Page 78 of Shifters Reckoning

Not Olivia, the beta Acheron had once held in his grip back at Site 52. Half the warriors I loved were threaded through with his touch, and the vision had just told me every thread was a leash.

What was left was almost nobody.

Giselda, a wily old vixen too near her own ending to spend her energies on a death march. I wouldn’t let her do it, even if she volunteered.

So, that left Jasper, who’d handed my mate a bell and lost no part of himself to the dark, and Dr. Wise, a bespectacled human historian who braked for archives and had never once been close enough to Acheron for him to notice she existed.

That was the shortlist. That was the whole of it. Two untouched souls in a war, and the horror of it sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

I was going to have to leave. Quietly. Soon. Before the Beaver Moon, before anyone could talk me out of it or, worse, insist on coming. Insisting on coming was exactly what everyone I loved would do, and every one of them would be a knife I handed to our enemy myself.

Fuck. I was going to have to leave without telling my mate why. It would rip his heart out, but I had to find a perfect moment where I could escape.

Logan would demand. Logan would feel me pull away, and he would reach for me through the bond the way he reached for everything, his hand out, his whole self offered. If I answered him honestly, if I told him where the road went and why he couldn’t walk it, I’d pour the map straight into the one mind Acheron might already own a window into. The rule wasn’t just about who I brought. It was about who I told.

Since we’d cleared the air between us, we’d promised each other honesty. The connection between us had been the one place in the whole screaming world where I never had to perform as the multimorph. Now I had to lie my face off.

I found the warm, furnace-bright line of Logan, reaching for me the second he sensed me stir. Trust me, love, I sent. Then I built a wall in front of it. Gentle. Deliberate.

On the far side of our link, I felt him startle. His question rose, instant and afraid. Emma?

I didn’t answer. Instead, I mentally closed the door on the bond, a door pulled quietly shut in a house where we’d promised never to lock a room again.

“There will always be an after,” I whispered to the man on the other side. “This is the only way to get our after.”

Then I buried the ache down where it couldn’t slow my hands, and I went to find Jasper, but the war found me first.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

logan

Six-Mile

Two Days Later

Icouldn’t build a house to hold twice the people it was framed for. I’d spent twenty years telling clients exactly that in exactly those words, right before they asked me to do it anyway.

Six-Mile had been framed for a pack. By the time the survivors arrived, my compound held hundreds of warriors, a few hundred civilians, and now, the wounded remains of two clans who’d learned the hard way that warded ground only held until Acheron reached deeper than the map said he could.

So, we did the thing we did when the framing wouldn’t stretch. We overloaded it and prayed the joists held. Then I searched for Emma in our link. Her heart hadn’t come back.

We were three to a bed again, with four to a bed closing fast. The infirmary was now standing room only, cots wedged so close a healer had to heal from the head, and the tiny homes I’d been so proud of, turnkey and one-of-a-kind, had blown right past their design load. Emma’s rule was a memory now. We housed frightened people wherever there was a floor. I told them all we would sort out clan diplomacy later, if there was a later. Though, I kept the last part to myself.

Which was how I ended up refereeing a bathroom while trying to drink my coffee.

Emma?

She didn’t answer. Forty-eight hours of her not answering. She was pulling away from me, and it terrified me. I took a sip of java and attempted to focus on the bird in front of me.

“The raccoon fills the sink with gravel,” the raven said in the mess hall, arms folded, with the offended dignity only a raven can manage. “Every morning. And then he stands guard over it.”

“It’s a settling bed,” said a bear who could have worn the raven as a hat. “For the water. Your kind wouldn’t understand hydrology.”

“You each get a third of a bathroom,” I said. “Work it out like adults, or I’ll assign mediation to another bear.”

I’d meant it as a threat. The universe, which has a sense of humor I’d never appreciated, had somehow heard a suggestion. Now there was, in fact, going to be another bear in the bathroom that a raven, a raccoon, and a bear already shared.

Against every law of nature I knew, our fragile peace was holding. Barely. With spite, gravel, and the truce my own bad joke had accidentally built.