what was left of a grieving man, but knowing it and being in its presence were two different continents.
He had a face, sort of, and the body of a tall man, but the depravity rolled off of him in waves, a low, sick change in air pressure that made me want to pop my ears. Behind his cloudy eyes, unmistakably, he was glad to see me.
“Multimorph,” he said. “You’ve come.” His gaze flicked to Jasper. “With an accompaniment.”
“Acheron.” I moved the flagpole with the sad strip of white at the end. “I came to set terms.”
“You came to look at me.” He sounded almost fond. “Good. Look. I have wanted, for a very long time, to be looked at by someone who could actually see.”
Jasper sniffed, but he said nothing.
Before I could get one word of my carefully rehearsed terms out, he lifted one gray hand, and he showed me the future he was fighting for.
A picture pushed straight into my head… except he didn’t show me my death this time.
Instead, he brought me to my hometown, Willow Creek, but after he won.
The Veil down, the two worlds bled into one, and shifters strolled the streets in daylight with their heads up and their teeth out, no more hiding, no more masquerade, a people finally free to be exactly what they were, the top of the food chain with him as the king of them all.
Humans were dying in the gutters, out in the fields, and on their knees. The clans had been enthroned over them, fed, and worshipped. They were safe forever, which was the word he kept repeating in my mind. Safe, safe, as though he’d found the thing I couldn’t argue with.
Then I glimpsed the cruelty. He’d saved his version of best for last.
Vixen’s was still standing, and Sheila was behind the bar… alive, the star tattoos still crinkling around her eyes, pouring drinks for shifter lords and smiling, smiling, smiling with nothing behind it.
Shannon sat in a fine house with her three kids quiet as mice, none of them laughing, because he’d taken the laughing away.
He showed me Riley, my Riley, bright, busy, and completely emptied of what made her Riley, matchmaking on command for masters who owned her. But there was nobody inside her to enjoy it.
He turned to ten-year-old Callie with Sully-Boy in her arms, kneeling in the road with her rainbow-less hair, beaming up at me on a throne with adoration and absolutely nothing else.
Alive. Every one of them was alive. That was the whole horror. He wasn’t threatening to kill the people I loved now. He was offering to keep them… preserved, obedient, adoring, and hollowed out from the inside like a gourd left out to dry.
Finally, beside my throne, in the picture, there was a second one. His.
“You feel it,” he pleaded. “The pull. The storm and the anchor who holds it. Mine was taken from me nearly two hundred years ago, and I have been half of a broken bond ever since, a magnet with no north, waiting for my other half to be born again.”
I bit back a rush of tears. He’d been brokenhearted for nearly two centuries, and that pain filtered through, but it had left him open to perversion by the undying creature the witches had made.
Logan hadn’t been anywhere in the vision Acheron had pressed into me, and I had to find a way out of this that didn’t turn Logan into next century’s Acheron.
Our enemy fixed his ruined gaze on me. “And here you are. The first true one since her. You could fill the hole she left. You are the only living person that could. Rule beside me, and I will keep every soul you love breathing and adoring until the stars go out. No more names to add to your list, Emma. No more list. Just an after that never ends.”
He knew about the list. He’d been in Logan’s head. Of course, he knew about our list.
He shared his vision of my whole warm, ordinary world kneeling, hollow-eyed, to an evil king and queen.
“You’re lonely,” I whispered. “It’s been hard for you.”
“I am alone. I’ve been alone for almost two centuries, but I live on.” He lifted his chin as though he was proud of his survival. “I’m building a new kingdom, and you can join me. We will never die, and we will never be alone again.”
“Or you can lay down your weapons, surrender fully, and we can adopt you. We’ll forgive you. You can live out your days in peace. Those are our terms.” My hand tightened on the bo staff.
He considered me. “Will you agree to be my mate? We will live forever. No dying and leaving one behind.”
For one second, for one moment, the tired voice almost reached me.
That loneliness would be how I felt without Logan, all the power and no one to share it with.
An ache spread through my chest. I had felt the hint of it at the root of the world, when a version of me had also offered a crown to end the fear.
Acheron had offered me a seat at his right hand, but he was trying to offer living on and never being alone ever again. I sighed.
Then I thought about Callie’s spark and the cost of putting it out. I was a vet, and I had spent my whole adult life learning the difference between a creature that was alive and a creature that had merely been kept living in pain.