33. Logan #2
“May I escort you to the proceedings, m’lady?” I offered my elbow to Emma, trying to lighten the mood of the serious shit we had to do before we got to the even more serious shit.
On the manor porch, she turned and grinned at me. Her eyes flashed, and it reminded me of moonlight through prisms. “Maybe you can take me on a real date sometime.”
“We have a real date later.”
She side-eyed me as we moved down the steps. “Oh? Is that so?”
“I’m your date for the end of the world.” Only one allowed to touch you. Mine.
Her mouth turned down, and her shoulder dropped by an inch. “You’re the only one I’ll ever take to the end of the world, love. Maybe we can plan on catching a movie next week?”
“I swear, someday we’ll be free of the doom,” I whispered. Images of tearing Acheron limb from limb splattered through my head, but the imagined carnage did little to cheer my mate. Fuck. I’ll be glad to get rid of Acheron.
Me, too. ’Til death do us part, Logan Blackwood.
I didn’t miss the shiver that rolled through her, but pointing it out to her would have been worse. Instead, we strolled across the lawn without speaking.
We’d called Ville Platte and a mixture of other shifters into the training gym in the last few hours before moonrise. It was going to be a quick and dirty delve, just enough to appease the naysayers.
Della settled Marcus on his back on the mats. “Comfortable?” she asked.
“Thank you.” He pressed his palms to the ground.
I jogged to the relic trove and retrieved the linking stone. After I returned, I placed it near Marcus, and Emma took her seat.
At the edge of the training floor, Torbin steepled his fingers, inhaled, and exhaled. Then he took his place at Marcus’s head. Torbin leaned over the cat alpha and pressed his hands to Marcus’s temples.
Wordlessly, the selected jury of twelve shifters stepped forward. Della, three more of the Ville Platte cats who’d led the raid, Flynn for the foxes, Torbin as the delver, and six others.
“Everyone ready?” Emma asked.
“Yes, Multimorph,” they echoed.
“Here we go,” she said, reaching over and lacing her fingers through mine. My mate channeled her magic into the relic. Besides, there would have been no keeping her out of the proceedings even hours before she fought Acheron.
I grounded her the way we’d practiced, so the relic’s draw ran through me rather than using up the reserves she would need tonight.
She flared. I held.
Tendrils of magic flowed from her to the linking relic, into Torbin, into the jury, and back into her. Soon, we shared each other’s minds, and rainbow energy circled us all.
The relic connected the witnesses to Torbin’s mind.
A breeze blew through the gym as the linking relic changed from stone to crystal. All their eyes glowed in multicolor swirls. Mine did, too, if I had to guess. There were fifteen of us tied up in each other’s brains now.
“We’re linked, Torbin,” Emma announced. “Please begin.”
At that, the hulking bear located the bond Marcus’s sister had burned into the big cat’s brain. Torbin pulled her lucid self into the light of our minds, and she testified on her own behalf. As she did, Marcus lip-synced along with her words. Creepy as hell, maybe, but she showed us everything.
Not in words only. More in the way the skill of delving shows memory laid over memory.
We experienced the day Acheron realized she had birthed the multimorph, the day he took her, the day at the creek, the moment she reached into her own brother’s mind, not to hurt him but because it was the only connection she had left.
She clawed her way into his thoughts to leave something behind, anything, a gap she could whisper through later.
We understood the cost. The link had slowly burned Marcus’s sight away to nothing, and she had felt every second as it had happened to him. She would have carved out her own eyes twice over if the magic had let her trade places with him.
Their anguished screams mirrored one another, and I gritted my teeth against the agony.
Then came everything after—the mis-tied knots, the crossing stroke smudged a half inch out of true while a clearing filled with mages never looked up, the maps she slipped into Marcus’s head one careful piece at a time, the warding she loosened, the birthing-lines she guttered, the seam she whispered about over and over until her own brother’s skull rang with it.
And under all of it, the reason.
A boy.
