Page 72 of Shifters Reckoning

“The scraps from the 1840s pages concern themselves almost entirely with the multimorph of that emergence. However, an emergence is a braid, not a wire.” From her satchel, she removed a photostat with browned handwriting in the margins. The plastic sleeve around it crinkled.

She continued. “Her anchor appears multiple times in the surviving fragments. A blacksmith near St. Martinville. The fragments record him oddly. In earlier entries, he’s a man. He shoes horses, argues at the land office, and concerns himself with human concerns, but the later entries…” Her finger moved down the page to a line that had been half-eaten by water. “Here. I’ll read it. ‘And her iron-man stood the night watch, and no shadow would cross his light.’”

She handed it to me, and I took it, careful with the delicate document. His light. The words could have described me.

Dr. Wise adjusted her glasses once more. “The bond is a catalyst, Mr. Blackwood. That’s my working theory. A fated bond to an ordinary shifter makes a strong pair. A fated bond to a multimorph doesn’t leave the other half of the pair unchanged. She is the sum of your people’s magic gathered in one woman, and you are united to her. That power ran through you the day she saved your life and again in No Man’s Land. Now the magic has left her and reaches you.” She reclaimed the photostat, precise as a surgeon. “She isn’t making you something else. She’s making you more of what you have always been. You are her anchor. Iron made of light. That which the barrier shadows cannot cross.”

I sat with that for a long moment. “And the blacksmith,” I asked, “how does his story end?”

Dr. Wise removed her spectacles, polished them on the hem of her shirt, and put them back on.

“You’re stalling.”

She winced. “Most are not as direct as you, Logan.”

“Most have time to waste. We do not.”

“There’s a razor’s edge to it,” she admitted finally. “Every page that would tell me is gone, but I’ll say this much… The fragments about her run to 1849. The fragments about him stop in 1848.” She stared at me. “A year earlier. Whatever the price was, I believe he paid a portion of it first. I need three more days with the diocesan crates before either of you does anything.”

Three more days? Everyone kept asking me for time like I was the one supplying it. There was no reason to agree or disagree when Acheron’s actions would decide what came next for us.

“One more question,” I said. “The light. Shadows won’t cross it. Is that in your pages, or did I just tell you?”

For the first time that morning, Eleanor Wise smiled. “‘No shadow would cross his light,’” she quoted. “1846. You corroborated it. History is a wheel, Alpha. Try to be the part that holds.”

The study door banged open. It was Phil. He’d gone so pale his lips were white. He had a radio in his hand, and any chance we had at any extra time had likely disappeared.

“The earth-dens,” he said. “Red Tail. A finger came out of the Atchafalaya side an hour before dawn, thirty miles past the deepest mark on Jace’s map. The outer dens are down. They collapsed on the Ville Platte evacuees, and there are shadows in the runs. Their radio set went down with the outer dens. A runner didn’t reach a working one until now.” He swallowed. “Flynn’s already gone. He said… He said tell the alpha of Six-Mile he is requested.”

I was moving before Phil had finished.

Dr. Wise began packing her satchel. “May the alpha of Six-Mile be the wheel that holds. God help us all.”

After weeks of drills, we assembled on the run. Torbin’s bears charged toward the attack with Otis leading point. Every Ville Platte warrior in camp joined us, running to dig their own kin out of somebody else’s ground. Ravens flew overhead. The speaker had sent theirs without being asked, and I’d taken them without hesitating.

Emma met us at the gate with a healer’s bag she’d packed, and in one heartbeat, we did the whole argument through the bond without a word of it out loud. I’m coming.

You’re needed here.

Kids, Logan.

I know, love, I know.

Stage the wounded. I’ll follow with the second wave. “Take Fern,” she said out loud.

Fern was already there. The fox had risen off her infirmary cot, bandaged from collarbone to hip, kept upright by spite. She shook with the effort, and the glare she gave me shut down my objection.

“They’re my home dens, Alpha,” she said. “I was whelped and raised in the deep runs. Your maps show maybe half of what’s under that territory, and the half they don’t show is where my people will have taken the evacuees.”

“We can carry you.”

She bared her teeth. “You can carry me if I fall down, Alpha. I weigh nothing. Until then, I’ll carry myself.”

Raising my eyebrows sufficiently cowed her. “If you go, then you ride the four-wheeler, Fern, or I leave you behind. Forcibly.”

She didn’t argue this time.

I circled my hand in the air. “Let’s go.”