Page 102 of Shifters Reckoning

“Logan, we can’t pretend we didn’t know this was coming. This was always the end of my story.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re the…” I paused. “No, we are the multimorph, two parts of the same whole, and we’ll decide how this ends.”

She crossed her arms and studied me with a wan smile. “How do we do that?”

“We have to make you harder to kill.”

She dropped her arms. “Lead the way.”

We headed to the training gym. Once inside, I marched to the center of the shifter-filled gym, the sparring mats squeaking under my bare feet. Midmorning was the busiest training time in Six-Mile, but none were as important as keeping Emma alive.

“Everybody, out!” I bellowed. “Private multimorph training for the next two days. The entrance will be locked, and you will continue your drills outside. Be thankful it’s not July.”

Code for no bitching.

Shifters lowered their practice weapons in confusion, murmuring and sharing glances. Nobody moved.

“Logan, let them finish,” Emma began.

“Out!” I roared. “Anybody in here in sixty seconds will have to answer to me!”

That set a fire under their feet. A brave few returned their weapons to their spots on the walls, but most placed them on the mats and fled. The door opened and closed a hundred times before they’d all gone.

With the building emptied, I locked the door. Then we took the training gym, just the two of us on the mats where, a lifetime ago, she’d sparred with Olivia and learned to fight with a bo staff.

“Choose your weapon, love.”

She grimaced at me, picked up an abandoned bo staff as though she’d been thinking of her first training, too, and twirled it. “Not sure I want to fight with this panicked version of you.”

“Can’t be panicked if we’re training.”

She raised her stick in a defensive position. “Not sure that’s true.”

I trained her how I had schooled raw recruits for decades, except she wasn’t raw, and she wasn’t a recruit. She was the culmination of every shifter who’d ever lived. However, I still made her drill the boring maneuvers to prove her feet knew how to move without asking her brain. Sweat dripped down her.

“Again,” I demanded after she dropped her weight incorrectly coming out of a shift. “The dome’s going to be small. He wants it small. No room to run, no clan to tag out to, no me. Just you and him. It’ll come down to however fast you can change your mind about what shape you are.” I circled her, correcting the drop of a shoulder and the angle of a heel. “You’ve been fighting like you’ve got warriors at your back. In there, you won’t. In there, you’re the army. So you move like one.”

“Fucking bossy,” she said, breathing hard, resetting.

“Alpha,” I corrected, earning the ghost of her grin for it before I made her do it again.

She was extraordinary. I’d always known it, but watching her up close with no war to distract me… She shifted from cheetah to bear to fox and back before my eyes could catch up, the colors running together, faster and cleaner than I’d ever seen her. I understood I was training the most dangerous living creature in Louisiana, but it did not make me feel one degree better. Acheron was not a living thing, and the rules were different for the dead.

We went over the ugly stuff too. We reviewed how to take a hit and keep a shape; how to fight hurt, fight tired, fight scared, because she was going to be all three; how to make the small space work for her instead of him. A dome was a room, and I’d built a lot of rooms. I knew where the load-bearing corners were.

By the next dawn, she could put me on the mat four falls out of five, and the fifth I only took because I cheated like Acheron probably would, and she laughed, real and bright. For several seconds, the Cold Moon wasn’t coming. Then we switched to swords, reset, and went again.

At midnight, we turned to other work. I had Cora moved to the infirmary in the manor and asked Torbin to have each of the clans multi-ward her there.

“That’s a helluva risk,” she said, watching as they moved the thrashing, whimpering woman out of the gym.

“You’re worth the risk, Emma. If you don’t survive, none of us do.” I’d risk anything for Emma whether she liked the idea or not.

She didn’t answer.

“Time to practice the link,” I said, returning both of our swords to their spots.

She frowned and wiped sweat from her forehead. “The link? With the wall between us?”