Page 101 of Shifters Reckoning

Mine, his wolf rumbled through me. Still mine.

Still yours, I sent through the tiny gap. Always. There will always be⁠—

I didn’t get to finish it because someone crossed the warded boundary line. My stomach clenched. Ravens, but not raven shifters. Carrion things, oily and wrong, trailing a stink I’d smelled on the seam of the sky and the ruin of my mother’s mind.

I slipped out of Logan’s arms, and his heavy footsteps followed me.

“Emma,” he barked.

But I didn’t stop. I darted to the porch, down onto the circular gravel driveway, and peered at the sky. Shifters stopped to see what I watched.

The birds dropped out of the November cold like stones, and where they should have hit the ground, they simply weren’t birds anymore. They came apart into three flat pieces of gray bark. The husks fell onto the frost at my feet and reformed as one flat board.

Letters had been burned into the wood. Not carved or written.

Bending over to read whatever idiocy Acheron had sent would be showing more interest than he deserved. What a fucking drama queen.

MULTIMORPH. Come and settle it the old way. You and I, alone, at the wound you keep bandaging. Single combat, my magic against your borrowed skins, at the Void, under the Cold Moon. Seal us in as your kind seals a death-duel. No pack to cross it, no anchor to reach you, no mate. You and I alone.

Below it, smaller, he’d continued.

Do not delay past the Cold Moon. Each day you keep me waiting, my army will eat one town filled with your humans. Willow Creek is closest. Shall I start there? Riley? Shannon? Perhaps Sheila? Who would you choose? Meet me at the Cold Moon when our powers are strongest.

The letters crawled like worms over the wood.

Somewhere behind me, Sophia made a choking sound. On three pieces of wood flown in as ravens, Acheron had summoned me to a face-off.

Emma, dead in a dome of her own making. Him at her throat. And no one, no anchor, no pack, no mate, able to cross the boundary to help. Logan’s foretelling. Shit.

I turned around. Logan hadn’t moved from the porch. His expression had turned ashen. He was replaying the same images I was, but his version was worse. He’d been made to look at it every night since a monster put it in his head.

Neither of us had to say it. The dome. The premonition. The porch creaked as Logan made his way down the steps and joined me beside the invitation slat.

“Well,” I said into the heavy quiet, “at least he asked nicely.”

Nobody laughed. I hadn’t expected them to.

Logan’s hand found mine. He gripped hard and did not let go. I crushed his hand in mine.

A couple weeks. A dome. A price I still hadn’t determined.

We’re almost out of time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

logan

Six-Mile

She was going to accept Acheron’s challenge, and I had weeks to make something of the hate building inside me.

So I did the only thing I could come up with when the feelings were nearly too big to carry. I turned it into a job site with one purpose—frame it, brace it, and fashion it into something that would still be standing when we weren’t.

“Time to train,” I told her, staring at the wreckage from three ravens that hadn’t been birds at all.

“Train?”

“You have a few weeks before you face him. He’s hundreds-fucking-years-old… Hated me, my family, forever, but he doesn’t want to take you to hurt me. Maybe that’s what it was before, but he’s gone beyond that. He’s evil now, but I won’t let him have you.”