Page 73 of Shifters Reckoning

We sprinted from Six-Mile to Red Tail into the glare of the morning sun with a wounded fox on a four-wheeler bouncing ahead of us, through the country that still smelled alive.

Red Tail’s dens were some of the oldest dug-out ground in Louisiana, and coming over the ridge exposed what had been done to them overnight.

They’d been hit from below and behind, and the hillside above them had avalanched down onto them. Buckled entries and caved-in living spaces spread across the territory.

Cat families were trapped under the rubble, and gray smears moved over the ground, not a wall of them, not the boiling tide I’d seen in the south, but dozens, flowing between the broken entries. The shadow mages were trying to get at the survivors.

But the older runs on the low ridge held strong. The ancient heart of the hill hadn’t been breached. The council den, the deep galleries, and the ground the first foxes had claimed stood unbroken. The shadows pressed inward but couldn’t go in.

Everything new had fallen. Acheron’s attack hadn’t come to kill Ville Platte evacuees. It had come to gnaw at the anchor chain, and the displaced shifters had been in the way, pinned between a collapse they couldn’t dig through and the warding lines the enemy couldn’t cross. It proved Dr. Wise’s research correct.

Flynn paced the tree line, his jaw set, his expression tight. Jasper stood at his brother’s shoulder, torn arm and all, having outrun the order that told him to stay in his Six-Mile sickbed. For once in his life, he had nothing smartassed to say. Thirty foxes zipped from one end of the boundary to the other.

“Runs five and six are down,” Flynn said, no preamble, his eyes never leaving the hill. “The deepest gallery answered. Beauregard’s got maybe two hundred souls behind the old warding, and Della’s holding the connector against whatever’s inside with six cats and no light.”

“What’s the connector?” I asked.

“The connector’s a hundred-yard-long darkened corridor, Logan. There are shadows in it, and my people can’t fight what they can’t see. That’s the problem. I can’t send anyone into that.”

“You’re not,” I said. “You won’t.”

Silver-white light flared out of me and spread over the ridge like early frost. Every shadowy gray smear on that hillside stopped moving at once, the way roaches freeze when the kitchen light comes on. The brighter my light, the farther away they moved.

“You’re sending me,” I said. “I’m the lamp. Build the rest of the plan around that.”

Flynn and Jasper shared a look and nodded.

The foreman who thought he was the smartest asshole on the crew built wrong and built tardy. Delegation was the way to go. I’d known it for twenty years, and every day of Emma’s war had been teaching it to me again with the subtlety of a nail gun, so in opposition to my instincts as an alpha, I didn’t direct or command. Instead, I reacted and managed the flow.

The ravens went up, and I didn’t tell them where to look. They’d been reading the ground from the sky for hundreds of years. Their spotter-calls poured in, and the warriors adjusted to what the birds saw. They found the finger’s burrow line and discovered two entries the current maps missed. They located the softest portion of the collapse. The one place the slumped hill was loose fill instead of sheared clay.

The bears attacked the soft edge. Otis set his shoulders at the point of the wedge, and the hill succumbed to six sets of paws. When the young bear’s rhythm faltered, I didn’t order him to steady. I placed my hand on his back and sent a thread of light into it. Otis breathed once, huge, and dug with renewed enthusiasm.

It was weird as fuck for me, but it reminded me of the shit Emma did as a healer.

Soon, the ground opened to reveal the mouth of the corridor and the darkness within. Without hesitation, I sent strands of light into the underground hall, in the middle of the corridor.

Ville Platte cats took the lead, and foxes brought up the rear. We advanced into the connector. The shadows in the tunnel peeled back from my light, screaming and hissing. They receded into the ground.

The cats did the rest. Their eyes worked where even fox pupils strained, and they killed by battle geometry and skill with attack angles. In this skirmish, keeping the light steady was my job, and I matched my pace to theirs. Above ground, the shadow creatures screamed as they were torn apart by teams of shifters.

We found Della in a spacious grotto at the far end, tucked just inside the old warding’s boundary, standing in front of two hundred people who cowered in the dark. Her voice had worn down to a rasp after hours of reassuring shifters and convincing them to wait for rescue.

Her eyes luminesced and widened in the light coming up the tunnel, and her jaw went slack. “What’s up with that?”

“I took a second job as a lamp,” I said, my hands spread wide. “Alpha life got boring.”

“Well, took y’all long enough,” she rasped, ignoring my sarcasm.

“Traffic,” I said, reusing an old joke.

Ville Platte’s second laughed.

Behind her, two hundred souls smiled in the illumination where there’d been dark for six hours, and the thankful sound they made was going to live in my memory for the rest of my life.

We brought them out into the morning. All the ones that could be moved.

One gap-toothed raccoon boy came up in Otis’s arms. The kid took one look at me glowing and informed the entire hillside, “The multimorph does it better.”