Page 112 of Shifters Reckoning

I stayed awake and guarded the bedroom, and I made a vow she was too asleep to hear. You’ll live even if I have to walk through an off-limits dome to save your life.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

emma

The Void Edge

The Eve before the Cold Moon

Two Weeks Later

As planned, I called a truce in all the packs and clans, and I’d forbidden any aggressive action toward Acheron. I wasn’t going to walk into a room to fight a man without first seeing where he stood.

After Logan read through the emails Olivia had been keeping from him, he was about to tear the local sheriff a new one. Or Olivia. He hadn’t decided which. But I had extracted a promise of truce from him too. He wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone else until after I got back from my confrontation with Acheron. Everything could go to shit later.

On the last evening before the rise of the Cold Moon, I had traveled to the edge of the Void under the protection of a white flag tied to a bo staff. I’d brought Jasper, Ahmie, Evie, Blaze, Izzie, John, Oliver, and a few others along.

Logan also waited at the center of the grouping, his jaw set. Torbin waited beside him, vast and grim. Marcus remained where Della had placed him, his blind face aimed south. She was next to him. The rest of the warriors flanked them on either side.

Now we stood at the murky edge of the Void. It had grown smaller, but it hadn’t disappeared, and darkness writhed inside it. A helicopter flew over, sending an airburst over me and the shifters who held the line of the living behind me, but the thick cloud blanketing the Void didn’t change at all.

I turned to my loyal fox. “It’s time, Jasper.”

“Aye, let’s give him your message.”

Are you sure about this, love? Logan sent.

No, I’m not, but we have to give him a chance.

We marched into the Void with our shoulders squared. Nobody stopped us or came running after us. When I summoned my magic, a cool breeze caressed my cheeks. Rainbow flames danced along my skin, and Jasper’s eyes glowed.

The gloom eased back from us as we moved through. I’d seen the Void on Jace’s screens and smelled it on Fern’s dying fur, but standing inside it was another thing entirely. It wasn’t fog, and it wasn’t smoke. It was the absence of life, and the wind that came off it carried the repugnant scent of decay.

Don’t. Don’t. I won’t be able to find you, Logan roared in my head.

I sent back the only thing that fit. I am the multimorph. Stay where I can find you, at least until it’s time for the dome.

Emma… He can’t be redeemed.

I must try.

Then take me with you.

This is the only way, Logan.

Without another word, I raised my flag, and we slipped deeper into the dead country to meet a dead man’s tenant.

Acheron sat in a clearing that had been a marshy cypress grove before he’d drunk it dry. His hollow court surrounded him. He had his hunched back toward me.

I’d expected robed mages, rows of them, their heads down, but that wasn’t what this court was. These beings stood in loose ranks around Acheron, dozens of them formed a perimeter, shifters he’d kept and slowly hollowed out. Men and women with black leaking through their eyes, standing too still, breathing when they remembered that they used to. Some of them still wore their animal forms. A bear had a blackened muzzle, part of the flesh sloughed off. Inky goo dripped on the ground in place of the slobber. A fox had no cunning left in its face, no glimmer in its eye.

When I marched toward the clearing, they parted for me, smooth, silent, unbothered. The way a creature makes room for another of its own kind.

I shivered. That recognition was the part that got under my skin and threatened to stay. Not the menace. His whole ruined household looked at the multimorph strolling into their master’s yard and didn’t tense or bristle. None of them treated me as a threat because they probably believed I was coming home.

Logan had wanted to come with me, but I knew seeing my mate would disrupt any long-shot chance I had at reaching the man inside the evil. Dammit. What if destruction was the only way forward?

Steady. You’re the multimorph. Multimorph first. Terrified vet a distant second.