Page 92 of Shifters Reckoning

I hugged him and embraced Dr. Wise.

“Give ’em hell,” Jasper rasped.

“What he said,” Dr. Wise agreed. She smiled and settled on the ground with a pen and a journal she’d pulled from her bag. “That’s as much goodbye as I intend to record.”

Jasper guffawed.

Without another word, I squared my shoulders and turned to face the mouth of Wolf Moon Cave. Last time, Marcus had dragged the linking relic to the front of the cavern, and I’d never been farther than the entrance. The mages had made sure of that. Maybe that had been the point of their interference. If I had gone deeper, I might have discovered what I needed to defeat Acheron completely.

My footsteps seemed loud as I marched past the shallow entry room where Marcus and I had once played at being thieves, through the twilight zone where a corridor banked to the right, probably leading to where the linking relic had been. I moved on into the dark zone alone, switched on my flashlight, then onward toward the place where the floor dropped away and the real descent began.

Where the light faded, the traps began.

The first ward was like walking down the steps into the cold water of an unheated pool. It pressed against my skin. When I drew on my magic, the energy rushed over me and created a soft glow around me. A drop-off yawned in the dark ahead, probably too steep to traverse as a woman. I eased to the edge and peered over. Definitely too deep to jump down into as a human. I settled on a large boulder and summoned my mountain lion form. A burst of wind brought more colors, and I morphed until I wore the big-cat shape…

…and the boundary warding peeled it off me like a wet coat.

I didn’t have a better word for it. My mountain lion came, but the magic-work rejected it. The form unmade itself and dumped me back to human at the lip of the drop. My heart slammed against my ribs, and my hands felt raw against the boulder.

A voice rumbled through the stone walls. Not this one. Not a borrowed one. Not one you took.

“I take all of them,” I answered. “That’s what I am. That’s what you made me. What would you have me choose?”

It didn’t respond.

I attempted a she-bear, but the warding stripped it before the fur finished forming and left me shivering.

I tried the raven, to fly over the edge and down the drop, and my wings peeled away from my body. I tried a rat, small enough to scurry between the rocks. No luck. A fox, a squirrel, a raccoon, even a cobra form I’d never tried before.

One after another after another, every animal I chose, every shape in the whole impossible menagerie of me, I offered each one to whatever guard protected that descent, and one after another, the cave took them off me and handed me back nothing but Emma. I was scraped rawer each time, until I stood at the edge of the drop with empty hands and no fur and almost no skin left to hide in.

Finally, finally, the truth of the trial sank in.

I couldn’t borrow my way down. That was the entire point. Each form I could be, I’d taken out of instinct, mimicking friends, mimicking attackers, and a thousand animals whose shapes had poured into me at emergence. Borrowed, all of them. The path didn’t want the multimorph, the culmination, the sum of stolen skins.

It wanted the one thing that was only ever mine, freely given.

Naked, I stepped over the edge of the drop as nothing but Emma Carter, the vet from Willow Creek with multicolored hair and a rainbow tattoo on her hip.

No claws. No scales. No wings. No fur. Just me, choosing to be exactly and only me, and offering myself. It was mine to give to protect everything I loved.

The ground opened under my bare human feet like it had been waiting hundreds of years for someone to figure out the secret. The earth swallowed me…

And it lowered me down into the heart of the world.

The heart of the chamber was the place from my vision, and I sat in the middle of it.

The stone cavern had been worn smooth by water, a hollow beneath the hollow where I’d started this journey. A light that had never needed a sun rose out of the floor itself, out of a break in the rock that I recognized the moment I saw it. It mirrored the same gash that ran through the sky above Six-Mile.

This was the entrance to the Veil, its root, its anchor, the source magic that linked to all other powers and energies in the shifters’ world. This was where the first shifters had made the distinction between human and shifter. This was where the linking relic had been drawn out of the earth.

I was not alone.

She was waiting for me by the light, and she wore my face. Not as a reflection of every form at once. This being was just me… or almost me. Same rainbow hair, same green eyes, same tattoo on the same hip with white fabric draped around her.

But she stood in the assured way that I almost never could pull off myself, and she smiled the way I’d caught myself starting to smile in the worst moments—at the gym, at the linking, at the girl in the flatbed trailer. She wore the clans’ symbols up her arms like armor burned into her skin. Forms danced in her eyes, all of them, bear and cat and fox and wolf and raven, not borrowed but owned, united but ruled. All the frequencies hummed through her.

“You’ve been so tired,” she said, speaking with my voice. “Barely holding them all together. Begging surly alphas to please, please get along.” She tilted her head. “You don’t have to beg. You never did. You can touch the power inside every shifter. You can reach into a panicking girl and gentle her. You linked a whole army and threw an attacking horde into the forest. Why unite what you could simply hold?” She spread her arms, and the animal forms rippled over her like water. “No more traitors. No more Salalis. No one could betray you if no one had a will. No more names on your list. Just peace. Your peace. Forever.”