Epilogue
EMMA & LOGAN
The Gathering Place
Between Bear Trees & Red Tail Territories
Emma
The landscape inside of what had been the Void came back to life one inch at a time.
I could tell every inch of it because I held the seam now.
The local authorities took credit for finding the solution, and the local news played along.
Science won against the blight, dontcha know, and shifters decided to save our “big reveal” for another day.
The Void wasn’t a void anymore. That was all that mattered. By next spring, beneath the Pink Moon, it would be hard to tell where the Void had once been.
Two weeks after the Cold Moon, we summoned a conclave at the newly completed Gathering Place, and the first thing I did as the keeper of the new balance was to refuse to sit at the head of the table.
“Emma,” Torbin growled. “It is your right.”
“Yeah, well, there isn’t a head of the table anymore. That’s the point. Why do you think I had your bears haul the old council slab out and bring a circle table in instead?”
Torbin turned to Logan as if to ask him to do something about his mate, but Logan only chuckled and shrugged.
“Every clan must face every other clan, Torbin. I am the multimorph.” I winked at the old bear.
He bowed. “As you wish,” he rumbled.
Within the hour, shifters collected in the structure, and every seat had been filled.
Olivia shoved her fingers in her mouth and whistled as loudly as she could.
After the cacophony of voices died out, she gestured to the assembly.
“Y’all shut up. Multimorph wants to speak, and she’s still worn out from the shit with Acheron, so don’t make her yell, and I won’t have to throw you out. ” She nodded.
“Really?” I whisper-yelled at her as I stepped toward the front of the open-air amphitheater.
Olivia shrugged while they settled and turned their many-colored eyes toward me. “Multimorph is going to tell them how the world works now. They should listen.”
I raised my hands to the assembled shifters. “Thank you for agreeing to come. We couldn’t have beaten Acheron without you.” I paused. “Before the treaties, before one word of borders or votes or who owes whom what, I have a request.”
“Name it, Multimorph,” Torbin rumbled from his seat in the front row next to both my mothers and Logan.
“We hold a Death Rite. Here. Now. We acknowledge those we have lost. No bodies means no shrouds, but we can give the fallen the only rite left to offer. We can speak their names in the ancient, warded places their ancestors created.”
A murmur moved through the shifters.
The old bear went still. “Please repeat your request, Multimorph,” Torbin said. “It is most unusual.”
“I know exactly how unusual it is. That’s why it has to be first. We are about to spend what might be years arguing over who gets what.
Good. We should, but not one of us gets to argue over the spoils of a war until we have stood together and said the names of the people who paid for it. The dead come before the deals.”
“Begin,” Torbin announced.
“Please do,” Marcus agreed.
Heads nodded across the conclave.
As planned, Dr. Wise stepped forward with the casualty list and ceremoniously handed it to me.
I took it and raised it high.
I read the ones I could and passed the page to Olivia after my voice gave out.
Then she passed it to Flynn, who passed it to Levi, who passed it to a raven.
Rachel, whom Acheron took into the woods alone.
Dominic and Rosa, who sacrificed themselves at the south post so a wounded fox could reach us with the truth.
The souls of No Man’s Land. Otis’s brother.
The Ville Platte cats lost in the tunnel.
Every name, out loud, until the reading of them was longer than any speech I’d ever given.
When we came to the hardest part of the list—the shifters Acheron had hollowed into husks and thrown at us as shadow mages—I started reading once more. At the end, I listed the shadow mages that Logan had re-formed into weapons.
Logan stood up. He didn’t have to. Nobody would have made him. He stood anyway, my alpha, in front of the whole shifter world, and he said their names with me.
At the end of the names, he added, “I unmade these souls with my own hands, before I understood what I was. They’re mine to carry.
I’ll carry them the rest of my life, and I’ll say their names out loud every year we hold this Rite because the day an alpha stops naming his dead is the day he becomes something worth being afraid of. ”
Nobody spoke.
Then Garrick, of the northern wolves, put his fist to his chest, the old salute, the one that predated all our clans, and one by one, every leader in Louisiana, every shifter in attendance, did the same for the man owning the worst thing he’d ever done.
The living came home slowly, the way the green came back to the Void.
Cora resurfaced a little more each week.
The foul thread Acheron had braided through her mind unwound the way Marcus’s did, strand by strand.
There were bad days, and there were days she knew all our names, and there had been one afternoon in the Six-Mile infirmary when she studied me with those green eyes.
She said, “You have my grandmother’s stubborn chin.”
I had to leave the room to fall apart in the hallway. Getting her well had been one of the hardest, longest fights we’d had after Acheron.
And Eli. God, Eli.
He came out of the darkness a wide-eyed nine-year-old, and he arrived in Six-Mile as skittish as a feral kitten and got adopted on the spot by roughly the entire compound.
Sophia claimed grandmother rights before the boy had finished his first cinnamon roll, and dared everyone to argue. Dr. Wise appointed herself his second grandmother and gifted him his own notebook.
