Page 103 of Shifters Reckoning

“Won’t matter. You can link with other shifters, and you’ll link with me the same way you’d link with them. No heart-stopping stuff for you this time.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Are you?” I countered.

“Yes. Does it matter?”

“What do you think?”

She shrugged and covered a yawn.

I pressed my finger to the scanner, and the door popped open. We moved through the extra warding into the relic room.

The trove didn’t have windows. My father had built it that way on purpose, a stone box sunk into the back of the gym where the tobacco used to cure, cool and dark as the inside of a fist. The light came up slow when I crossed the threshold, and it never got brighter than a low amber dim. The objects in there didn’t like the sun, and I’d stopped asking why a long time ago.

Shelves ran floor to ceiling down both walls, cypress gone black with age. Two hundred years of everything the Blackwood pack had ever thought worth locking away sat on those shelves. Healing medallions rested in a row like dinner plates, each one older than the last. A rack of blades nobody living had drawn in anger but one. The ceremonial katana, sheathed and silent, that had taken a traitor’s head.

Along the north wall, cradled in a trough worn smooth by centuries of hands, the Death Rite cylinder waited. The pale stone created the death shroud we wrapped shifters in. It gave up a little of itself every time we returned one of our own to the earth and replaced the loss back by morning, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, as though the old rock could feel a death coming before the rest of us did.

Bundles I couldn’t name and boxes I’d never opened rested on the rest of the shelves. At the center of the back wall, alone on its own plinth because it did not tolerate company, was the linking stone, a plain cube of hewn rock that had turned to a prism of clear light when my mate sat on it and pushed her magic through it.

I settled on the floor, eyeing the stains from Olivia’s blood with a few more newer drops probably from her birth mother.

Emma took a seat on the cube.

I braced for the rush of energy, hoping I wasn’t too tired to be her anchor. “Go ahead.”

She drew on her magic and sent tendrils of it into me. Instead of letting it tear through her, I reached through my side of the bond and took it. Sink the rod, take the current, give it somewhere to go that wasn’t her own nerves. The lightning and the rod. Even with the wall she had built between us, power filled me, seeping through cracks in the partition between us.

Holy hell. She was glorious. Her abilities had increased since she had gone on her adventure with Dr. Wise and Jasper.

Emma flared bright enough to light the room through her skin. The rainbow tattoo blazed on her hip, and I held the line. She had to remain unbroken. She had to stay herself.

I wasn’t a second sun for her to burn beside. I was the grounding anchor.

Slowly, her glow dimmed.

“That’s it,” she whispered. The tears on her face had nothing to do with sadness. “Logan, that’s… I could hold twice that. Three times. With you, I can hold anything.”

“That’s the idea.” I shook from the effort but grinned like an idiot. “You’re the storm. I’m what lets the world survive you… I’m what lets you survive you.”

“Again,” she said.

We repeated the linking a dozen times, but there was still the wall in it. There was still, after everything, a closed door in the middle of the bond, and every time we linked, I felt her power flow around it like water around a stone, careful. She was keeping something on the far side where I couldn’t reach.

Yet it was enough.

I scooted toward her, and she leaned down toward me and climbed into my lap, both of us too spent to do anything other than rest. Later, we set up two cots, and she took one while I took the other. We’d be training hard again tomorrow.

Healing the rift between us happened the way it always had. Not with a conversation but with contact, honesty, and the stubbornness of two people who refused to let our relationship stay broken. Hands. Foreheads pressed together.

With each link, the wall between us weakened. Spiderweb cracks spread through it, but neither of us mentioned it.

Several nights later, in the quiet after another successful link, with me drained and wrapped around her on the relic room floor, she finally let me in.

Abruptly, she sat up. She took my face in both hands, and she studied me with those big green eyes, the ones I had nearly drowned in back in Vixen’s.

“You’re my anchor, you know,” she said. “You promised me that you’re the ground wire.” She pressed her forehead to mine. “You didn’t twist those souls back in No Man’s Land because you’re becoming a monster, Logan. You did it because you were alone and desperate. You thought you had to be everything, same as I thought I had to be everything, and we were both wrong. We’re not everything if we’re alone. We’re each other’s balance.” Her thumbs moved over my cheekbones. “I’d cross any room in the world for you. I’d cross the dome, if the rules let me. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Acheron won’t let me.”