36. Emma
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
emma
The Wound in the Veil
Beneath the Cold Moon
Ihad locked magicks with Acheron, and I couldn’t break away. He held me in place, and my exhaustion threatened to give the wizard the edge he needed. I had one chance left.
My knees buckled, and I sent another thread of energy into the relic in my palm. Energy surged through me like a shot of adrenaline.
You’re here, but I am, too, love.
My mate’s voice filtered through the bond. Fresh-cut pine, smoked whiskey, and cigars stirred my mind. The option I’d had my hand on, the last choice, the one that would cost Logan everything, suddenly stopped being the only option in the world.
We’re here, I sent back, and the light in me hesitated.
For a breath, the whole burning future paused.
My alpha, my stubborn, ridiculous alpha, had made a break in the warding and pushed through the barrier. Now his scarred hand was closed around mine in the center of a dome he was never supposed to enter, and the oldest story in the shifter world had a new detail.
I wasn’t by myself.
So, I didn’t have to fight alone.
I straightened and, once more, planted my feet in the dirt with Logan’s hand in mine.
The dome roared. Cracks had spider-webbed out from the gap Logan had forced through it, and the frequencies from the rest of the shifters filtered into me.
I ceased throwing battle spells at Acheron one at a time like a woman rationing herself toward a death she’d already agreed to.
Instead, I let a tsunami of energy rush into me.
The emergence expanded in my chest.
Every multimorph before me had reached for this alone and been swallowed by it because there had been nothing to hold the woman in place while the culmination had poured through her. No anchor, no tether, no hand.
But I had Logan.
You reach for whatever you have to reach for. I’ll be there.
And he was. Each degree brighter I burned, Logan absorbed the overflow. The storm grew and moved, but I held. I stayed lit, furious and entirely myself in the middle of becoming everything I needed to be.
I am the multimorph, but I am also Emma Carter.
Voices of all the other culminations before me rose in the wind. They answered my call.
The dome couldn’t block them out. Because Logan had forced his way through, there was a gap wide enough for my allies to reach me, and they did. They linked with me, fortified me, pushed back against the energy deadlock I still shared with Acheron.
If I can only tip the balance…
Shadow mages flooded the dome, filling it with an inky blackness. Yet none could touch me, my mate, or dim our light. Hollowed-out shifters marched on the gap, coming to the aid of their master.
My bond with Logan flickered, and I flinched. A moment later, Marcus whispered in my head. He told me what I needed to know and what no one else on earth could give. He told me where to look.
Not the cowl. Not the theater. Not the voice that had crooned at my mate across a creek, had hollowed shifters into husks, and had driven my birth mother, exploiting her genetics. I triaged Acheron, the way I’d evaluated Sully-Boy tangled in barbed wire and searched for the wound.
Wind swirled inside the dome. Shadows and multicolored magic filled the vortex. Lightning struck the top of the dome, and thunder shook the boundaries. More cracks formed.
Logan squeezed my hand. It’s time, love.
I faced Acheron, and for the first time, I truly saw him.
On one side, there was corruption. An ancient, patient, bottomless rot, older than the man, older than the name.
Foulness had been drowned, dragged up, and taught the dark arts.
The undead beast had discovered that the sweetest meal in all the world was a person’s soul in the exact moment love shifts to grief.
Centuries of an anguish so total it had gone bad, curdled, learned to feed on more sorrow.
Buried a layer down, there were also the remnants of a man who had forced himself to believe destruction was the only way to save the universe.
He had been an anchor. A shifter from almost two hundred years ago.
He’d stood exactly where Logan had stood tonight, on the wrong side of a boundary, and had watched his multimorph become the mortar between two worlds, win, and disappear.
Then, he’d done what history had told him to do.
He’d held his line. He’d grieved. He’d stood there, hollowed out, with a hole shaped exactly like her.
He had become a monster who’d chosen the dark.
He had been the end of our story, run out to its full and horrible length.
He was still searching for the woman, the fated mate he had lost.
“No! Do not speak of her!” Acheron’s face twisted as though he understood the war inside himself.
Emma. We’re running out of time. Logan’s growl reverberated in my thoughts.
He sent as much murderous rage into his stream of power as he could, and I met it with compassion. Still, his magic and mine were melded together.
