Page 113 of Shifters Reckoning

I stopped six feet from him and planted the end of my bo staff in the dead earth. “I’m here under a flag of truce.”

Jasper halted beside me and crossed his arms.

Acheron’s assembly of twisted souls closed ranks behind us. Then the old wizard turned around. Up close, he was an evil hurricane in a tattered robe, the edges constantly shifting in the wind. He was ancient corruption wearing what was left of a grieving man, but knowing it and being in its presence were two different continents.

He had a face, sort of, and the body of a tall man, but the depravity rolled off of him in waves, a low, sick change in air pressure that made me want to pop my ears. Behind his cloudy eyes, unmistakably, he was glad to see me.

“Multimorph,” he said. “You’ve come.” His gaze flicked to Jasper. “With an accompaniment.”

“Acheron.” I moved the flagpole with the sad strip of white at the end. “I came to set terms.”

“You came to look at me.” He sounded almost fond. “Good. Look. I have wanted, for a very long time, to be looked at by someone who could actually see.”

Jasper sniffed, but he said nothing.

Before I could get one word of my carefully rehearsed terms out, he lifted one gray hand, and he showed me the future he was fighting for.

A picture pushed straight into my head… except he didn’t show me my death this time. Instead, he brought me to my hometown, Willow Creek, but after he won. The Veil down, the two worlds bled into one, and shifters strolled the streets in daylight with their heads up and their teeth out, no more hiding, no more masquerade, a people finally free to be exactly what they were, the top of the food chain with him as the king of them all.

Humans were dying in the gutters, out in the fields, and on their knees. The clans had been enthroned over them, fed, and worshipped. They were safe forever, which was the word he kept repeating in my mind. Safe, safe, as though he’d found the thing I couldn’t argue with.

Then I glimpsed the cruelty. He’d saved his version of best for last.

Vixen’s was still standing, and Sheila was behind the bar… alive, the star tattoos still crinkling around her eyes, pouring drinks for shifter lords and smiling, smiling, smiling with nothing behind it.

Shannon sat in a fine house with her three kids quiet as mice, none of them laughing, because he’d taken the laughing away.

He showed me Riley, my Riley, bright, busy, and completely emptied of what made her Riley, matchmaking on command for masters who owned her. But there was nobody inside her to enjoy it.

He turned to ten-year-old Callie with Sully-Boy in her arms, kneeling in the road with her rainbow-less hair, beaming up at me on a throne with adoration and absolutely nothing else.

Alive. Every one of them was alive. That was the whole horror. He wasn’t threatening to kill the people I loved now. He was offering to keep them… preserved, obedient, adoring, and hollowed out from the inside like a gourd left out to dry.

Finally, beside my throne, in the picture, there was a second one. His.

“You feel it,” he pleaded. “The pull. The storm and the anchor who holds it. Mine was taken from me nearly two hundred years ago, and I have been half of a broken bond ever since, a magnet with no north, waiting for my other half to be born again.”

I bit back a rush of tears. He’d been brokenhearted for nearly two centuries, and that pain filtered through, but it had left him open to perversion by the undying creature the witches had made.

Logan hadn’t been anywhere in the vision Acheron had pressed into me, and I had to find a way out of this that didn’t turn Logan into next century’s Acheron.

Our enemy fixed his ruined gaze on me. “And here you are. The first true one since her. You could fill the hole she left. You are the only living person that could. Rule beside me, and I will keep every soul you love breathing and adoring until the stars go out. No more names to add to your list, Emma. No more list. Just an after that never ends.”

He knew about the list. He’d been in Logan’s head. Of course, he knew about our list.

He shared his vision of my whole warm, ordinary world kneeling, hollow-eyed, to an evil king and queen.

“You’re lonely,” I whispered. “It’s been hard for you.”

“I am alone. I’ve been alone for almost two centuries, but I live on.” He lifted his chin as though he was proud of his survival. “I’m building a new kingdom, and you can join me. We will never die, and we will never be alone again.”

“Or you can lay down your weapons, surrender fully, and we can adopt you. We’ll forgive you. You can live out your days in peace. Those are our terms.” My hand tightened on the bo staff.

He considered me. “Will you agree to be my mate? We will live forever. No dying and leaving one behind.”

For one second, for one moment, the tired voice almost reached me. That loneliness would be how I felt without Logan, all the power and no one to share it with. An ache spread through my chest. I had felt the hint of it at the root of the world, when a version of me had also offered a crown to end the fear.

Acheron had offered me a seat at his right hand, but he was trying to offer living on and never being alone ever again. I sighed.