Page 123 of Shifters Reckoning

Everything we’d never managed to say out loud poured across our link in both directions at once. All the sparring on the mats, every midnight in our bed, the breaking of the wall between us, the price and the choosing, the storm, and the anchor.

Race ya home.

There will always be an after.

I love you.

I love you.

Come back. Come back. Come back.

Then it was just us, forehead to forehead, in the frost, while an army formed around us.

You’re my anchor, I sent him.

You’re my storm, he sent back. You reach for whatever you have to reach for. I’ll be there. I won’t let you lose. Not ever. Not you.

Then he lifted his head, and he moved to the front of the army.

And I joined him as the multimorph.

We marched south under the Cold Moon into the Void under the wound in the Veil, and I carried the stone Dr. Wise had given me.

A thick cloud hung over the depression in the earth exactly the way it had been in Logan’s premonition. The seam had been pried open, and it wept a sickening light. My own stubborn stitch strained across the worst of it.

Beneath it, the clans of Louisiana assembled as one people. Torbin. Flynn. Marcus with Della at his shoulder. Garrick’s northern wolves closest to the front, first honors, the point of the spear. Jasper. Hundreds of other shifter warriors collected to stand against this threat. All gathered in one place to hold the perimeter around the dome while I marched in to confront Acheron alone. Gratitude rushed through me.

Acheron was already there, waiting, the evil, undead wizard wearing a grieving man’s skin. His hollow court stood behind him, and the shadow mages waited in the ground.

I didn’t give a speech. Bad guys monologued, not multimorphs. I strolled out into the space between the two armies, and I raised my hands.

“So,” Acheron wheedled. He moved closer to me. “You came. Good. I do so hate to be kept waiting.”

“Let’s get you back to bed, old man,” I said. “You look tired.”

Acheron’s upper lip curled, exposing blackened teeth. “The dome, if you will, according to the rules of a duel.”

Carefully, I drew on a rush of shifter energy. A burst of wind exploded through the opposing armies, and colors danced across my vision. I built the dome myself. Those were the terms for a death duel. I drew a boundary out of the earth, constructed of rainbow light that hardened as it rose from the ground. Finally, the dome clicked closed, locking everyone I loved outside and me inside with Acheron.

Now I didn’t have access to any of the others.

No shifters. No packs.

The first part of the premonition had been made real, exactly the way Acheron had shown it to my mate in No Man’s Land. Me, in a dome of my own making, alone with Acheron, the monster… while a hundred yards away, Logan stood beyond a boundary he couldn’t cross, where he couldn’t do a single thing but watch.

Except he wasn’t only watching.

I felt him at the far end of the bond, the anchor for my storm, and I covered a smile. He was the one thing the dome couldn’t wall out because our connection didn’t run through the air. It ran through us.

Then the battle opened like a struck match.

Acheron came at me from the center of a hurricane. “You are mine!”

I met him in the midst of a storm of my own.

Balefire. His left hand came up half a beat before his right.

Olivia, you beautiful genius, you were right.