Page 59 of Shifters Reckoning

Ahead, deep in the colorless trees, the shapes flowed around a singular point. A woman-shaped shadow stood in the ruin as though she’d been waiting for my crossing to reach her ears.

She turned toward me, and I ducked behind the trunk of a dead tree.

And her face twisted in a sickly smile.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

emma

Six-Mile

Dawn

The perimeter wolves announced them home at first light, and I was at the gate before the second howl finished. Logan! You surprised me!

They came down the driveway like the survivors of a flood, Olivia in the lead with her gear gone gray with dust, Levi draped over Harlan’s shoulders like a scarf that had given up, the Ville Platte cats flanking a Red Tail fox whose paws must have worn through somewhere around mile eighty. John brought up the rear. Nine of them had gone through our gate two nights ago.

Seven came back.

I counted twice, the way I counted every group now, and the bottom dropped out of my morning before Olivia had even shifted to speak.

Logan! Where are you? It echoed through my mind in a wailing howl. The threadbare bond still stretched between us, but I couldn’t make out my mate’s answer. Each cell in my body trembled at the rush of worry.

“He’s alive,” she said first. “Alive as of dusk last night. At least he was when we left him at the edge of the Void. Let me get them fed, and I’ll report.”

We made our way into Six-Mile Manor, the headquarters for our offensive, determined to attempt privacy. Marcus trailed after us.

I warded the study against sound and took a seat at the desk in Logan’s chair. I’d slept a week under Torbin’s warding at Bear Trees, and it was easy to replicate. My mother materialized out of the mess hall with coffee and a mountain of eggs and the usual briskness she deployed instead of screaming, and the camp’s leaders packed into Logan’s study while the runners ate like newb shifters after their first shift.

Olivia gave the report standing, her spine straight, her tone even, the surveyor’s tape and the stopwatch math spread across Logan’s desk next to Torbin’s doily. The Void cloud was on the move, consuming whatever life it touched.

“Five days, six if it’s lazy. Landfall happens at the Thanksgiving feast we’ve promised.” Then she stopped, considered me, and I knew the rest was going to be worse.

“Say it,” I commanded.

“There’s a Steele marching with the horde.” She said it easily, as though it had cost her nothing to communicate. “At the fore in the thick of the shapes. Logan scented her at the line and took the scent apart twice to be sure.” Her gaze flicked to Marcus, standing motionless by the window with his face aimed at the glass he couldn’t see through. “Your sister. Alive, moving under her own power, and walking point for Acheron’s army.”

The study went so quiet I could hear the percolator two rooms away.

My birth mother. The words wouldn’t fit anywhere I put them. The woman from the creek, the one who’d linked with her brother and nearly destroyed him, the one Logan had left behind a warding with her son and mourned ever since.

Marcus’s hand had risen to the thin chain at his collar. Maybe he was looking for the bat pendant I’d left in my bedroom, but he made no comment.

“And Logan,” Olivia went on, quieter, “stayed. He sent us home with the intel and jogged into the thick of it alone to figure how Acheron holds her, whether she’s a lock or a key. His words.” A muscle ticked in her jaw. “Jasper peeled off near Ville Platte.”

“To warn them?” That came from Marcus.

Olivia shook her head. “Don’t think so. He left me a note. It says…” She produced a scrap of paper with two fingers. “‘Gone to mind the bell.’”

“Of course it does,” I said, my thoughts far away.

“He promised half a day behind us, Emma. He has until tonight.”

The room erupted in conversation after that. Torbin asked engineer’s questions about the line’s pulse rate. Flynn wanted his fox’s route home mapped against the gray. Somebody said the word evacuation for the first time, and somebody else said it back, and the war went on being planned in my mate’s study while I stood there holding two facts that wouldn’t leave me alone.

My birth mother was strolling toward us at the front of a horde. She was one of the genetic sources of every bit of magic I had in me. And my idiotic, beloved, magnificent fated mate was trapped in a cloud of death, alone with her and Acheron.

Fuck my life. She was alive, leashed, and aimed at us. I didn’t know how to process it. Things had been different since Logan had his last confrontation with Acheron, and now my mate intended to risk another showdown. This shit was for the birds. You promised me an after, Logan!