Page 124 of Shifters Reckoning

The dome lit up as though it had been struck by lightning.

Cheetah. Raven. She-bear.

“Die, you bastard!” I slammed down where he’d been a moment before. Form to form to form, faster than I’d ever shifted before, the colors ran together into one long smear.

He threw death at me, and I threw life magic and living forms back at him. He was old, vast, and certain, while I was fast, furious, and brand-new. For a while, for a glorious, terrible while, we were even.

A fireball left my hands and exploded against him, singeing the corners of his robe.

His face peeled back in a grimace, and he shot a blackened fireball at me.

I formed a shield and deflected it. It exploded against the curve of the dome.

Balefire shot from my palms.

He threw his head back and absorbed the onslaught.

Shoving my hands into the dirt, I drew magic through the tainted earth, and multicolored flames exploded over my skin. Wind rushed through the dome, swirling faster and faster.

Acheron leaned into the gale and sent his own. Rainbow life magic mixed with blackened death and swirled in a whirlwind that lifted us both into the air.

Then I pulled the spell taut, and it detonated. The blast slammed us both against opposite sides of the container. I slid to the ground, the breath knocked from my lungs.

He dropped and groaned before jumping back to his feet, cackling. Another blast of balefire left my hands. It slammed into him, and he crumpled. Blood dripped down my nose.

Each attack I spent, he simply weathered. The ancient corruption under the tired man, patient as geology, waiting for the storm to spend itself the way it had spent every storm before mine. He didn’t have to beat me. He’d learned that a long time before I was born. He only had to outlast me until I reached for the thing I’d have to reach for, the only thing big enough to end him, and paid the price the histories flinched from writing down.

Balefire caught my side. It burned through me, and I faltered but didn’t fall.

“The victory is mine,” he crowed.

“Don’t count your chickens, asshole,” I yelled.

But I felt the premonition closing its hand around the moment, felt the future Acheron had rehearsed a hundred times sliding into place around me like the dome had. Inevitable. Sealed.

We were almost to the part where I exploded the ground beneath him and achieved nothing. This was the sequence where he wrapped his hands around my throat and the bond shrank to emptiness, making Logan wish for death.

I knew the script, so I knew exactly how this was foretold to go.

So I did the one thing Acheron didn’t expect.

I stopped fighting his way.

I refused to use animal forms against him. I planted my feet in the earth with a balefire wound in my side. Then I shoved my hands into the earth and drew on the primal energy. I reached down to the bottomless well I’d found in Wolf Moon Cave, to the whole gathered heritage of every emergence since the first shift. All of it, all of them, thousands of years of old power finding its way home.

I knew exactly what the first shifters said it would cost.

With my mate’s steady hand at the far end of our bond and a whole ordinary world worth keeping folded into my chest like armor, I reached for all the energy I could, choosing it freely.

I dragged every drop into my body, and I clenched my teeth against the rush of power I nearly couldn’t control. Rainbow light filled the dome, and Acheron’s form disappeared in the brightness.

I sent magic into the rounded stone Dr. Wise had given me. Then I sent a stream straight for him.

I am the multimorph.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

logan