Eli, her son, kept alive, still breathing because she complied, and every act of sabotage was a coin flipped against her own child’s life, paid out of her own splitting mind, with no one to tell and no way to prove she was anything but the monster’s compass.
Every betrayal in the war unspooled backward in our minds, and every single one of them was a shifter fighting the enemy from the inside.
And Marcus. Marcus, who’d caught his sister’s whisper, understood what it was and said nothing to anyone except Emma because a man with the enemy’s voice in his head was a threat.
If the shifters had bound and gagged Marcus the way they’d bound Salali, the chance at winning would have died, and Eli would have died.
So, he’d swallowed it. He’d carried the enemy’s voice, his sister’s grief, and his own blindness in silence, played the prickly, proud cat alpha, and let the whole alliance think the worst of him.
The worst they could believe about him was still safer than the truth, for a boy none of them knew was held in a darkness none of them had seen.
His concealment hadn’t been treachery. It was the longest, loneliest act of loyalty in the entire war, and he’d have carried it to his grave and let them depose him over it rather than risk losing the thread.
Emma took a shaky breath. “Have we seen enough?”
I moved closer to her.
“Yes, Multimorph,” Torbin rumbled.
“Yes, Multimorph,” Della agreed.
“For fuck’s sake, yes,” Flynn muttered.
The link broke gently.
Torbin straightened. Tears caught the gym lights and glistened in the old bear’s beard.
Emma sagged against me, and I held her up as the relic went dark, and for a long moment, nobody in that room could speak at all.
Della broke the silence. “I always knew,” she said. She crossed to Marcus and gripped his hand, pulling it through the crook of her arm. “Up we get, Alpha.”
“Thank you, Della,” he murmured, staring at the wall. “What’s the verdict?”
“You’re not a traitor,” Flynn said, “and there’s enough of us who know the truth now to beat the rest of them into line.”
“I don’t think they’ll be deposing you any time soon,” Della added.
“Good. Now let’s get on to the real work. Acheron’s at hand,” I growled. “No time to waste.”
Ville Platte sent word to their pride immediately, and the collected shifters moved out of the gym and onto the lawn between the manor and the gym. Emma waited nearby as we gathered for the final battle of the war we’d been waging for weeks.
The runner arrived, breathless and wide-eyed, as the first, upper edge of the Cold Moon cleared the trees. He delivered it to the whole camp. Some news won’t wait for privacy.
“The cats stand with the alliance, tomorrow and after,” he said, “and Ville Platte’s alpha remains Marcus Steele.”
Not despite the blindness. Not despite the sister. Because of both.
Marcus heard it standing in the middle of my compound beneath a moon he couldn’t see, and he put one hand out and let Della take it. I looked away then. Some things a man should get to feel without another alpha watching.
“You did that,” Emma said quietly, beside me, leaning into my side, spent and proud.
“No, you did that. You built a world where the truth could get a hearing.” I pulled her into my arms. “I only built the room.”
Around us, the camp settled into the strange quiet in the last hours before we confronted Acheron as one people. Wolves, cats, foxes, squirrels, ravens, bears, and a newbie horse and a youngling bunny…
We were one people at last, not because they’d stopped being different but because they’d finally all been given a reason to face the same direction. The ravens had their autonomy. The north had their honors. The raccoon had his menu. And Ville Platte had their alpha.
The alliance walked into the last night complete.
This was what I’d been all along, the one who pulled the field together long enough for the multimorph who mattered to do impossible shit in the middle of it.
The Cold Moon loomed, large and white.
Somewhere out in the Void, a tired dead wizard built his kingdom of nothing. My mate was going to build his ending for him, with her own two hands when the moon reached its zenith.
And I would be on the other end of that bond the whole time, the ground under the storm, prepared to sacrifice the most valuable thing I could.
Myself.
Me for her.
Cheap at the price, but I’d have paid it a thousand times.
Come on, Cold Moon. We’re ready. All of us.
Race ya, love.