Page 93 of Shifters Reckoning

For fuck’s sake, I want it.

For one long breath in that ancient light, with my heart still aching and my whole body scraped down to nothing but myself…

That was the part I would never tell Logan, or maybe I would, someday, when we were living our after and our hair had gone gray. Maybe when we were as old as Giselda.

I studied her, this version of me who never had to be afraid again, who never had to watch another warded haven fall or repeat another name into the dark, and I craved her so badly it frightened me more than Acheron ever had.

Then I remembered Salali’s head rolling in the dirt because a council I’d empowered had chosen death freely, and how freedom was the whole reason each choice had ever meant anything, and how a world where I controlled it all myself would be a world without free will, without choice. That wouldn’t be peace at all.

She was just Acheron’s dream with better hair.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want peace like that. I don’t want to control any of them.”

She kept smiling. “You’ll come back to me and ask me for it all. They all do, in the end. It’s what the power is for.”

“It’s what the power could be for.” I stepped past her, toward the gap in the floor, toward the bright white light. “I’m the multimorph. I don’t control shifters. I stand between them and the one who would.” I glanced back at her once. “Nobody should reach into a soul and control a being without asking. Not Acheron. Not me. If any multimorph ever tells you it should be different, you send her to me, and I’ll explain it.”

She flickered, and the animals sloughed off her like a shed skin. Then she disappeared, and I was alone at the root of the Veil with rainbow light coming up through my hands.

And then the first shifters spoke… Not one voice. All of them. They were a chorus, older than any of the clans, older than the separation we’d built to fence the world.

You refused the crown. Their voices roared like rushing water.

“I did,” I answered.

A vibration rolled through me, from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. It might have been relief, and it might have been grief. Maybe, with them, it was always both.

Good. The last one who wore it is why we need you, but you cannot leave here the way you came, Culmination, because now you know the truth, and the truth brings responsibility.

The light poured up through the crack in the stone, spread over me, and seeped into me. I saw everything all at once as the whole history dropped into me—the old power, seeded down every bloodline since the first shift, scattered across thousands of years of shifters being born, struggling to survive, and dying. All of it, finally, gathered itself home… in me. The multimorph.

You were born with the key to the Veil in your blood, they said. You are the only living creature who can lay hands on the boundary itself. Here, you can mend what the corruption has torn. Here, you can close the wound and send Acheron back to the dark that made him. Or, if you choose, you can finish the tearing he began and let two worlds bleed into one. The key opens both locks. It always has.

“I’ll mend it,” I said. “Obviously. Tell me how.”

They drew out the spellwork task thread by thread, bit by bit, and that was when I fully understood why the page had been destroyed.

Mending the Veil was not a spell I could cast. It was a thing I had to become. To close the seam, the culmination must give herself into it and pour every drop of the gathered power back down into the boundary. Here. Now.

All the bloodlines that had found their way home to me would come apart again along the seam of the world, and the woman they’d become—the vet, the rainbow, the daughter, the mate—would be the mortar in the wall. Emma Carter, spread like a bandage across the boundary between two worlds, holding them apart forever…

They had paid it themselves, once, the first ones. When they raised the Veil, one of them had gone into it to hold it up. That was the cost. That was the great sacrifice the vision had warned me about. Not death. Worse than death.

To save everyone I loved, I would stop being anyone at all.

I recalled the bar where I’d met Logan, the mountain lion attack that had triggered everything, the burned multimorph’s tree from the previous Gathering Place, and the note I’d left on his desk against a crocheted doily made by a grumbling bear.

So much life had come before… What would come next?

Logan living with an empty mate bed. Sophia losing the last family she had. Riley and Shannon in Willow Creek, never understanding what it had cost to stay ordinary. All the warriors in Louisiana with a doctor and a fox waiting at the mouth of a cave…

Dr. Wise, with papery hands and fierce eyes, at the foot of the old oak, had told me, “It’s an invitation to write a different ending.”

I didn’t know yet how I would accomplish it. It was an equation that didn’t have a solution. Unbalanced. Shit. I didn’t have a better answer, not yet, not with the light in my hands and the cost laid out plain and true and terrible.

Maybe there wasn’t a better way. Maybe the price was the price, and I would walk back into the war with my eyes open, the way one of the last multimorphs had walked into hers. She’d begged to be killed rather than be used, and I finally understood it wasn’t despair. It was her writing the only ending she could fathom. The multimorph’s tree…

But I wasn’t at the ending yet. I was at the beginning of the end, which is a different part entirely, and Dr. Wise had spent her whole widowed life teaching shifters the difference between a story that was finished and a story that had been hidden.