Page 60 of Shifters Reckoning

My insides churned, and I shook, fighting the nausea.

I made it out the door, across the lawn, past the fence line, and into the trees before my self-control gave way. Then I let the wind and the colors morph me into a she-bear, the first shape I ever was, the one that knew what to do with a feeling too big for a human body, and I put a dead oak on the ground in eleven seconds and screamed at the splinters. Crows cawed their displeasure overhead.

When I came back to myself, human and heaving on the grass, Marcus was leaning against a pine at the clearing’s edge, his arms crossed, his face pointed politely elsewhere.

“Better?” he asked.

“No.”

“Good. It shouldn’t be.” He pushed off the tree. “You’re doing the math he did. Whether you can reach the Void line by tonight if you run your fastest shapes and don’t stop. You can’t. It’s too far, and you’d arrive spent, alone, and delivered exactly as he wants you. He’s been trying to pull you south, niece. Don’t be as idiotic as your mate.”

“But it’s Logan.” I stifled a rush of hot tears and lifted my chin, trying to put myself back together after the break in my control.

“It’s Logan, who is the second-most stubborn creature in Louisiana, mated to the first.” He spoke kindly. “And it’s my sister. You think I haven’t run the same numbers? I’ve been running them since Olivia said Steele. I can’t see the road, and I’d still leave tonight if I thought it would buy either of them one hour.” He turned back toward the noise of a war camp waking up. “It wouldn’t. What buys them hours is everything you’re about to do today, so come do it.”

Marcus took halting steps, and I followed him without speaking. Torbin waited at the fence, vast and patient as always. He didn’t say anything. He just strolled beside me all the way back to the training gym.

I scanned the assembled shifters. With a clap of my hands, I yelled, “Seven a.m. Time to train like you mean it!”

Midmorning, Dr. Wise’s green Subaru came up the long drive, and I jogged toward the manor and up onto the porch to meet her. She had mud up to her door handles and a bumper sticker I’d never noticed before that read I BRAKE FOR ARCHIVES. Maybe she’d gotten it while she had been off in New Port Orleans.

My mother burst out of the mess hall and reached Dr. Wise first. The two hugged like old friends.

Dr. Wise straightened her spectacles and marched onto the porch. She nodded toward me. “Multimorph, I have news.”

“Let’s go in.”

Once we were in the study, she unpacked her leather satchel onto Logan’s desk. The smells of old books and salt water wafted out.

“I went through every parish history from 1841 to 1849,” she said. “Church registries. Land offices. Two family Bibles. Somebody spent a century making sure the ending of the last emergence stayed hidden, but they missed the diocesan water-damage crate. Who wants to spend time in the middle of mold and mildew?” She laid a page in a plastic sleeve on the desk, gently. “And so…”

The page had browned with age, and the handwriting had faded. The inscription was partially English, partially a language I didn’t recognize.

“The first shifters didn’t just learn to change,” Dr. Wise said. “They also created a partition. The page calls it the Veil. It’s a boundary woven between the magical world and the human one, anchored to the old, warded grounds. It is why humans don’t typically stumble into shifter magic. It is why your wardings work at all. Every ward in Louisiana is a knot tied into the same net.” Her finger hovered over the last legible line. “And in 1849, something tried to tear it down, and the cost of stopping it is the missing part.”

“Acheron,” Flynn said.

“Or whatever Acheron used to be.” Dr. Wise peered over her spectacles at me, and her matter-of-factness unsettled me. “The old, warded grounds, Emma. The earth-dens at Red Tail. The hollows in Bear Trees. The Gathering Place.”

“The new Gathering Place?” I asked.

“Not the benches your people raised last month, but the old warded ground the elders insist Gathering Places be raised upon. They aren’t just safe houses. They’re anchor points, and they will hold against his creatures the way plain ground won’t. If you’re moving civilians, you move them there.” She began repacking the satchel with terrible calm. “Also, I’ve read enough now to say this plainly instead of through your mother, whatever this power is that you keep almost using, do nothing primal until I’ve finished the pages. The last one who improvised with primal magic is the reason I’m reading fragments.”

“Understood,” I said, and I mostly meant it. If Logan came back, a primal-level orgasm was probably the first order of business, and I might have tapped into the primal a little bit when healing Fern, but none of that seemed important enough to say.

By noon the map on the study wall wore a new constellation of pins. Warded ground, north and east. Everything vulnerable, south and west. And a Void tide between them, coming up through the parishes.

Evacuation wasn’t just a possibility anymore.

It was on the schedule.

“Head south first, to Ville Platte,” I instructed the shifters collected once more in the study. “Bring as many shifters as you can to Six-Mile. Warriors, farmers, homebodies, all of them. As many as will come.”

Olivia sat across from me, nodding, and Phil stood at the study threshold with his arms crossed to keep eavesdroppers away, and Marcus grimaced in the corner with Della beside him. One of the hardest conversations of the day was about to happen in the corner of the study quietly between a blind alpha and the second he would have to send in his place.

Della turned to her alpha. “They’ll ask why you aren’t coming yourself.” She wasn’t being cruel, only speaking the truth.

“Tell them their alpha is at the multimorph’s right hand,” Marcus said. “It has the advantage of being true, even if I’m leaving out the part about being blind.”