Page 77 of Shifters Reckoning

You are the culmination, she said. Every emergence since the first. The old power seeded down through all the blood, finding its long way home. You were born to save. You were born to end.

“I know what I’m for,” I answered. Multimorph first. Terrified woman second. “I’ve known since before the squirrel alpha lost her head under my watch. Tell me the part I don’t know.”

She gestured with an expression that might have been approval and might have been grief. With time, I was learning it was usually both.

What Acheron breaks can be mended, she said. The Veil can be healed, the harvest unmade, the taken who were never truly consumed set free, but mending is not unmaking, child. To close what he has torn, the one who mends it must give a thing she cannot get back. The old ground took its price from us once. It will take one from you. This is not a threat.

A shiver went through me that had nothing to do with cold. I’d stood in enough exam rooms and delivered enough impossible news to enough trusting faces to know the sound of a diagnosis that didn’t have a good ending. I’d just never been the one on the table.

“What price?” I asked.

That is yours to meet, not mine to name, but the road, at least, I can lay plain. The road has rules, and the rules will keep you alive long enough to reach the Choosing.

She stepped closer, and her light came with her.

The way opens only to you. Blood of the culmination, and no other blood at all. Hear this and carry it whole. You may take no one his hand has ever touched. Not the mate whose mind he burned a version of the future into, she said.

Logan’s face moved through my mind… Logan on his knees in No Man’s Land with a premonition seared into his mind, me dead in a dome of my own making, him unable to reach me. He watched as I died.

Oh, fucking hell. My heart twisted, and my knees threatened to buckle. How had he been carrying the weight of this nightmarish future alone? He knew about my nightmares. How had I not learned about his?

But I didn’t have time to work through it as the figure went on. Not the uncle who carries his sister’s link in his skull.

There was Marcus, blind and proud, his fractured mind entwined with someone else.

Every soul he has marked is a thread he can pull. Bring one, and you carry his eyes into the one place he must not see, his hand into the one lock he must not reach. The road that saves becomes the road that ends. Do you understand?

“I understand,” I said, and I despised how well. “This is mine and mine alone. Heard.”

Then go and find your Choosing, Multimorph, she said, already disappearing. And whatever you decide, choose it as you have spent this night. Freely. This is the only way that has ever been power.

I came out of it with frosty tears in my eyelashes and Giselda’s cane prodding my shoulder.

“You were somewhere, somewhere other, girl,” she said, peering down at me with knowing eyes. “Was it a true one?”

“True one?” I echoed, my voice weak to my own ears.

“Vision.”

“Yeah, sure.” The sun rose gray and broke through the shattered trees. Nineteen shifters were breathing behind me. Somewhere north of there, my mate was tucking rescued children behind wardings and reaching through our bond for my warmth. “It was true.”

“Then you’ll do what it wants, and you’ll do it your own wrong way, same as always.” Giselda thrust a piece of dried meat and a heel of bread into my hands. “Eat. Whatever it asked of you, you can’t pay it fainting in the mud.”

I ate. The way opens only to me.

Fine. I’d marched into worse alone.

But I couldn’t walk it by myself. I would need someone who could watch my back, who could see, fight, and leave the enemy blind. I’d need someone who could read the old pages and tell me which trap was which, and I couldn’t take anyone Acheron had ever laid a hand on.

I ran the roster the way I ran the wounded, name by name, and watched the list burn down to nothing in my hands.

Not Logan. God, not Logan. The man who’d cross a collapsed grave to reach me was the wrong shifter to carry into the dark. Acheron lived in Logan’s head now in a burned-in little theater that played my promised death on a loop, masquerading as a foretelling.

Not Marcus, whose skull his own sister whispered through.

Not Fern, not any of the wounded I’d just knitted shut. Every one of them had been raked by shadow work that left fingerprints.

Not Riley, tortured, mended, and marked whether she remembered it or not.