Page 84 of Shifters Reckoning

The seam in the sky didn’t close, but it had stopped widening. It caught on my double stitch, and the edges held. I’d managed it. The patch, the stitch, and the magic it had taken to give us more time.

I released the flood and sagged.

Then the well collected its price, and the light went out, and so did I.

Oh. My heart stopped.

The drum in my chest halted. The sensation of a flurry of movement around me followed. Yelling. Screaming. Crying?

The camp roared.

Olivia muttered curses.

“Aye,” Jasper whispered.

Over it all, Logan’s voice pulsed in my head in time with the heartbeat that should have been. Emma, Emma, Emma. Hands moved over me, magic worked through me.

One lurching beat at a time, my chest moved, and my heart was forced back to beating.

“Emma. Emma. Come back. Come back to me. Come back. Don’t you dare…” Logan’s palms wrapped my face, and tears slid over my cheeks. His? Mine? I couldn’t tell.

But I opened my eyes to the Thanksgiving wreck. The long tables were kindling. Sweet potatoes, Phil’s banana pudding, drop cloths, decorations made of autumn leaves, all of it flung and trampled. Waiting had caused this… Avoidance had been my mistake.

Above me, blotting out the moon, was Logan. His face was ashen, and his hands had moved to my chest. “There she is,” he breathed, and his relief in it nearly finished what the well had started. “There she is.”

“Did it hold?” I rasped.

“You threw them out into the forest. They’re regrouping somewhere out there. Levi’s out locating them.” His thumb dragged gravy off my cheekbone. “You did it, love. You held the line.”

He helped me sit up, and I let him believe we’d succeeded. He’d earned three seconds of thinking we’d won. We all needed to believe we’d been triumphant.

“Take it easy, love,” he whispered close to my ear.

“Need to stand,” I managed. “Our people need to see me standing.”

“You sure about that?”

“I am the multimorph.” My wink seemed to settle Logan’s concern.

As I climbed to my feet, the truth filtered into me. The patch would not hold for long. My stubborn double stitch across the seam of the world bulged. It was a bandage over a wound that kept bleeding underneath. I’d triaged the sky and bought a night. Maybe two.

Acheron would test it until he broke it open again.

I could pour every soul in this camp into it a second time, a third time, and it would only ever buy nights, because I would be treating the symptom. The tear itself lived somewhere else, somewhere old and to the south, and it required surgery.

When I swayed, Logan tucked his arm around my waist. He raised his fist over his head. “The multimorph lives!”

All around us, shifters, warriors and civilians alike, cheered. The sound grew to a deafening rush. They believed we’d won, too.

I realized, standing in the ruins of a holiday with my mate’s shaking hands still on me, the journey had to be made. Tonight. While the horde still licked its wounds, the patch still held, and there was opportunity to slip away.

The way opens only to you. You may take no one his hand has ever touched.

Every night I delayed was a night the patch thinned, and Acheron’s army grew, and Louisiana filled up with more names for the casualty list. Nothing like a near death experience to solidify what had to happen next… like right now.

There was no version where I could stay and hold Logan or be gently talked into a better plan. There was only the hard path ahead and the fact that I had to be on it before the man beside me realized what was happening and stopped me.

“Emma?” As the cheer diminished, Logan turned to me, and his eyes narrowed. He’d felt my decision, maybe, or the sense of one. “What is it?”