Page 76 of Shifters Reckoning

“You’ll need to take it easy and rest,” I said, smoothing my hand over her hair. “Take care of your healing.”

I hoped it would be enough. If she was anything like the other shifters, the minute she could stand, she’d be one of the first back on the front lines.

“Yes, Multimorph,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Her eyes fluttered closed.

Not one part of me understood how the shifters didn’t blame me for everything. Their lives had been normal until I’d come along. Now the human world bore down on us all, and Acheron wasn’t far behind.

I moved to the next. There was an instinct in a mother wolf that understood how to close a wound with nothing but her tongue and her patience. There was a power bears carried, a deep furnace calm, that could hold a broken body warm enough to keep its own soul from wandering off. Foxes knew precision. Their little clever paws comprehended exactly where flesh had been torn. Even the raccoon in me was good for something, all that maddening fussy dexterity turned to knots and sutures no needle could reach.

As I went, I held all parts of me at once, half a menagerie of healers braided into one, and I poured rainbow light down into flesh that drank it and gave nothing back.

Name by name. That was how I survived it, the only way I had found to survive any of it. Every warrior, each name an instrument, the whole tunnel became a song I refused to let go quiet. The Ville Platte cat with Della’s cheekbones. A Red Tail kit too young to shift, whimpering for a mother who was already three names up my list.

Fern had gone gray at the lips and furious about the fuss. I knelt in the mud beside the quiet, brave fox and hummed her frequency back to her until her breathing found a rhythm it could keep.

“Told you,” Fern slurred. “Report first.”

“Shut up and heal, warrior,” I said.

Something that was almost her old grin slipped over her face before she slid down into real sleep, the kind that mends.

Giselda’s voice echoed in the dimly lit interior beside me in an old spellwork chant. Each time I’d run out of energy, she’d grasp my upper arm and rasp more light into me.

Then she’d say, “Put your hands here.”

And I’d find another handful of light. I lost track of the hour, and I lost track of my own knees.

We lost one, a young cat, too far gone before I reached him. The energy inside him went slack under my palms, and I couldn’t make it stay.

Giselda sighed. “Shame.”

I sat back on my heels and let two tears fall. No more… because the corridor was still full of the living, and grief is a tax you pay after.

“That’s not on you, girl,” Giselda said harshly. The woman didn’t have gentle in her. She had truth. “You don’t get to grieve like a woman and heal like a god in the same breath. Pick one. The dead will wait.”

“Reckonings rarely do,” I said. I didn’t realize I was quoting Marcus until it was out of my mouth.

She cackled softly, and it was the ugliest, most welcome sound I’d heard all night.

By dawn, there was nobody left in that tunnel who was going to die. Twenty souls, and I’d bought nineteen of them another sunrise, and it had cost me everything I had and a good deal I didn’t. I crawled away on my hands and knees, glad Logan had gone. The air had turned thin and colorless with cold, and I made it as far as the roots of a half-fallen cypress before my body simply laid itself down without asking permission.

Not tired. Empty, the way a well ran dry, scraped clean, down into the part of me that had never been so parched, not since a mountain lion taught me what I was in a state park so long ago.

And a vision took me.

It didn’t come like a dream. Dreams I knew.

I’d been running from Acheron’s nightmares for weeks, always recoiling from Riley’s stolen scream. This was the opposite of running. This was reality yawning around me as though it had been waiting for this moment.

I stood in an ancient dark, the air older than the cypress, more archaic than the dens or the wards we’d built to fence the world. My bare feet rested in the hollow of stone worn smooth by water, in a light that had never once needed a sun.

The rocks matched the linking stone. It must have been where the linking relic had been born, fashioned in preparation, where the square stone that had turned to crystal beneath me had first been formed.

Below Wolf Moon Cave, the primal, instinctual part of me understood, though no one had ever spoken of the place to me. This was where the first shifters raised the Veil.

In the glow, a figure waited.

The shape was me in a mirror. Each form I’d ever held rested in her eyes, and every form I never would, rainbow, shadow, feather, and fur, folded down into the one who turned her face to me and spoke with a voice I felt in my own marrow before I heard her.