Page 40 of Shifters Reckoning

If I called for him now, he’d come. He’d leave dozens of half-feral strangers, a construction site, and my mother, and Acheron would have gotten exactly what a nightmare was for. Fear was free. Making my people risk their safety… Well, that part was up to me.

I’m okay, I thought at the warding, not pushing it through, just setting it down where the bond could absorb it. Nightmare. Not news.

I lay back down and stared up at the ceiling. Riley was home in Willow Creek, sleeping behind her parents’ locks with headaches that were finally fading. Flynn’s foxes drifted past her house often. She was fine. She was guarded. The next time I stood in Red Tail, Flynn and I were going to have a long talk about whether guarded was the same thing as safe. I needed to be sure.

“You don’t get her,” I muttered aloud. “You don’t get any of them.”

Mom had always said snackies and nappies healed a million ills, so I ate the snack Torbin had left behind, drank half the jug of well water, and slept without dreaming again until a woodpecker landed in the branches for the day shift.

Acheron would never get any of them. Even if it killed me.

The Next Morning

“Let me see you shift,” I called to the group of twelve bear shifters assembled in front of me, mostly in a line in the clearing behind Torbin’s den.

A gust of wind burst through, and they crunched down before looming large in their animal versions. Several of them shook their fur, sending long strings of slobber flying in the burst of sunlight through the autumn leaves. Strings of spit wrapped their muzzles, and they snuffed at the air.

I turned in a slow circle and took an inventory of what I had to work with. Mass. Sweet mother of shifter pearl, their mass. Twelve bears standing shoulder to shoulder made a wall I could have built a highway on. The brisk morning steamed off their backs as if they were a row of parked engines.

Black bears, brown bears, one cream-colored giant who was probably kin to Torbin, all of them broader than anything I’d treated in my exam rooms and about a hundred times more patient. Bears endured. Ursids held the line. Bruins studied a rainbow-haired outsider who’d let shifter justice take an alpha’s head, and they waited, polite and unreadable, to see what I would do next.

Time to join them.

I didn’t give them the cheetah or the squirrel or any of the flashy stuff. Instead, I reached for the first form I’d ever taken, the one that had come roaring up out of me at a campsite in Magnolia State Park when a mountain lion had decided to make me its dinner. I let the wind and the colors crunch me down and remake me into the she-bear.

The line in front of me went still. Then the dirty-white giant huffed, a big, gusty, unmistakably approving sound, and twelve bears relaxed by one collective inch.

Note to self: when in Bear Trees, be a bear.

Some diplomacy I could accomplish without words. Thank freaking God.

We worked shifts until the frost burned off. Human form to bear form and back. A shifter who could change twice in a fight could heal in the middle of it, and Acheron’s mages wouldn’t stop swinging while we caught our breath. I made them time each other and made them shift lying down, midstride, half-submerged in the creek that cut across the back of the clearing. The newer, younger ones came up from every change ravenous, and a washtub of chicken cornbread sandwiches emptied.

That was where Otis came in.

He was the youngest of the twelve, and he trained because the attacks had targeted his family. The far side of the Bear Trees territory had burned while Acheron’s shadow mages had harvested whoever they caught, and Otis’s older brother had been on the wrong side of those assaults. His name lived on Dr. Wise’s list now. Otis hit each exercise first, left every drill last, and telegraphed every damn pivot with a dropped left paw that was going to get him killed.

“Again,” I commanded.

After the third time, I put his human nose down in the frost with a move Olivia had taught me back when I couldn’t hold a bo staff without bruising my own toes. Then I growled at him. “Your left paw drops when you turn. Dammit. A squirrel could see it from the next parish over.”

He shook himself and set his jaw. “Then I’ll turn faster.”

“Or you’ll turn smarter.”

So much to do, so little time.

He gritted his teeth, and he winced. His grief sharply scented the air.

Training to save an already-dead ghost was a helluva soul-sucking monster to live with, so I softened my disapproval. “We’ve got all week, Otis. I’m not going anywhere.”

It was midmorning, all of us human again, sweating in the cold, munching on cornbread, and arguing about footwork, when a raven crossed over the clearing. The approaching shadow made me wince, then brace for an attack.

Just a bird. Probably just a bird. It had come in high over the cypress crowns, circled once, twice, and slid away south without a single wasted wingbeat. The cornbread turned to sawdust in my mouth as I counted the ways birds had become a threat category. Nobody else so much as glanced up. Twelve warriors, the pride of Bear Trees, and not one of them had eyes anywhere above their own shoulder height.

“New drill tomorrow,” I announced. “Anybody got anything red?”

Torbin, who had watched the entire morning from his stump with the patience of continental drift, went into his hollow and came back with a strip of red cloth as long as my arm. “It was to be a quilt border,” he rumbled, in the tone of a man donating a kidney, “for a quilt meant to bring comfort to a grieving shifter.”