Page 55 of Shifters Reckoning

And he did. I could feel exactly how much he knew, how the bond ached in both directions at once.

“There will always be an after, Emma. That’s still the only promise I’m keeping until my last breath.”

He kissed me like a famished man, and I hated that we didn’t have enough time to spend another night in our shared bed before we went our separate ways again. We’d had two weeks… We might never have another night again.

God, Logan. Will our life ever be normal again?

Keep your fires blazing for me. I’ll be back before you know it.

Then he was gone, disappearing into the shadows, shouting at shifters, and roaring for gear. The space where he had been filled with November cold.

Marcus still stood where the news had planted him, facing south. I moved to him, hollowed out as I was, and tucked my hand in the crook of his arm. He didn’t shake it off.

Behind us, my mother came out of the mess hall, took one look at the organized panic in the camp, wiped her hands on her apron, and started pulling terrified young shifters into the kitchen. I couldn’t stop my grin. Nappies and snackies was how Sophia Carter held a fucking line.

“Ville Platte can’t know I’m blind, Emma,” Marcus said, “but they have to be warned anyway. You see my problem.”

“I never didn’t. We’ll solve it tomorrow. Tonight, you’re going to help me post the watch, because you hear better than anyone I’ve got left.”

“Flattery.”

“Recruitment.”

His laugh was a dry, cracked thing, but it was a laugh, and I collected it the way I was learning to collect every small living sound in this camp. Names on a list. Instruments in a song. Bits and pieces of hope.

The bond thrummed with my mate arming for the south road, and somewhere under the crispy grass, nine days away, a holiday and a horde were racing each other to our door.

An hour later, at the gate, the response team assembled out of the dark—Olivia in her gear, Jasper trinket-silent for once with his beard tied down, six shifters of four different kinds, and my mate at the front of them, bright-eyed and terrible…

And mine.

Logan glanced back at me on the rise of the gate mound, and his grin flashed white in the lights, the same grin from Vixen’s bar in Willow Creek.

I pressed my affection through the bond before the dark took him from view. Some things should be sent ahead of the fear where they could do the most good.

Race ya home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

logan

The South Road

That Same Night

We ran south beneath a waxing moon. I set a blistering pace that would cost us all, but we didn’t have any time to waste. Spider eyeshine glittered over the ground, reflecting the blanket of starlight above. Each of us had a small bag of supplies that we could carry in either of our forms.

Nine of us moved through the November dark. My wolves took up the road. John and a big, quiet wolf called Harlan ran near my flanks, their paws eating miles, momentum and murder in a double column.

Marcus’s two cats ran the ditches and the fence lines, vanishing every time a farm dog lifted its head and reappearing a quarter mile on like they’d never been gone. They’d volunteered before I finished asking. Ville Platte sat at the end of the south road, and the big cats weren’t sentimental about anything except their home territory.

Jasper and a Red Tail fox I didn’t know took the scout positions. They ran ahead, making wide sweeps east and west, their noses high in the air, suspicious about everything. Above us, threading power lines, Levi ran the top line, our group’s eyes in the canopy, mercifully too winded to smack-talk.

Olivia ran at my shoulder, where she’d been running for years.

Two weeks ago, this unit would have been a bar fight. Tonight, nobody bristled when the cats crossed our line of travel. Nobody snapped when Levi dropped out of a pecan tree into the middle of the wolves to relay Jasper’s hand signs. Emma’s crazy-assed integration, the mixed houses, the banner drills, the shared tables her mother kept loading like a woman feeding the apocalypse into submission, was holding at speed, in the dark, under the weight of impending destruction.

My mate had built this without ever once raising a hammer, and I intended to tell her so at length, preferably unclothed. Naked as the night was long. The way I liked her best.