Page 132 of Shifters Reckoning

The living came home slowly, the way the green came back to the Void.

Cora resurfaced a little more each week. The foul thread Acheron had braided through her mind unwound the way Marcus’s did, strand by strand. There were bad days, and there were days she knew all our names, and there had been one afternoon in the Six-Mile infirmary when she studied me with those green eyes.

She said, “You have my grandmother’s stubborn chin.”

I had to leave the room to fall apart in the hallway. Getting her well had been one of the hardest, longest fights we’d had after Acheron.

And Eli. God, Eli.

He came out of the darkness a wide-eyed nine-year-old, and he arrived in Six-Mile as skittish as a feral kitten and got adopted on the spot by roughly the entire compound.

Sophia claimed grandmother rights before the boy had finished his first cinnamon roll, and dared everyone to argue. Dr. Wise appointed herself his second grandmother and gifted him his own notebook.

Marcus, my somewhat-blind uncle, taught him to hear a room, and the two of them would sit on the porch listening to the dark like other people watched television.

Eli had tried to call me aunt, once, politely, and I told him aunt was for people who wouldn’t eventually teach him how to ride a rainbow motorcycle, so he’d better just call me Emma. He had grinned for days. Though, I didn’t know what he’d do when it became clear I was his sister, not his aunt.

Marcus went home to Ville Platte, his sight seeping back a degree at a time as the corruption drained out of him. He saw shadows, then shapes, and then the blurred gold of a winter sun. He had returned to a homecoming, thanks to Logan and Della.

Flynn got his mate back. Bree danced into Six-Mile and turned into my mom’s top assistant in the mess hall. They planned to return to Red Tail as soon as their den was rebuilt.

East Nuttal confirmed Ahmie and Evie as co-alphas once the dust settled. They’d prefaced acceptance of the role as both of them or neither, never split, exactly the way Levi always said it would go. Then Levi appointed himself as their ambassador and moved half his things to Six-Mile to be menace-in-residence.

And Riley. Torbin’s delving had sealed her worst memories away to keep her whole. I could have unsealed them. There was very little I couldn’t reach anymore. I am the multimorph, after all. But I didn’t.

Instead, I sat with her in Vixen’s over an Animal Doctor for me and a Shirley Temple for her, and I gently explained the truth. There was a door in her mind, I could open it, and it was hers and hers alone to decide whether it ever got opened.

She’d stared at me for a long moment. “Will those things make me sad?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Then let’s leave it shut for now.” Then she’d waved at Sheila. “Can we get another round?”

Sheila was the loose thread. Logan’s cousin, human as a fence post her whole life. The week after the Veil healed, she leaned on the bar, squeezed her eyes shut, and a burst of wind circled her.

All the shifters in the bar reacted to the magic.

Sheila’s eyes popped open, and she gaped at me across the room. Her star tattoos crinkled, and she tossed her freshly dyed, festive red hair over her shoulder. “What the hell was that?”

“Latent, maybe. Emergent, maybe.” I shrugged. “Never too late to shift. You know that. Maybe the universe is buying you a Christmas present.”

Sheila grinned from ear to ear while Dr. Wise had a theory, a fresh notebook, and a gleam in her eye.

Logan

It was Christmas in Willow Creek, the first ordinary holiday any of us had had in ages. Vixen’s had been strung with lights and was loud with shifters pretending to be regular folks and regular folks who’d stopped asking why the downtown bar had gotten so popular.

Sheila poured Animal Doctors. Phil manned the grill. Sophia had commandeered the kitchen. It was, near as I can figure, the best night of my life, and I didn’t even know yet what was coming.

Sheila gestured to me. “You let me know if you need the recipe for that Morning After Green Drink. Non-alcoholic and great for your liver.”

“Will do,” I answered, waving over another plate of burgers.

After we’d all eaten, Emma stood up on a chair and raised her hands. “I’d like to announce that my practice will open in the new year. I’m ready to get back to mending all the creatures in Willow Creek, and Shannon and Riley are rehired.”

Cheers and applause reverberated through Vixen’s.

Shannon cupped her hands around her mouth. “We still can’t find the stapler.”