Page 131 of Shifters Reckoning

Between Bear Trees & Red Tail Territories

Emma

The landscape inside of what had been the Void came back to life one inch at a time. I could tell every inch of it because I held the seam now. The local authorities took credit for finding the solution, and the local news played along. Science won against the blight, dontcha know, and shifters decided to save our “big reveal” for another day.

The Void wasn’t a void anymore. That was all that mattered. By next spring, beneath the Pink Moon, it would be hard to tell where the Void had once been.

Two weeks after the Cold Moon, we summoned a conclave at the newly completed Gathering Place, and the first thing I did as the keeper of the new balance was to refuse to sit at the head of the table.

“Emma,” Torbin growled. “It is your right.”

“Yeah, well, there isn’t a head of the table anymore. That’s the point. Why do you think I had your bears haul the old council slab out and bring a circle table in instead?”

Torbin turned to Logan as if to ask him to do something about his mate, but Logan only chuckled and shrugged.

“Every clan must face every other clan, Torbin. I am the multimorph.” I winked at the old bear.

He bowed. “As you wish,” he rumbled.

Within the hour, shifters collected in the structure, and every seat had been filled. Olivia shoved her fingers in her mouth and whistled as loudly as she could. After the cacophony of voices died out, she gestured to the assembly. “Y’all shut up. Multimorph wants to speak, and she’s still worn out from the shit with Acheron, so don’t make her yell, and I won’t have to throw you out.” She nodded.

“Really?” I whisper-yelled at her as I stepped toward the front of the open-air amphitheater.

Olivia shrugged while they settled and turned their many-colored eyes toward me. “Multimorph is going to tell them how the world works now. They should listen.”

I raised my hands to the assembled shifters. “Thank you for agreeing to come. We couldn’t have beaten Acheron without you.” I paused. “Before the treaties, before one word of borders or votes or who owes whom what, I have a request.”

“Name it, Multimorph,” Torbin rumbled from his seat in the front row next to both my mothers and Logan.

“We hold a Death Rite. Here. Now. We acknowledge those we have lost. No bodies means no shrouds, but we can give the fallen the only rite left to offer. We can speak their names in the ancient, warded places their ancestors created.”

A murmur moved through the shifters.

The old bear went still. “Please repeat your request, Multimorph,” Torbin said. “It is most unusual.”

“I know exactly how unusual it is. That’s why it has to be first. We are about to spend what might be years arguing over who gets what. Good. We should, but not one of us gets to argue over the spoils of a war until we have stood together and said the names of the people who paid for it. The dead come before the deals.”

“Begin,” Torbin announced.

“Please do,” Marcus agreed.

Heads nodded across the conclave.

As planned, Dr. Wise stepped forward with the casualty list and ceremoniously handed it to me.

I took it and raised it high.

I read the ones I could and passed the page to Olivia after my voice gave out. Then she passed it to Flynn, who passed it to Levi, who passed it to a raven. Rachel, whom Acheron took into the woods alone. Dominic and Rosa, who sacrificed themselves at the south post so a wounded fox could reach us with the truth. The souls of No Man’s Land. Otis’s brother. The Ville Platte cats lost in the tunnel. Every name, out loud, until the reading of them was longer than any speech I’d ever given.

When we came to the hardest part of the list—the shifters Acheron had hollowed into husks and thrown at us as shadow mages—I started reading once more. At the end, I listed the shadow mages that Logan had re-formed into weapons.

Logan stood up. He didn’t have to. Nobody would have made him. He stood anyway, my alpha, in front of the whole shifter world, and he said their names with me.

At the end of the names, he added, “I unmade these souls with my own hands, before I understood what I was. They’re mine to carry. I’ll carry them the rest of my life, and I’ll say their names out loud every year we hold this Rite because the day an alpha stops naming his dead is the day he becomes something worth being afraid of.”

Nobody spoke.

Then Garrick, of the northern wolves, put his fist to his chest, the old salute, the one that predated all our clans, and one by one, every leader in Louisiana, every shifter in attendance, did the same for the man owning the worst thing he’d ever done.