Page 74 of Shifters Reckoning

“Everyone’s a critic,” I told him.

The ravens laughed their harsh laughter overhead where nothing could reach them.

After we counted the survivors, we determined we’d lost four. Two fox wardens who’d held the outer runs long enough for the rest to fall back behind the old warding, and two of the older Ville Platte cats who’d passed in the corridor before we arrived. Four new names for Dr. Wise’s casualty list.

Fern crumpled in the churned dirt before the last of the shifters came out. At least she’d stopped pretending she weighed nothing. Flynn scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the healers’ staging area. Nobody in Red Tail was ever going to call her Bear Trees’s fox again. Two hundred and some walking out of the earth alive.

Emma arrived with the second wave of reinforcements and the last of the daylight. Her rainbow magic bled through the copse of trees before I saw her. She carried her healer’s bag, tearful eyes, and her palms already filled with multicolored healing. The wounded turned toward her.

While she worked, I stood in the wreck of Red Tail’s dens and finally understood she was the fire. Every soul in Louisiana gathered to her warmth, and Acheron would happily waste two worlds trying to put her out.

I’d spent weeks afraid I was becoming something or someone else. Watching Emma kneel in the dirt and channel magic for our people, with my light still hanging over the ridge so the dig teams could work through the dark, I mulled over who I had become and how everything about my life had changed.

I wasn’t becoming something else. I already was. Now, my job as the anchor was to be the iron that steadied Emma’s fire. The light that illuminated the night watch. Not her equal, not her rival. The premonition Acheron had burned in my mind could go to hell. Shadows couldn’t cross me, and I stood between Acheron and everything he wanted.

And her iron-man stood the night watch.

The blacksmith’s pages stopped a year earlier than his multimorph mate’s had, but mine weren’t written yet, and I intended to make it a helluva story for Dr. Wise’s journals. I went to speak to my mate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

emma

Red Tail

The Fallen Earth Dens

After Sunset

The homes of Red Tail had kept foxes safe for hundreds of years, and it had taken Acheron’s reaching hand to turn them into a grave. I hated Acheron. Fucking hated how he ripped apart every good thing. What had Red Tail ever done to him?

But even as I mentally railed against Acheron, I knew that Red Tail had always been in the crosshairs. The clan had always been a target. Jasper was one of my staunchest supporters, and his brother was too.

Shaped as a wolf, I loped across Flynn’s territory. Once through the final copse of trees, I shifted into my human self in a burst of color and wind and stopped short at the main complex. Destruction surrounded me. This was the result of aiding the multimorph, of supporting me.

Logan had been worried, so I’d stayed to take care of what I could back in Six-Mile. Maybe I was avoiding responsibility. A finger of the horde had reached deeper than any map said it could, punched into a place we’d sworn was safe, and pulled the roof down on the people I’d promised to save.

Logan and Flynn had been in charge of the rescue. Runners brought news as it happened, and the recovery had gone famously. Logan’s new skills as a magic flashlight wall kept the shadow mages at bay.

“Multimorph.” A dusty Flynn met me at the mouth of the deepest run. Dirt clods clung to his regrowing beard. Lately, grief over his still-lost fated mate had scoured everything easy out of his face. Then this attack happened on his home ground. These were his injured, his dead. Being an alpha wasn’t an easy path, despite Flynn’s nonchalance.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“I’m happy to do what I can, Flynn. I only wish I had known Acheron intended to stab us here, done more to prevent…” I gestured to the devastation. “This.”

“You can’t know everything, Emma.”

I pressed my lips into a tight line, unwilling to add arguing with the multimorph to Flynn’s to-do list, no matter how incorrect I believed he was.

“Glad you were safe in Six-Mile when this happened,” he continued.

“I should have been here.”

“The multimorph is worth every life in every clan.” When I opened my mouth to argue, he shook his head. “We have the ones we could carry moving north. Logan’s taking them to Six-Mile behind the warding there.” His throat worked. “The rest can’t be moved. Not yet. Maybe not ever, not without⁠—”

“Show me,” I said.

He offered his arm, and I tucked my hand through his elbow.