Page 71 of Shifters Reckoning

Then she shattered around me, pushing me over the edge with her.

For one perfectly suspended moment, there was no war, no Void, no seam in the sky, nothing we feared. Just my mate, holding on, calling my name.

After, she slept. She dropped into it fast and hard, and the bond hummed satisfaction between us. I lay in the dark with her tucked against me and did the math I hadn’t let anybody see me do in the gym.

Five days to the Beaver Moon. Five days to a feast that was going to be a battle. A camp full of clans held together by a truce my mate had reached into their chests to rebuild, and an army of shadow mages in the south feeding on the boundary of the world, and a premonition he’d burned into my head. The two of us lying here keeping our secrets for each other’s sake, calling it love, and not being wrong.

She whimpered once in her sleep. I gathered her closer and pushed steadiness down the bond until she settled. She calmed because I was her anchor, and I could still ground her.

I didn’t sleep. I wasn’t sure I tried.

In the early morning, I eased out from under her one careful inch at a time, tucked the pillows into my shape so she wouldn’t wake yet, and stood a while just looking at her rainbow hair. Breathing. Mine. Still Emma. Still here.

Then I pulled on a shirt and a pair of shorts and went down to the kitchen. If I couldn’t sleep, I could at least get ahead of the day, and I’d promised myself I’d give my mate one morning without adding my problem to her stack.

I brewed coffee, carried it into the study, and placed my mug on Torbin’s doily. Then I stood at the map wall with its new constellation of pins, and I started to pace, waiting on the one person in Louisiana who’d be up before the sun and would hand me a library instead of an opinion.

She’d be along by six. Dr. Eleanor Wise always was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

logan

Six-Mile

Three Hours Later

Emma had managed to sleep two hours after I’d left the bed. Then she’d trotted into my study and demanded to take over the evacuation training and the battle training for the morning despite my insistence she take an easy day. She’d been adamant that it was better for the clans to work with her after she’d linked them all without permission.

“I am the multimorph,” she announced with her arms crossed and her gorgeous hips jutted to the side.

“I see your tattoo,” I said, leaning back in my desk chair.

Her mouth opened and then closed. Then a smile broke across her face. “You’re not going to argue with me?”

I shrugged. “Should but won’t.”

Then she dropped a kiss on my mouth and bounded off.

Thirty minutes later, Dr. Wise marched into my study, her arms filled with hard copies, her attaché case slung over her shoulder, and a stack of note cards in her hand. These, she placed on my desk. I lifted my coffee and moved Torbin’s doily three inches to the left so it wouldn’t crowd her note cards.

“Sit down, Alpha,” she said as though she were speaking to a classroom. She closed the door behind her.

I quirked an eyebrow. “I’m already seated.”

She glanced at me over her glasses. “Oh, so you are. Then you stay there.” Her bag slipped to the floor with a thud as she placed the stack of books on the corner of my desk. She settled in one of the upholstered seats, scooted to the front edge, and pulled her journal from her bag. A pen came out next, quickly uncapped.

“You heard the report,” I said. “You probably saw what I didn’t say in it.”

“I heard a man describe fighting free of a hundred shadow creatures without describing how.” She tapped her pen on her paper with an expression devoid of alarm or pity. “Show me. Small version, please. I’ve only the one satchel, and the various archives would never forgive me if I lost any of their one-of-a-kind volumes.”

Carefully, I reached down and let one thread up through my palm—silver-white, quiet, throwing shadows over the bookshelves in my study. The light didn’t flicker. It held until I released it.

Dr. Wise exhaled through her nose. Then she wrote for two full minutes while I sat there feeling like a soil sample.

“Well,” she said at last, “you’re not the first.”

The scar on my chest tingled. “Say that again.”