Page 63 of Shifters Reckoning

Night

She smiled toward my hiding place, and then she did the one thing I hadn’t planned for.

She turned away.

No cry went up. No shadows peeled off the flowing dark to drag me out of the dead brush. The woman simply turned back to the Void tide she walked ahead of and lifted one hand like a conductor, and the southbound edge of the horde bent. A slow, oily curve in the current passed forty yards wide of the deadfall where I crouched with my heart trying to kick its way out through my old scar.

She moved hundreds of shadows around me like traffic cones, and she essentially ignored me.

Hmmm… Lock or key? I followed.

Tracking inside the murk of the Void was useless. No breezes. No insects, no healthy decay, no life to layer scents. My paws made no sound, but nothing in that fog made sound. The silence wasn’t peace. It was a church where the congregation had been eaten.

I’d promised Olivia half a day. I’d promised Emma an after. One night, I vowed in the dim, pacing the frontline of the enemy’s army, one night to learn how Acheron holds her, and then home.

For two hours, the shadows rolled forward, consuming trees, leaves, and anything that held life.

Except me. It was as though no one except Marcus’s sister understood that I was there.

I progressed with them until the gray void to my left folded sideways, and Jasper was simply there, downwind, red fox fur, and his eyes like struck matches, moving at my flank as though we’d planned it in the study over coffee. He’d doubled back the moment the unit cleared Ville Platte and run the dark flat-out to reach me.

I bared my canine teeth and nearly took his head off.

We shifted human in the lee of a dead oak, close enough to share air. Whispering was the only sound either of us was willing to risk.

“You’re supposed to be halfway to Six-Mile,” I breathed.

“Aye, and ye’re supposed to be smarter than a bag of hammers, so we’re both a disappointment to our mothers.” He tapped one ear. “Foxes hear their own bells across a battlefield, remember. Across a battlefield, Logan. Not across Louisiana. Somebody had to stay in range of the thing, or the bell’s just brass and sentiment.” His gaze slid past me south toward the moving dark. “Olivia knows. I left her a note.”

“She’ll skin you.”

“Aye, she’ll try, and I’ll run, and she’ll catch me.” He sighed romantically. “Aye, it’ll be a lovely evening.” The twinkle died as fast as it came. “Now hush, lad. Ye’re following the lady, and the lady’s following, er, leading that.”

That was a sickly glow on the dead horizon, the color of a worsening bruise.

We went to see.

They’d made their base in a drowned cypress flat, where the black water stood so motionless it looked solid, and the trees came up out of it like giant, skeletal ribs. I counted ninety cloaked and hooded mages ringing the shallow water. In the middle, a wound split the sky.

I didn’t have better words for the wound. A seam in the world, pried open the width of a hand, weeping the bruised light. Looking at it hurt, and the scar in the center of my chest burned as though Acheron held a welding torch an inch from my skin. The laceration hung low in the sky, and at least thirty of the living-dead mages attended the gash in turns.

The ritual moved like shift work, rows of robed figures facing the wound, droning, carving runes into the dead trunks in lines that dripped in dark red. While they worked, the horde around them waited. Hundreds of shapes settled into the ground like oil soaking into cloth. They seemed to be dormant. Maybe refueling.

The fingers at the fore, the fast-raiding hands that had enveloped Fern’s watch post and the country ahead, those ran free, but the body stayed with its engine.

Break the engine, I thought, construction-brained even at the end of the world, and the whole job site stops. This work was the motor that propelled it all forward.

Through it all, my mate’s birth mother trudged. She moved down the rune lines like a foreman on inspection. The mages bent away from her as she passed. Her hands were never still. With her right, she commanded rising shadows, dispatching them north in thin, fast columns.

I watched as more fingers reached the countryside ahead of us. Acheron’s leash-bearer did her work while he was elsewhere doing what had to be worse.

It was Jasper who caught the left hand.

He froze beside me for a ten-count, and then his whisper came so soft it was hardly audible. “Watch her off hand, lad. Low. When she passes the new-cut runes.”

I watched. She trailed her left hand along the fresh lines the way a farmer might trail his fingers through standing wheat—casual, idle, a woman caressing her work.

But the results changed. Nothing overt. A crossing stroke smudged a half inch out of true. A closing loop left a hair’s width open.