Page 99 of Shifters Reckoning

“There’s my girl,” she said. “There you are. I don’t care what any of them out there think they’re looking at. I know my own kid, though. I’m never going to get used to all the nakedness.”

I laughed and scrunched my nose. “Modesty has no place among shifters. One of the most in-your-face differences between shifters and regular humans.”

“Never going to get used to it.” She thumbed a tear off my cheekbone. “You went somewhere terrible.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you make it back in one piece?”

“Most of me.” My voice cracked. “Mom, most of me made it back.”

She pulled my forehead down to hers, the way Logan did. “It’s enough,” she said. “Now come inside where it’s warm because I have things to tell you. Some of them are going to knock you flat, and I’ll be damned if my daughter’s going to hear them standing out in the cold.”

I let her lead me into the toasty interior. She poured coffee for us both before she began. The camp had held on while I was gone, but Olivia had been torn open and carried home in Logan’s arms.

Mom leaned forward. “One more thing?”

“What’s that?” I took a sip of coffee.

“Not sure it’s the best for last, but it’s the most important bit.”

I arched an eyebrow at her. “Well? Is it bad news?”

“Not sure yet.”

“You’re scaring me, Mom. Go on. Out with it.”

“Well, they brought a woman back from the raid,” she said. “She’s in a makeshift infirmary in the relic trove, behind warding. Torbin says he added a triple-warding. They say Acheron can’t get to her, and the mage can’t reach her. She’s… not well, sweetheart. Half of her is somewhere awful still. But when she surfaces, she talks.” She reached for my hand, and her thumb moved over my knuckles, steady. “She talks about a boy named Eli, and…” My mother, who had raised me alone through my father’s long dying and never once flinched, looked frightened for the first time in her life. “Emma, I think you should go see her. I think you’ll know why when you do. And I want you to know, before you walk in there, that it doesn’t change one single thing about whose girl you are. You hear me? Not one thing.”

I took a shuddering breath, placed my coffee mug on the table, and went to meet my birth mother.

The new infirmary was in the relic trove room at the back of the gym, and the thick warding slid over my skin at the threshold. Acheron’s reach died at the entrance, and I could feel that too, now, the way I felt everything: the hole where his weight should have pressed in but didn’t. I pressed my finger to the scanner.

She lay in a bed at the back of the room, the restraints on her wrists padded with velvety fabric, and I knew her before I reached her. Not by her face, though her face was a wrenched, exhausted version of one I’d seen in Marcus. No, I knew her by scent.

Family. That was the only word for it. Under the rot and the sour reek of a body that had been used hard, there was a scent I recognized instantly in my bones. Blood of my blood. Though Marcus had never smelled like family, she did.

I’d spent years as the adopted daughter of a man and woman who had loved me as their own, and I hadn’t missed her, but my chest still ached. She was the reason I was here.

I pulled an overstuffed chair to the bedside. Her eyes were closed, moving under the lids.

“Hey,” I said, useless, a vet talking to a creature too far gone to hear. “Hey. You’re safe. You’re behind the warding. He can’t reach you back here. Nobody’s going to reach you here without asking. Not him. Not me.”

Her eyes opened. They were green. Mossy, emerald, the exact green I’d spent my whole life seeing in the mirror and never once seen in another living face, because Sophia’s eyes are brown, and my father’s had been gray. Before he’d gone blind, Marcus had amber eyes.

She swallowed, and her gaze found me, landed on me, unfocused, then focusing, then… For one whole breath, they cleared. She looked at me the way a drowning soul catches sight of a coastline after ages at sea.

Her mouth worked.

I leaned in. Around us, the multilayered warding hummed, and Acheron’s weight stayed outside the trove where it belonged.

“My son,” she whispered. “Where is my son? Eli. Is he… Did you… my boy…”

“We’re going to find him… Eli.” I used his name because he had one now. I took her restrained hand in both of mine. I didn’t weep, because she didn’t have time for my crying and neither did I. “I promise you. I’m the multimorph, and I don’t make promises I won’t spend everything to keep. We’re going to get your son back. Do you understand me? We’re going to bring Eli home.”

Her expression changed with recognition, maybe, or perhaps just from the comfort of a vow. She sighed, and the other half dragged her back under before she could tell me her own name or ask mine.

I sat with her until her thrashing eased. Carefully, I healed what I could reach without pulling on the parts of her that were still Acheron’s. I gentled the raw restraint marks on her wrists, cooled the fever, and laid a little rainbow light into the places the grief had worn through. I didn’t try to heal the deep wounds. Not yet. Not until I knew how the knot was tied to her soul, the same way I hadn’t yanked on Marcus’s eyes. I couldn’t fix what I didn’t understand. Do no harm. They taught me that in vet school, and every day of the war had burned it into me.