Page 67 of Shifters Reckoning

Dr. Wise scrambled for the laptop she kept in her attaché case. We turned on the news, every leader in Louisiana crowding around a thirteen-inch screen like it was a crystal ball. Baton Rouge affiliate. A helicopter shot, shaky, late-afternoon gray light. Miles of dead-still forest laid out under the chopper like spilled ash and a strip of living green at the edge dying in a line we could have drawn with a ruler.

“—officials are calling it a suspected agricultural blight,” the anchor said, “though botanists we spoke to say no known blight moves this quickly. State agencies have not yet⁠—”

Sheila’s voice came through the phone on the table, tinny and tight. “It gets better. Parish scanners have been going all evening. Two sheriff’s departments and a game warden posse are talking about driving down for a look tomorrow. And a boy in Krotz Springs put a video online of, and I quote, ‘shadow people walking in the dead trees,’ and it has two hundred thousand views, and, Emma…” She said my name, not multimorph, Sheila to the bone. “…people in my bar are talking about it. Regular people. The wall’s coming down whether Acheron finishes his ritual or not.”

The assembled shifters collectively gasped.

Dr. Wise collapsed in one of the folding chairs toward the front.

Holy shit. Centuries of secrecy. The masquerade every clan in this room had bled to keep, that Salali had died a traitor to, that Shannon had been sworn into, and that Torbin’s delving had sealed shut in Riley, failing on its own, on the news, at six o’clock, a week before landfall.

Garrick broke first. “You found the engine.” He was on his feet, his wide shoulders squared at Logan. “All those mages in a swamp and an army that sleeps while they work, so we go tonight. Every warrior in this camp, straight down their throat while they’re droning at the sky. You want to save your Veil, Dr. Wise? Kill the men eating it tonight before the sheriffs and the news cameras crawl all over our war.”

“They’ve been warned,” Logan countered. “They cut me out of a pair and nearly boxed me. You’d be marching hundreds of warriors, half of them three weeks trained, into ground that makes his soldiers at night, which is his goal. I’ve been there. You haven’t.”

“Then we’ll die closer to the problem than you’re standing!”

“Enough.” The raven speaker’s voice cut across the gym, dry as shed feathers. The raven contingent rose behind her in a single motion that was worth a thousand words of argument. “Wolves want to charge. Wolves always want to charge. Hear what the ravens say. The Veil is coming down, the humans are already looking up, and this camp…” One long finger swept the gym, the tiny homes, all of it. “…is a bull’s-eye painted around a single woman. Acheron follows the warded seam? Then every clan should be standing on its own warded ground when he comes, not nested here waiting to die in somebody else’s territory. Red Tail for the foxes. The high roosts for us. Let the multimorph stand where she chooses. We are done bleeding for wolves.”

The room came apart. Not politely. Not one at a time.

Garrick’s wolves came off the benches shouting. The ravens closed ranks around their speaker. One of the northern seconds said something about feathered lawn ornaments that was going to cost us all dearly.

Flynn was on his feet roaring that his territory was sheltering half of Ville Platte and anyone leaving the line could explain it to the evacuees personally. The raccoon alpha clutched his Thanksgiving menu like a life vest.

Torbin planted himself in the middle of it, his vast arms spread. “We are one people. We agreed. We swore.”

But even Torbin’s patience cracked in the face of the tumult. Bears could hold a line against anything except a room choosing to be afraid.

Days. We had days, and the alliance was tearing itself apart in front of me in real time, fear ricocheting between them until the gym sounded like an orchestra on fire on the sinking Titanic.

Dr. Wise’s warning sat in my ears where she’d left it. Do nothing primal until I’ve finished the pages.

I glanced at her, one row ahead, small and gray and watching the room burn through an archivist’s eyes. She saw me look. She knew what I was weighing. She didn’t nod, and she didn’t shake her head. Eleanor Wise had never once pretended a choice belonged to anyone but the one who’d pay for it.

I’m sorry, I thought, to her, to the girl under the quilt from yesterday, to myself. The pages will have to catch up.

I stepped into the middle of the gym, next to Torbin, and extended my arms. Then I demolished every block I had.

It was so easy.

That was the truth I carried, the thing I would be paying down for years. It didn’t cost me anything. All the leaders, the strongest and most guarded wills in Louisiana, and their magical frequencies lay open to me like patients on my stainless-steel surgery table. Garrick’s granite fury met the speaker’s dry vigilance and Flynn’s stubborn ache, combined with Torbin’s fraying patience and Marcus’s hope.

I didn’t force a strand of my magic into them or around them. I simply connected them. Took the walls out from between one heart and the next, the way Logan would take a fence down between two pastures and let the fighting shifters experience what was on the other side.

Garrick’s fury, felt from inside, came from three shifter kids in a den outside Shreveport and a mate who’d told him not to come home a coward. The raven speaker’s concern was a high roost full of children in the hill country who couldn’t be moved.

Flynn’s ache had a scent attached, one he’d been tracking for months, and when it washed through the link, someone across the gym made a sound like a mourning dove.

Torbin’s steadiness wasn’t the absence of fear. It was held fear, the way he’d held it at every deathbed in Bear Trees in living memory, and Marcus’s hope hurt worse than anyone’s grief.

Beneath it all, because a link can run both ways and I have never figured out how to give without sharing, was me. The list I read every night, the flickering candlelight in the window, the door I was already, quietly, terribly certain I would have to walk through before this ended. It all flashed through the temporary bond I’d created.

I held them there for twenty heartbeats. I counted each one. Then I took the fences back up, gently, one by one, and stepped out of the middle. The gym had gone so still I could hear the laptop’s tiny anchorwoman still reporting about blight.

Garrick sat down first. He studied his hands. “The northern packs hold the line at Six-Mile,” he said, “wherever the multimorph wants us.”

“The roosts will send half,” the speaker rasped. From her, half meant surrender. Half was a treaty. “And our eyes are yours at any height in any weather.”