Page 53 of Shifters Reckoning

That was when I felt it. Not an audible sound. A stutter.

I’d spent weeks learning to feel shifters as frequencies, and the camp hummed like a hundred and fifty orchestra instruments almost in tune, but to the south, out past the last torch, something had gone awry in the music. A dropped note.

I scanned the dimness past the fence line and found nothing. The perimeter wolves hadn’t sounded. The warding at the gate hadn’t broken, so I raised my hands to silence the residual murmur of conversations.

Steady, I told myself. You’re the multimorph. Multimorph first. Scared woman second.

“Three months ago,” I began, my voice carrying in the cold air, “I was a vet with a rainbow dye job, and every single one of you belonged to a clan that locked its doors against the others.”

Low laughter here and there. The ravens didn’t laugh, but they turned to listen.

“Tonight, I observed a raccoon teaching a wolf to wash pecans. I watched cats run banner drill with bears… and lose. Torbin, gracefully conceding.”

The bears roared, Otis loudest.

“We’ve created something incredible, and in seven days, under the Beaver Moon, we are going to set every table this camp owns and eat Thanksgiving dinner together like one clan. That’s what we are now. When Acheron comes, he will not find wolves and cats and foxes and squirrels. Squirrels distract. Bears hold. Cats finish.”

That had become a camp proverb. Half the crowd chanted it with me.

Abruptly, Levi’s voice rang loudest from a rooftop, adding the unofficial fourth line. “Foxes lie!”

A ripple of laughter answered, and Jasper accepted it like a knighthood.

“He will find one people,” I said, and the laughter stilled. “One army. One⁠—”

The southern perimeter guard howled. Not one wolf. All of them. A rising chain of alarm exploded through the camp, and the stutter I’d felt was suddenly rushing toward our boundary.

“Open the gate!” I jumped off the trailer and ran.

Logan appeared half a stride behind me, the crowd tearing itself out of assembly and into formation with a speed that made two weeks of drills worth every bruise.

A fox came through the gate at a dying sprint. Her red coat was black to the shoulder. Not with mud but with a substance that moved. The wiry, quiet fox had Jasper’s coloring and a tenth of his mouth but had volunteered for the southern watch when the training rotation had ended because foxes noticed what others missed.

Dark veins crawled through her fur, and blood gushed down her body. She was running on three legs by the time she crossed into the outdoor lights. Ten feet in, her legs gave out. She skidded, rolled, and came up as human on the frosted grass, and my heart broke sideways in my chest. Then she fell over.

“Fern!” Levi bellowed.

Gashes raked her from collarbone to hip, and the flesh around them had gone gray-black and cold, stinking of death.

Acheron’s calling card.

The last time someone was carried in torn open like this, it had been Phil with Rachel in his arms, and the healer had barely pulled her back. In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Acheron had still enticed her into the woods alone to be devoured.

Not this time. Not this one.

“Fern.” I hit my knees beside her, and rainbow light spilled out of me into her wounds. Shadow mage work resisted healing the way Marcus’s eyes refused it. The foulness battered against me for every centimeter I healed. I gritted my teeth and kept on.

Flynn arrived at her other side and gripped her hand. Jasper crouched at her head, his joviality completely gone.

“Report,” Fern rasped.

Bleeding out on the chilly ground, the fox called her own meeting. The shift to human had cost her the last of her strength, and another shift wouldn’t have saved her anyway. Shadow wounds didn’t answer to shifting the way regular wounds did. It had to be me.

“Healing first,” I snapped. Fuck me. Her wounds weren’t knitting together as fast as they should.

“Report first, Multimorph, because you might not want to spend the strength when you hear it.” Her fever-bright gaze found mine, pinning me. “The dead zone is moving.”

The shifters in the camp had assembled around us in a great silent ring with breath-fog and over one hundred and fifty heartbeats that I could feel stumbling one by one as her words carried.