Page 43 of Shifters Reckoning

Bear Trees

One Week Later

“Ithink it’s nearly time for me to head to Red Tail,” I announced to Marcus, who sat in the corner of Torbin’s den in the rocking chair with a doily draped over one of its armrests and a cup of Earl Grey balanced on one of his knees.

Marcus inclined his head, his eyes pinned on the wall behind me, his pupils blown wide and useless. A week in Bear Trees hadn’t taught him to point his face directly at whoever he was talking to, mostly because he hadn’t cared enough to bother learning. “Running out on the bears already, niece?”

“Alleged niece.”

“Mmm.” He sipped without spilling a drop, which was more than I could say for myself most mornings. “You smell like the bayou side of my family when you get bossy. Did I mention that? It’s uncanny.”

“You’ve mentioned it each day this week.”

“And every day, it remains true.”

I dropped onto the bench beside the little kitchen table and wrapped my hands around my own cup. Hot tea in a thousand-year-old cypress hollow, poured from a kettle older than my mother, and served by a bear alpha who crocheted his own doilies… My life had gotten so odd that strange felt like an average Tuesday.

Multiple nights running, Acheron, wearing Riley’s skin, had chased me through my dreams. I’d given up on sleep around four each morning, padded past the composting toilet I still refused to dignify with a compliment, and found Marcus already awake in the main room, listening to the dark the way other people watched television.

“Come here,” I said. “Before the warriors show up.”

His jaw tightened. “No.”

“Marcus.”

“You’ve tried twice.”

“Third time’s the charm. I don’t make the rules.”

He held still while I crossed to him, which was as close as Marcus Steele ever came to saying please. Up close, his eyes resembled scratched glass, the sandy lashes throwing shadows over irises that didn’t track. I laid my fingertips against his temples.

Heat gathered in my palms. Rainbow light seeped between my fingers, and I followed the damage inward. Not the eyes. The eyes had been perfect since the first time I’d looked, and that was still the hell of it.

When I pushed, the foul damage shoved back. I released Marcus before it could take more from me than I could give, and I steadied myself on the arm of the rocker, breathing hard.

“Well?” he asked.

“Anything different for you?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Shadows. Shapes, maybe, if the light’s behind them.”

“That’s more than Monday.”

“It’s less than seeing.” He turned his face toward me then, unerring, as though he’d never needed eyes to find anything in his life. “Don’t spend yourself on me, Emma. You’ll want every drop of that for our battle.”

I crossed the room and sank back onto the bench. Outside, dawn grayed the gaps between the cypress knees, and above us, a woodpecker went to work. “When are you going home?”

“To Ville Platte?” His mouth curved downward. “An alpha who can’t meet his challengers’ gaze doesn’t get to keep being an alpha. Cats aren’t sentimental about weakness, so I can hardly complain about the outcome of the curriculum.” He grasped the doily-draped arm and rocked once. “When I go home, I go home whole, or I won’t go home at all.”

The Ville Platte reckoning was going to be ugly whenever it came, and he was avoiding it. I allowed it because I was the multimorph, savior of shifter-kind, and I was avoiding plenty of things myself. We were quite the all-alike family in that way.

Alleged family.

“The bears are waiting for you,” Marcus said, tipping his head toward the entrance a full second before I heard the first heavy footfalls outside the warding. “And your squirrel is already in the trees, sharpening his mouth.”

A quick jog brought me to the clearing behind Torbin’s. It had gone silver with frost, and my breath fogged in front of my face. Perfect camping weather, my dad would have called it. Perfect training weather would have to do.

Twelve bear shifters waited in their line, hulking even in their human forms, wearing the collection of sweatpants and stony patience I’d come to expect from Torbin’s people. The bears of Bear Trees mostly kept to themselves. They valued size over speed and had spent the week regarding me with cautious courtesy. I’d earned some of that. All of shifter-kind had watched the multimorph allow an alpha’s beheading, and bears had long memories to go with their long claws.