Page 114 of Shifters Reckoning

Then I thought about Callie’s spark and the cost of putting it out. I was a vet, and I had spent my whole adult life learning the difference between a creature that was alive and a creature that had merely been kept living in pain.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “You’ve been alone so long you’ve forgotten what people are. You believe keeping them, using them is loving them. A creature that kneels, smiles, and never leaves is not better than a mate who laughs with you, slams the door when they’re mad, and comes back on their own two feet because they chose you for love.” I gestured at his hollow court, his rotting bear, his empty fox. “That’s not a household that’s good enough, Acheron. That’s a shelf. You’ve got a shelf of taxidermied creatures where your family used to be, and you’ve decided that’s love, and you want me to come dust the knickknacks with you forever.”

The storm in him went very still, and his tattered robe drooped.

“I’ve saved a lot of lives,” I said. “I’ve also been gifted the responsibility of allowing lives to end, and here’s what years of that teaches you—barely breathing isn’t the finish line. Alive with the light still on is the finish line. You want to hand me a Willow Creek full of people I love with the lights switched off and call it a gift.”

Acheron’s eyes flashed. “What if I told you, Multimorph,” he spat my title, “that I chose this? I sought the old wizard and begged to join with him.”

Jasper grunted and settled into a ready stance.

I blinked as Acheron’s words sank in. “What are you saying?”

“I wanted to live until I could consume your kind and your mate and you. This cycle must end. You must end. The multimorph will never be allowed to hurt anyone else, and joining with the wizard was the only way to become strong enough.” His tired, pleading voice went out like a snuffed wick, and the hurricane hit, full force, as the truce cracked. He flicked his fingers, and a black tendril shot out of his palm. It struck the bo staff and knocked it to the ground beside me.

The atmosphere changed, and the hollowed-out shifters took a step closer, shrinking the circle around us. Acheron’s robes fluttered in the rush of wind.

I took a deep breath. “Well, then, respectfully, and I do mean this from the absolute depths of my multimorph heart, go fuck yourself. Sideways. With a shelf. In the ass.”

Jasper guffawed. “Aye, lass, ye tell ’im.”

Somewhere, a hundred yards back, over brown winter grass, across a line he couldn’t cross, I felt Logan bark one shocked laugh into the bond, half horror and half helpless love, and it was the best sound I’d heard all day.

Acheron did not laugh.

Here we go. I sent the warning to Logan, hoping he could still sense me, despite the surrounding Void.

Sic him, love.

God, I love you. I drew a flood of energy into me.

A blackened gorge raced out from beneath Acheron’s feet, and the white flag on my flung staff withered to frost and ash, and every hollow thing in his court turned its wrong-colored eyes on me at once.

The gorge yawned wide. The pressure dropped so hard my nose started to bleed. My nose, blood. I was standing dozens of yards from my mate… God, I knew that image. I’d seen snippets of it in my own head, and the ghost of it in Logan’s eyes.

I crouched and did not step back. Standing my ground was the one thing I had left.

“I will take them all from you,” Acheron shrieked, and there was nothing tired left anywhere in him. “In the order you love them.”

“Do your worst, jerkface,” I snarled.

“Ye ready?” Jasper asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I muttered.

“I will start with the smallest and the brightest,” he said, his voice rising two octaves, “and I will make you watch the light go out of each one. The child and her cat. The red-haired girl. The mother of three. Your own mate’s dear cousin behind her bar.”

Feigning nonchalance, I shrugged. This was a part of the gambit. I had to keep my trembling to a minimum and piss him off royally. “Holy hell. Why do all bad guys have to monologue so hard?”

He leaned toward me, spittle flying. “You will build my dome under the Cold Moon, Multimorph, and you will lose. When you are unmade, I will still have all of them, and I will keep them, and there will be no one left who remembers they were ever anything else. I will live forever.”

“Tomorrow, then. Not before,” I said. “Under the fullest point of the Cold Moon. I’ll build the dome, and we’ll see who’s still standing when it comes down. You’ve foretold it, asshole.”

I turned my back on him, on the hurricane, on the shelf of dead animals, on the tired, evil creature that wanted me to fill the hole in its heart. Then Jasper and I marched out of the Void the way we had walked in, one foot in front of the other with our spines straight. Blood ran down my lip. I did not let him see my shaking until I’d crossed the line back into the living world.

Logan’s arms clamped closed around me, and he turned so the line of the living couldn’t see my face. Then I shook. Fucking hell. I convulsed.

Well, I’d done it scared… which Mom always said was the only kind of brave that counted.