Page 64 of Shifters Reckoning

“She’s loosening the knots,” he murmured.

Knots tied before her but mis-tied after her, so slick and slight that a drowned flat full of mages bent to the labor never recognized it. Three trunks past her touch, a birthing-line of runes guttered, and a dozen newborn shadows rose out of the black water, lost their shape, and slopped back down into it like failed bread.

The mage nearest the failure glanced at the line, looked at the sky, and recarved it, droning. Bad materials. Bad luck. Nobody audits the foreman.

“She’s sabotaging it,” I breathed. “She’s been sabotaging it. The lack of warding at the plantation, the map in Marcus’s head, tonight… Perhaps she’s been kicking the ladder out from under him for months.”

“Or,” Jasper murmured, “she’s the finest bait ever tied to a hook, and we’re the fattest fish in the parish. No warding at the plantation was a lure.” His gaze never left her hands. “Ye saw her smile at ye, lad. Ask yerself what it costs him to let ye see a smile and a mis-tied knot. Cheap, if it buys him the alpha of Six-Mile stepping deeper into the Void on hope.”

“And if it’s real, she’s the reason this army may lose, and we owe her the war.”

“Aye. Both true ’til one isn’t. That’s the hell of double lives.” He pronounced it as a man who had run his share of them. “There’s a thing I can’t unsee either way, Logan. Look what’s not here. Smell it.”

I did. Steele musk, mage rot, grief. Underneath it, nothing. No boy.

Wherever Acheron kept the boy now, the nephew Marcus mourned, the child I’d sworn to come back for, Acheron did not keep him with the army. He kept the leash and the collar in different places.

That was the report. That was worth the night—the engine, the schedule, the saboteur, the missing boy. Every part of me said go home.

“It’s enough,” I whispered to Jasper. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Aye.”

Then we slipped north without shifting, without adding a magical neon sign to our already risky location.

We’d only made it half a mile when a raven crossed the dead sky.

This one flew like a knife searching for a back. It made one slow circuit over the flat, one over the deadfall line. Then it screamed, and the forest came alive.

The ground to our east lifted. Not shapes rising out of it. The ground itself. A hundred yards of grayed soil peeled up into a wall of tendrils, and the silence of our surroundings fractured all at once. Wet, eager smacking rolled toward us.

“Run,” Jasper barked, and for once in his life, there was no lilt in it at all.

We shifted and fled two different directions, fox and wolf, flat-out through dead forests, and the sweep ran with us. Not chasing us. Herding us. Columns of darkness flowed wide on both flanks exactly the way they’d done the night nine of us had marked the line. I’d been boxed in once before and stepped out of it by sending everyone else home. This time, there was no one to send.

I scanned the surroundings and spotted Jasper, crouched and sprinting faster than me through the underbrush. A collapsed levee came up out of the gloom like a giant arm.

I spotted one gap to the north-northwest.

“The levee! They mean to bury us,” I snarled through my half-shifted face, now human enough to speak in legible words. “Over and split. You east, me west.”

He darted east along the crown of rising dirt, his streak the only living color in that whole void world.

I went west, and shifted fully.

The dark soil followed me. All of it.

The columns folded in behind me and clenched like a fist. Then I understood: the sweep had never been herding us anywhere. It had been cutting one out of the pair. Acheron wanted me.

The levee disappeared out from under my paws, turning into slumped mud. I slipped down the filth into black water, and it carried me to the edge of a dead bayou with no current, no far bank in sight. No sound but that smacking, ravenous tide closing in behind me.

Coughing and retching, I waited.

Shadow mages didn’t gloat. That was Acheron’s job.

The evil advanced slowly now because I had already been caught, tendrils reaching over the mud like the fingers of a hand closing over their prize.

The bell was in my fist. Cold brass, a fox gift, one ring from rescue. I’d never rung it with intention, but Jasper had come anyway.