Page 83 of Shifters Reckoning

According to plan, Levi streaked along the ridgeline of the mess hall roof, his small paws sending scratching noises across it. Then the sounds disappeared as he leaped into the canopy of the forest, drawing Acheron’s attention upward.

Behind the squirrelly chaos, the bears lumbered to their feet. Torbin’s people, with Otis at the center of them, moved to the perimeter of the mess hall and pushed the breakaway walls outward. The barriers crashed down, and the night air rushed in. Each bear took up space in an opening, roaring and slinging spittle over the ground.

The cats flowed outward. Della led the Ville Platte warriors while blinded Marcus waited in his seat, and a hundred silken cats rolled out of the mess hall. As Acheron’s forces moved in, the cats screamed and snarled. Claws and teeth tore open the shadow-mages’ throats.

Myriad foxes darted out into the spaces between. Flynn’s Red Tails sliced the evil vanguard into pieces, felling at least twenty oily shapes in short order. If the mages made it past the cats, the foxes and bears took up the fight.

Squirrels distract. Bears hold. Cats finish, and foxes lie.

I’d made it a camp proverb, a chant to give frightened shifters a mantra to repeat as we faced Acheron. Now they proved it with their bodies, and it was working. If I hadn’t already been crying, I would’ve started.

We didn’t stop the tide. We only slowed it. The seam in the sky widened.

So, I did what I always saved as a last resort, the primal Dr. Wise had begged me not to do until she’d read the last of her missing pages. Reaching out, I gathered the strands of energy from each of the shifters, and…

I linked them. All of them.

Not with a relic stone that did the amplifying for me. No. Across the battlefield, with only my magic, I located every clan’s frequency at once. The threads of hundreds of fighting souls joined with my power, and I pulled.

Energy tsunamied up my spine like floodwater with a purpose.

I stopped being myself alone. My own forms careened through my head, though my body didn’t physically change. Colors bled together, cheetah to she-bear to fox to raven to… to… something I didn’t have a name for. Light formed around me. Borrowing the warding instinct from every being that stood between the threat and our home, I reformed all of it into a living wall along the south fence.

Not magic laid over the warriors. The warriors themselves, their strength and mine braided into one form, an obstacle that held. When a bear planted their feet, I felt it in my own. When a fox faked a move, I flinched to the side. We were, for one impossible stretch, exactly what I’d stood on a flatbed trailer and promised them we’d become.

One people. One army. One.

Still, it wasn’t enough. The Veil groaned, and the seam in the sky yawned wider. Acheron’s hands twisted on the magical net of the world, and every ward tied into that net, every relic stone, hollow, and earth-den in Louisiana, my own barrier included, shuffled toward coming undone all at once.

That was when the revelation hit me. If the Veil went, our wall went. If the wall went, we all died. Simple as a horrible, terrible diagnosis.

“Hold the line!” Logan roared, his body enveloped in bright silvery white. “Emma, do it now!” He fought three shadows, slicing through them with his light.

I dropped to my knees and pressed my palms flat against the thin floor of the mess hall. My hands heated, and colorful magic boiled between my fingers. More… There had to be more.

Deeper than the conclave stone that had nearly killed so many of us.

Deeper than any drill I’d run on the training floor.

Deeper, even, than the warehouse where I’d once put friends on the ground because I couldn’t hold what I’d called.

At the edge of my vision, Blaze screamed in an equine neigh, and Izzie the swamp rabbit crumpled. John and Oliver howled. Risking the quartet of younglings I had brought into Six-Mile for shifter training nearly forced me to release the power I held.

“Culmination,” the woman in my vision had called me. “Every emergence, all the old blood and magic finding its way home.” Standing over the well of power in the earth below with the Veil coming apart above me, I finally understood what it had meant and comprehended the price mentioned in the warning.

I did not have one second to spare for fear. I reached into the well of power with both hands and forced the energy upward to the gash in the Veil. My skin burned as though I’d stepped into a fryer.

I gritted my teeth and bit back a scream. Fuck, it hurts.

Logan turned to face me, and his eyes widened, his battle forgotten. His expression twisted, and pain pulled at his face. Emma! No!

I grasped the edges of the wound in the world and refused to allow the injury Acheron craved. I would heal what had been broken, remake what had been unraveled.

Multicolored light came up out of the earth, out of me, and out of every linked soul on that fence line. The light exploded in Six-Mile, streamed into the atmosphere, and coalesced into a great sphere… a second, closer rainbow moon.

Then it slammed outward in a ring that lit the underside of the boiling clouds and zapped frosted grass to steam. The detonation threw the entire horde back off our ground and into the forest beyond our boundaries. Our magic circled the laceration, and I threaded strands at either end, stitching it as best I could. Then I shoved it full of knots of magic, as though I were packing a wound.

Then I smiled. It was enough. For now.