Page 81 of Shifters Reckoning

The barrier didn’t fall.

“I’ll tell you, since we’re doing this,” I began. “Every day since No Man’s Land, there’s a voice in the back of my head telling me how much bigger my power could be. Death becomes me. That’s the thing I hear when I close my eyes, and I am terrified that when this is over, whoever’s left standing in my skin won’t be a man you’d cross a room for. Now you’re pulling away, and I don’t know what to do.” I dragged in a breath. “That’s my side. On the table. The way we said. Now you.”

Her eyes filled, but she didn’t let any tears fall. My magnificent, stubborn mate dammed the flood back with the set of her jaw.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“You can. You made me promise⁠—”

“I know what I made you promise.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and when she lowered them, she sagged. “You think I don’t feel the separation between us every second? I put it there. You think it doesn’t cost me? I hate it,” she spat, “but there is something I know now, Logan, about what I am, about what it costs to be the one who fixes what Acheron breaks. Still, I would give this to you. I would give you all of it. I would open every door I’ve got and let you carry half of this… this… this…” She paused and lifted her chin. “Except I can’t.”

“You can.”

She shook her head, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I can’t tell you why I’m quiet without telling you all of it, and I can’t tell you because he’s in there, Logan.” She pointed at my head.

The floor tilted.

“He burned it into you in No Man’s Land,” she said, gentle as the healer she was, setting a broken bone. “The premonition. My death, on a loop, in your head. That’s not a scar, love. That’s a window. Anything I put in your head, I might put in his. Every word I give you is a word I hand to the one who’s coming to eat us. The door isn’t me shutting you out.” A tear got away from her, finally, one, and she let it roll over the beautiful, tortured planes of her face.

Shit, Emma. I love you. I can’t live without you. My wolf howled while I said nothing.

“It’s the only wall in our bond he can’t see through, and I must keep it up, and I can’t even tell you that much without… without…” She stopped, then laughed without humor. “Without telling you that much. Which I just did. God.”

I stood there in my own study with my heart coming apart. Somehow, she’d learned about the premonition, and she’d been protecting our war. I finally understood what she’d been carrying alone, and the worst of it, the very worst of it, was that she was right to put the whole world ahead of me… ahead of us.

Fuckity, fuck, fuck.

I reached for her through the bond anyway and put my hand flat against the wall she’d made like someone would press their palm to a window when the person on the other side was walking away.

Her chin quivered, and she pressed back.

I felt it, felt her soul. There. Just beyond reach.

But she kept the door shut.

“Emma—”

“Please.” The multimorph didn’t say please. “Don’t make me choose between the door and you. I’ll lose. We all will.”

I didn’t make her choose. Couldn’t. I was an alphahole, not a monster.

Instead, I crossed the room and put my arms around her, and she stepped into them, trembling. We stood in the aftermath of our own honesty and held on to the only thing left that Acheron hadn’t yet found a way to poison…

Our connection. Our fating. Our forever.

“There will always be an after,” I whispered into her rainbow hair. It was still true. It was the only true thing I had left to give her.

She didn’t answer, but it was enough, and I held her tighter, glad for the separation between us as more fear crept into the corners of my being.

Beneath the Rise of the Beaver Moon

The moon rose over the mess hall. Each decorated table had its own Thanksgiving theme, and each place setting had been constructed into a work of art. Red and yellow autumn leaves had been scattered between the plates.

That had been Sophia’s doing, and Phil’s, and more than a hundred frightened shifters who had needed something productive to do, anything that wasn’t waiting while the warriors prepped for war. They had obstinately prepared the only way they could.

If the horde was coming to crash our holiday, then, by God, we would have the holiday first. Trestle tables ran the length of the mess hall, end to end to end, dressed in makeshift tablecloths, foraged from a war camp… drop cloths, mostly, from my own trucks. Emma’s table was the only one with a white linen tablecloth.

Every seat had been filled. The raccoon alpha’s menu had been executed to the letter under protest, and nothing on it had been washed after cooking, which I counted as a personal victory. Dinner rolls by the washtub, Phil’s shifter-famous banana pudding, and the controversial sweet potatoes with Sophia’s marshmallows browned on top. The exact dish the shifters had bickered about a lifetime ago, back when the worst thing coming was a raccoon with opinions.