34. Emma #2
Then it was just us, forehead to forehead, in the frost, while an army formed around us.
You’re my anchor, I sent him.
You’re my storm, he sent back. You reach for whatever you have to reach for. I’ll be there. I won’t let you lose. Not ever. Not you.
Then he lifted his head, and he moved to the front of the army.
And I joined him as the multimorph.
We marched south under the Cold Moon into the Void under the wound in the Veil, and I carried the stone Dr. Wise had given me.
A thick cloud hung over the depression in the earth exactly the way it had been in Logan’s premonition. The seam had been pried open, and it wept a sickening light. My own stubborn stitch strained across the worst of it.
Beneath it, the clans of Louisiana assembled as one people.
Torbin. Flynn. Marcus with Della at his shoulder.
Garrick’s northern wolves closest to the front, first honors, the point of the spear.
Jasper. Hundreds of other shifter warriors collected to stand against this threat.
All gathered in one place to hold the perimeter around the dome while I marched in to confront Acheron alone. Gratitude rushed through me.
Acheron was already there, waiting, the evil, undead wizard wearing a grieving man’s skin. His hollow court stood behind him, and the shadow mages waited in the ground.
I didn’t give a speech. Bad guys monologued, not multimorphs. I strolled out into the space between the two armies, and I raised my hands.
“So,” Acheron wheedled. He moved closer to me. “You came. Good. I do so hate to be kept waiting.”
“Let’s get you back to bed, old man,” I said. “You look tired.”
Acheron’s upper lip curled, exposing blackened teeth. “The dome, if you will, according to the rules of a duel.”
Carefully, I drew on a rush of shifter energy.
A burst of wind exploded through the opposing armies, and colors danced across my vision.
I built the dome myself. Those were the terms for a death duel.
I drew a boundary out of the earth, constructed of rainbow light that hardened as it rose from the ground.
Finally, the dome clicked closed, locking everyone I loved outside and me inside with Acheron.
Now I didn’t have access to any of the others.
No shifters. No packs.
The first part of the premonition had been made real, exactly the way Acheron had shown it to my mate in No Man’s Land.
Me, in a dome of my own making, alone with Acheron, the monster…
while a hundred yards away, Logan stood beyond a boundary he couldn’t cross, where he couldn’t do a single thing but watch.
Except he wasn’t only watching.
I felt him at the far end of the bond, the anchor for my storm, and I covered a smile. He was the one thing the dome couldn’t wall out because our connection didn’t run through the air. It ran through us.
Then the battle opened like a struck match.
Acheron came at me from the center of a hurricane. “You are mine!”
I met him in the midst of a storm of my own.
Balefire. His left hand came up half a beat before his right.
Olivia, you beautiful genius, you were right.
The dome lit up as though it had been struck by lightning.
Cheetah. Raven. She-bear.
“Die, you bastard!” I slammed down where he’d been a moment before. Form to form to form, faster than I’d ever shifted before, the colors ran together into one long smear.
He threw death at me, and I threw life magic and living forms back at him. He was old, vast, and certain, while I was fast, furious, and brand-new. For a while, for a glorious, terrible while, we were even.
A fireball left my hands and exploded against him, singeing the corners of his robe.
His face peeled back in a grimace, and he shot a blackened fireball at me.
I formed a shield and deflected it. It exploded against the curve of the dome.
Balefire shot from my palms.
He threw his head back and absorbed the onslaught.
Shoving my hands into the dirt, I drew magic through the tainted earth, and multicolored flames exploded over my skin. Wind rushed through the dome, swirling faster and faster.
Acheron leaned into the gale and sent his own. Rainbow life magic mixed with blackened death and swirled in a whirlwind that lifted us both into the air.
Then I pulled the spell taut, and it detonated. The blast slammed us both against opposite sides of the container. I slid to the ground, the breath knocked from my lungs.
He dropped and groaned before jumping back to his feet, cackling. Another blast of balefire left my hands. It slammed into him, and he crumpled. Blood dripped down my nose.
Each attack I spent, he simply weathered.
The ancient corruption under the tired man, patient as geology, waiting for the storm to spend itself the way it had spent every storm before mine.
He didn’t have to beat me. He’d learned that a long time before I was born.
He only had to outlast me until I reached for the thing I’d have to reach for, the only thing big enough to end him, and paid the price the histories flinched from writing down.
Balefire caught my side. It burned through me, and I faltered but didn’t fall.
“The victory is mine,” he crowed.
“Don’t count your chickens, asshole,” I yelled.
But I felt the premonition closing its hand around the moment, felt the future Acheron had rehearsed a hundred times sliding into place around me like the dome had. Inevitable. Sealed.
We were almost to the part where I exploded the ground beneath him and achieved nothing. This was the sequence where he wrapped his hands around my throat and the bond shrank to emptiness, making Logan wish for death.
I knew the script, so I knew exactly how this was foretold to go.
So I did the one thing Acheron didn’t expect.
I stopped fighting his way.
I refused to use animal forms against him.
I planted my feet in the earth with a balefire wound in my side.
Then I shoved my hands into the earth and drew on the primal energy.
I reached down to the bottomless well I’d found in Wolf Moon Cave, to the whole gathered heritage of every emergence since the first shift.
All of it, all of them, thousands of years of old power finding its way home.
I knew exactly what the first shifters said it would cost.
With my mate’s steady hand at the far end of our bond and a whole ordinary world worth keeping folded into my chest like armor, I reached for all the energy I could, choosing it freely.
I dragged every drop into my body, and I clenched my teeth against the rush of power I nearly couldn’t control. Rainbow light filled the dome, and Acheron’s form disappeared in the brightness.
I sent magic into the rounded stone Dr. Wise had given me. Then I sent a stream straight for him.
I am the multimorph.