36. Emma #2
But not everyone could be returned. Even as my body drooped, faces danced in my mind, more that I would never be able to return.
Acheron hadn’t simply caged many of them.
He’d consumed them, spent their souls, and burned them down into the fuel that made him, and there was no fold to unwrap, no magical knots to untie.
Rachel didn’t come back. God help me. I searched for her, in the net of death magic Acheron had woven, because Phil had a question he’d been carrying since the night in a training gym.
There was a tracing where she had been, where she should have been…
a Rachel-shaped absence in the light. Dominic and Rosa, who’d sacrificed themselves at the south post to buy the road out for the runner who reached us, didn’t come back either.
The souls of No Man’s Land didn’t come back.
The ones already made into husks, already thrown at us as shadow mages, were gone.
Acheron put his face in his hands. “What have you done?”
“I’m not finished yet.”
Then I brought the edges of the wound in the Veil together, and I drew on all the magic I could pull through the cracks in the dome.
The shifters around us gave willingly, and the magic flowed.
Quickly, I worked a stitch that could never be broken and then released the threads. The Void was already dissipating.
But I didn’t close the Veil completely. I had one more thing to do.
I swayed.
Logan’s arm came around my waist. “Easy there,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
“Thanks.”
“And there will always be an after.” He kissed my cheek. “What are we doing with this asshole?”
“It’s up to him,” I murmured.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Logan asked, and images of ripping Acheron limb from limb flickered in my head.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I am—”
“The multimorph. Yeah, yeah, I know.”
I turned to Acheron and cleared my throat. “It always comes down to choice.”
The culmination had been poured back into the Veil, back into the well of magic all shifters drew from, but I had stayed behind. What was left of Acheron stood in the wreck of his body.
I turned to what was left of the evil mage. “I offer you a choice, Acheron. Mend or end. Same choice I got recently.”
He made no sound.
I took the few steps toward him, sank to the ground beside him, and continued, “Be the one who unites or be the one who consumes. Your choice must be your own and made freely. Mend. Or end.”
He whimpered.
“You’ve been running for centuries. I can return you to whatever’s left of the man…
” I climbed to my feet. “Or you can refuse, and I’ll toss you into the break in the Veil to finish closing the wound.
Your energy will help the fix hold like glue, and you’ll finally be able to stop the pain. It’s up to you to pick.”
The man lifted his head, and his gaze found me.
The grieving shifter fumbled for the offer, and a flash of hope spread over his face.
A hand came up. Two hundred years of wanting to stop, wanting to be forgiven, wanting relief for the pain.
He reached for mend like a drowning man surfacing in deep water, like anyone who’s been in the dark long enough to have forgotten there was ever anything else.
But the corruption refused. It would never give the man a choice. The spirit of the evil wizard had fully possessed the man, and it was hungry for more destruction.
“End it all,” he rasped. “Finish it, Multimorph.”
Logan growled and pulled me back into his arms, his teeth bared at the creature.
Then the evil clamped the outstretched hand and folded the arm back into the chest of the man, and the man was hauled back into the soul of darkness that had been inside him for almost two centuries.
I drew a rush of magic, wrapped his body in a net of balefire, and flung him into the gash. With a flick of my fingers, I pulled the stitch tight, and I closed the Veil over the man and his possessor. Acheron had gotten what he’d chosen.
But Dr. Wise had been right. The door didn’t set the cost. The one who went through it did. I’d walked through it with Logan’s hand in mine, and I was not, it turned out, willing to pay with my life when there had been a better coin in my pocket the whole time.
I didn’t patch the wound shut with my death as the mortar.
I’d mended it by ridding the world of the shadowed soul that had been Acheron reborn in what had once been a multimorph’s mate.
The Veil had closed over Acheron and the anchor he’d consumed, and it closed like a scar in skin—drawn shut, changed where it had been torn.
A living boundary needed a living keeper.
That was my price. That was the one I chose. I hadn’t poured myself into the Veil. I put one thread of myself in it. One strand, woven through the seam, a tether, and I retained the rest. I kept Emma.
Though, I suspected I would feel the seam for the rest of my life, one hand always resting on the boundary between the worlds. Part of me would always be bound now by the Veil. Part of me would always be listening, keeping the new balance, tending the scar.
It was a lifelong responsibility, but it wasn’t another death.
And it had given us all an after.
I’d take it. Hell, I’d choose it again.