The earth shook beneath our feet. Lightning jumped from thunderhead to thunderhead, and clouds boiled in the midnight sky. The Cold Moon disappeared, and shadows draped everything outside.
Magic darted from me to Logan and back again like electricity. It gathered over my chest, ball lightning, dazzling in myriad colors. I raised the orb over my head and prepared to cast it over our heartbroken enemy. He’d loved once…
Emma. Logan’s pleading voice echoed in my head.
But I stopped short of throwing the final attack.
I wasn’t going to kill Acheron.
He’d earned it a thousand times over. There was the casualty list on the desk back in Six-Mile and every soul he’d consumed and changed into a being twisted ugly.
But I was a healer. I had been for my entire life. Even as the multimorph, my mission had been to save by healing rifts between the clans. Destruction was easy, and I didn’t go all the way down to the depths of Wolf Moon Cave to learn how to destroy. Another option had always been my goal.
I was the one who unites. If I controlled anyone, I didn’t burn them, either, not even the worst of them, not if there was a thread of hope still left inside the man.
Lasting victory was never going to be Acheron’s kind. Death begat death and would create the next Acheron for the next multimorph.
Instead, I released my energy and then sent a stream upward into the Veil, grasping the energies of the Veil, and I gasped. Oof.
Acheron dropped to his knees, panting. “Nooo!”
Logan stepped closer. What is it?
Acheron’s corruption touches every knot in the Veil between the worlds, the whole net of shifters’ work. God, he’s trying to pull it apart line by line.
“What are you doing?” Acheron shrieked. He tried to summon a burst of his own power, but it sputtered out.
Kill him, Emma. Put him out of his misery.
I shook my head and groaned. “Corrupted magic isn’t a different substance, Logan. It’s the right substance used in the wrong manner.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Logan yelled. He tugged on my arm, but I pushed him away and focused on the gash in the Veil.
“Hold him,” I bit out. “He’s nearly used up.”
“You son of a bitch!” Logan marched to the whimpering Acheron and kicked him, knocking him onto his back. My mate landed another punch and dragged the weakened creature to his feet.
Carefully, I turned the threads back through themselves, stitching the Veil back together.
I redirected the currents Acheron had been running—death into power, life into fuel, the obscenity on earth that the Void had become—and I reversed the polarity.
Centuries of gathered power, every drop the culmination had poured into me, I gave it all back to every emergence still waiting to be born, to every future shifter, to those who still had to learn what they were made of.
The universe was on my surgery table, and I wished Shannon had been there to blot the sweat off my forehead. The dome shattered around us.
“No, no, no,” Acheron shrieked. “What are you doing?” He stared into the sky overhead. He tried to send a fireball rushing toward me, but it winked and died out. His robes whipped in the wind that now held less shadow.
“I’m unfucking the world. Can’t you tell?” My upper lip twisted as a rush of affection came through the bond. “I promised you I would.”
Acheron shrank, and his weeping vibrated the dome. “No, this isn’t what I foretold. No! You were her… We were to rule. How can you do this to me?”
Acheron had kept some of the captured shifters whole. He’d had to. He couldn’t consume the magic inside an already dead shifter, and he couldn’t hold a leash on a mother by threatening her with a son who no longer lived.
As I worked, trapped magic came loose, and stolen years returned home.
The unconsumed kidnapped shifters came free in a rush of released bodies.
All around the wreckage of the dome, light poured upward out of the ground, cutting through the shadow mages’ energy.
Shifters stood up, blinking in the cold, some human-formed, some animal-formed, and others half and half. Around the dome, our numbers doubled.
Eli! Marcus’s shout exploded in my head.
Fifteen yards away, Marcus groped through the air, following the scent of his nephew, a father’s worth of feeling in a man who’d never been one, all of it aimed at a small shape blinking and stumbling through the Void.
And a fox I almost recognized. Staggering, she came up out of the dirt, small and fire-engine red. She lifted her nose, and she caught a scent.
On the far side, a jubilant cry went up through Red Tail. Flynn made a sound I’d only heard once before, when her scent had washed through the link at the conclave. He made it again now.
“Bree!”
The scent he had never stopped searching for, the love he hadn’t been able to give up on. A mate the war had taken and not kept.
It’s beautiful, Emma. Logan squeezed my hand, and his relief flooded our bond. You saved the boy I tried to.
We’ll have to mend the casualty list too, I sent to him.
Gladly.