Page 61 of Shifters Reckoning

“Should I tell them anything else?” she asked.

He dictated the rest the way I’d once dictated a message: slowly, twice, as clearly as possible. Take routes north by the old trace roads, elders first, younglings to the city, the clan’s relics out of the den before the linens, wardens to stay dark and quiet beyond the Void’s flank. A cat’s evacuation. Pride intact, claws sheathed, nothing left behind worth eating. He got all the way to the end before his voice cracked.

“And tell them,” he said, swallowing, “their alpha is proud of them, and he will see them at the wintering ground.” A single tear slipped from the corner of his eye and glittered down his cheek. Not being there cost him.

Della studied him for a long moment. She’d carried his secret for weeks without giving him up once. He was her alpha, and she was his beta. It was a loyalty that was hard to explain in the human world.

“They’d follow you blind, you know,” she said, “if you’d let them.”

“That,” Marcus snapped, “that is exactly the experiment I don’t intend to run in the middle of a war. Go quickly, Della.”

Ten minutes later, she was gone.

By early afternoon, the first convoys were rolling into Six-Mile from the southern communities. Trucks, vans, and one defiant church bus. A gas-leak story had already been seeded in the parish Facebook groups. It took work to keep murders and crimes out of the news. Our masquerade was down to baling wire and cover stories now. The humans were kept in the dark, and I hoped it would stay that way.

Our compound had turned into a marshaling yard. Civilians in, sorted, warmed, fed by my mother’s assembly line, and sent on east under guard to the warded grounds. Shifter children I’d never met slept in the gym on training mats. A grandmother tried to tip Phil for carrying her suitcase.

It worked well… until the dissent found its voice.

They cornered me by the mess hall at three o’clock. The alpha of a far northern wolf pack was a slab-shouldered man named Garrick, who’d sent three warriors instead of six until the news about Thanksgiving shamed him into the difference. The raven speaker and two minor alphas flanked him.

“You’re emptying the south instead of defending it,” Garrick said. “Retreating. We have over a hundred warriors and the multimorph, and your answer to Acheron is fleeing.”

“My answer to Acheron is not using civilians as speed bumps.”

“Then use us.” He stepped closer, and around us, the marshaling yard slowed, ears turning toward the drama, the way camps do. “Take the army south. Hit the line before it lands here, or is the multimorph only good for drills and dinner parties?”

Alphahole didn’t cut it for the guy. Douchebag was closer. The fight I’d been expecting all day had arrived on a wolf’s shoulders, and I didn’t have time to duke it out with him.

No retreat here, jerkface. I glared and stepped toward him. I’d learned that much from Logan, and from Olivia, and from every decent alpha I’d met so far.

“The last group that met Acheron’s mages in open country was nine of our best,” I said, keeping my voice level and public. “Now you want to march over a hundred green warriors into a forest where the trees are dead and the ground spits up his soldiers? He would say thank you. He might even mean it.” I pinned Garrick with a dark look until his jaw ticked. “We fight him at the warded grounds, where the first shifters already dug our trenches. Four days from now. All of us. Until then, we move the shifters he came to consume.”

“Convenient,” the raven speaker rasped, “that every plan keeps the power close to you.”

I made a fist and drew back, already imagining landing it on the raven speaker’s chin. And I might have… if a scream hadn’t come from the loading line.

The youngling was from Ville Platte, maybe all of nineteen, and she must have been holding it together since they’d left home. The drive north with her life in a duffel bag, the Void line gobbling up the parishes behind her, the strangers, the wolves, the war… She was helping load the last of the luggage into the back of a truck when a van backfired.

That was all it took. Two months of terror escaped her tight control.

The change hit her sideways, half-invited. Colors burst out of her, a body caught between girl and cat, claws out and eyes blown. She came off the tailgate in a tangle of limbs that couldn’t decide fast enough what they were, and she came down three feet from a row of kids too young to shift.

The yard exploded in shouting. Garrick’s wolves surged forward with their hands wide. Force was the old answer, pile on and pin, but force was going to get someone horribly hurt.

“Hold!” I bellowed, and everyone froze.

Then I did the thing I’d promised myself I’d ration.

I reached out with the part of me the gym event had taught me to fear, found her jagged, screaming frequency, and linked with her. Not a wall. Not a cage. I flowed into the channel beside her panic the way I’d once flowed beside twelve bears and a squirrel in a training clearing. I hummed her own energy back to her, steady, until the static had lessened.

You’re safe. You’re whole. Come back.

Surrounded by a wash of colors and wind, her body found the girl version of her again. She crumpled to the ground, gasping, human, and unscathed.

Nobody bled. Nobody was even scratched.

I’d used less power than what it would take for a healing, no more force than a hand on a shoulder, and I stood in the ringing silence of my own camp. Half of the spectators looked at me like I’d hung the moon, and the other half remembered, visibly, in real time, that I could reach inside a shifter and turn them like a dial.