Marcus, my somewhat-blind uncle, taught him to hear a room, and the two of them would sit on the porch listening to the dark like other people watched television.
Eli had tried to call me aunt, once, politely, and I told him aunt was for people who wouldn’t eventually teach him how to ride a rainbow motorcycle, so he’d better just call me Emma. He had grinned for days. Though, I didn’t know what he’d do when it became clear I was his sister, not his aunt.
Marcus went home to Ville Platte, his sight seeping back a degree at a time as the corruption drained out of him. He saw shadows, then shapes, and then the blurred gold of a winter sun. He had returned to a homecoming, thanks to Logan and Della.
Flynn got his mate back. Bree danced into Six-Mile and turned into my mom’s top assistant in the mess hall. They planned to return to Red Tail as soon as their den was rebuilt.
East Nuttal confirmed Ahmie and Evie as co-alphas once the dust settled.
They’d prefaced acceptance of the role as both of them or neither, never split, exactly the way Levi always said it would go.
Then Levi appointed himself as their ambassador and moved half his things to Six-Mile to be menace-in-residence.
And Riley. Torbin’s delving had sealed her worst memories away to keep her whole. I could have unsealed them. There was very little I couldn’t reach anymore. I am the multimorph, after all. But I didn’t.
Instead, I sat with her in Vixen’s over an Animal Doctor for me and a Shirley Temple for her, and I gently explained the truth. There was a door in her mind, I could open it, and it was hers and hers alone to decide whether it ever got opened.
She’d stared at me for a long moment. “Will those things make me sad?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Then let’s leave it shut for now.” Then she’d waved at Sheila. “Can we get another round?”
Sheila was the loose thread. Logan’s cousin, human as a fence post her whole life. The week after the Veil healed, she leaned on the bar, squeezed her eyes shut, and a burst of wind circled her.
All the shifters in the bar reacted to the magic.
Sheila’s eyes popped open, and she gaped at me across the room. Her star tattoos crinkled, and she tossed her freshly dyed, festive red hair over her shoulder. “What the hell was that?”
“Latent, maybe. Emergent, maybe.” I shrugged. “Never too late to shift. You know that. Maybe the universe is buying you a Christmas present.”
Sheila grinned from ear to ear while Dr. Wise had a theory, a fresh notebook, and a gleam in her eye.
Logan
It was Christmas in Willow Creek, the first ordinary holiday any of us had had in ages. Vixen’s had been strung with lights and was loud with shifters pretending to be regular folks and regular folks who’d stopped asking why the downtown bar had gotten so popular.
Sheila poured Animal Doctors. Phil manned the grill. Sophia had commandeered the kitchen. It was, near as I can figure, the best night of my life, and I didn’t even know yet what was coming.
Sheila gestured to me. “You let me know if you need the recipe for that Morning After Green Drink. Non-alcoholic and great for your liver.”
“Will do,” I answered, waving over another plate of burgers.
After we’d all eaten, Emma stood up on a chair and raised her hands. “I’d like to announce that my practice will open in the new year. I’m ready to get back to mending all the creatures in Willow Creek, and Shannon and Riley are rehired.”
Cheers and applause reverberated through Vixen’s.
Shannon cupped her hands around her mouth. “We still can’t find the stapler.”
While everybody was still cheering, Emma peered straight at me across the room, over the heads of half of the shifters in Louisiana. She hopped off the chair, marched across the bar, and dropped to one knee in front of me.
“What the fuck are you doing down there?” I barked. “Get up before—”
But Emma held up a ring, and everyone in Vixen’s took a breath and went quiet.
“You said if I wanted a wedding, I’d have to be the one to ask,” she said.
“You said we might as well be, but you’d throw a big-ass party if I put a ring on it.
” Her voice shook slightly, my stubborn mate, kneeling in a bar.
“So… Logan Blackwood, as the sexiest man in Louisiana, will you marry me?”
I’d crossed a damned dome that wasn’t supposed to let anyone through. I’d stood beneath the fucking wound in the Veil and refused to retell the prophesied tale. But I could not, in that moment, get a single word out.
“You’re supposed to say yes,” Emma whisper-yelled. “I gave you the easy part.”
Laughter tittered through our audience.
“Yes,” I finally managed. Then I cleared my throat and roared, “Yes! You ridiculous-assed woman, get up here.”
I hauled her off her knees, into my arms, and kissed her silly while Vixen’s came apart around us. She pressed her palm to the layered scar in the center of my chest, the new one from the dome and the old one from balefire.
“When are ye two going to do the deed?” Jasper yelled.
“Beneath the Wolf Moon,” I answered as loudly as I could.
Emma’s eyes widened. “We have two weeks, people.”
Olivia groaned. “I am not standing keeper duty for the honeymoon.”
“Aye, ye knew we have to,” Jasper said solemnly. “It’s custom.”
Sophia burst into happy tears, and Dr. Wise comforted her while taking notes in her notebook.
Levi started a chant. “Groomzilla, Groomzilla.”
Somewhere in the noise, Sheila yelled, “Next round of Animal Doctors is on the house.”