Page 129 of Shifters Reckoning

I shook my head and groaned. “Corrupted magic isn’t a different substance, Logan. It’s the right substance used in the wrong manner.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Logan yelled. He tugged on my arm, but I pushed him away and focused on the gash in the Veil.

“Hold him,” I bit out. “He’s nearly used up.”

“You son of a bitch!” Logan marched to the whimpering Acheron and kicked him, knocking him onto his back. My mate landed another punch and dragged the weakened creature to his feet.

Carefully, I turned the threads back through themselves, stitching the Veil back together. I redirected the currents Acheron had been running—death into power, life into fuel, the obscenity on earth that the Void had become—and I reversed the polarity. Centuries of gathered power, every drop the culmination had poured into me, I gave it all back to every emergence still waiting to be born, to every future shifter, to those who still had to learn what they were made of.

The universe was on my surgery table, and I wished Shannon had been there to blot the sweat off my forehead. The dome shattered around us.

“No, no, no,” Acheron shrieked. “What are you doing?” He stared into the sky overhead. He tried to send a fireball rushing toward me, but it winked and died out. His robes whipped in the wind that now held less shadow.

“I’m unfucking the world. Can’t you tell?” My upper lip twisted as a rush of affection came through the bond. “I promised you I would.”

Acheron shrank, and his weeping vibrated the dome. “No, this isn’t what I foretold. No! You were her… We were to rule. How can you do this to me?”

Acheron had kept some of the captured shifters whole. He’d had to. He couldn’t consume the magic inside an already dead shifter, and he couldn’t hold a leash on a mother by threatening her with a son who no longer lived.

As I worked, trapped magic came loose, and stolen years returned home.

The unconsumed kidnapped shifters came free in a rush of released bodies. All around the wreckage of the dome, light poured upward out of the ground, cutting through the shadow mages’ energy. Shifters stood up, blinking in the cold, some human-formed, some animal-formed, and others half and half. Around the dome, our numbers doubled.

Eli! Marcus’s shout exploded in my head.

Fifteen yards away, Marcus groped through the air, following the scent of his nephew, a father’s worth of feeling in a man who’d never been one, all of it aimed at a small shape blinking and stumbling through the Void.

And a fox I almost recognized. Staggering, she came up out of the dirt, small and fire-engine red. She lifted her nose, and she caught a scent.

On the far side, a jubilant cry went up through Red Tail. Flynn made a sound I’d only heard once before, when her scent had washed through the link at the conclave. He made it again now.

“Bree!”

The scent he had never stopped searching for, the love he hadn’t been able to give up on. A mate the war had taken and not kept.

It’s beautiful, Emma. Logan squeezed my hand, and his relief flooded our bond. You saved the boy I tried to.

We’ll have to mend the casualty list too, I sent to him.

Gladly.

But not everyone could be returned. Even as my body drooped, faces danced in my mind, more that I would never be able to return. Acheron hadn’t simply caged many of them. He’d consumed them, spent their souls, and burned them down into the fuel that made him, and there was no fold to unwrap, no magical knots to untie.

Rachel didn’t come back. God help me. I searched for her, in the net of death magic Acheron had woven, because Phil had a question he’d been carrying since the night in a training gym. There was a tracing where she had been, where she should have been… a Rachel-shaped absence in the light. Dominic and Rosa, who’d sacrificed themselves at the south post to buy the road out for the runner who reached us, didn’t come back either. The souls of No Man’s Land didn’t come back. The ones already made into husks, already thrown at us as shadow mages, were gone.

Acheron put his face in his hands. “What have you done?”

“I’m not finished yet.”

Then I brought the edges of the wound in the Veil together, and I drew on all the magic I could pull through the cracks in the dome. The shifters around us gave willingly, and the magic flowed. Quickly, I worked a stitch that could never be broken and then released the threads. The Void was already dissipating.

But I didn’t close the Veil completely. I had one more thing to do.

I swayed.

Logan’s arm came around my waist. “Easy there,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

“Thanks.”