Page 75 of Shifters Reckoning

Logan found me as I worked the wounded. He eyed Flynn’s proximity.

I bit back the flash of a grin. Once an alphahole, always an alphahole. Logan hated it when any shifter was closer to me than eighteen inches. “Flynn’s escorted me to the wounded.”

Logan scowled. “Is it wise to use your energy healing?”

I stopped short and glanced up from the shifter I’d been healing. “Why wouldn’t healing the wounded be wise?”

“Acheron is amassing troops, and you should be saving all your strength for the impending battle.” It might be the final one, my love.

“Not yet.”

He squatted next to me. “Come north with the convoy, you’ll be safer,” he murmured into my ear. “You’re already nearing empty, Emma. Today’s training took it out of you. I can feel it.”

Flynn loitered nearby and kept his gaze on the ground.

I pulled back far enough to place my palm flat on the scar in the center of Logan’s broad chest, appreciating the hardness of his muscles and the way his pecs flexed as he moved. “There are foxes in that tunnel who won’t see morning if I get in a truck,” I said. “You know I can’t.”

He wanted to disagree, to argue, and to put me on the truck anyway, but he knew he mustn’t. His knowing echoed in our link, and I loved him so much.

“Then I’ll escort the others and get them behind the old magic,” he said. “You stay and help the ones who’ll die without you.” His forehead came down to mine. “There will always be an after, Emma. That’s still the only promise I’m keeping until I die.”

“Race ya home,” I whispered.

His grin flickered, ghost-pale in the ruin, and I followed Flynn toward the makeshift triage.

In the connector, Giselda was already moving through the groaning wounded, more youthful than she had been when I mediated between her and an old loner cat. The aged she-fox crouched over a male Ville Platte cat with her gnarled hands buried wrist-deep in a wound that should have already killed him. Her long gray hair had been pinned back for once. Her forgotten cane rested against the dirt wall. She’d been a fixture of Red Tail long before I was born, and I was certain she’d be a lingering rumor long after we were all dust. The wily thing who’d once bargained for a burial plot and told me to my face she meant to die where her life had been happiest. The border den she’d won sat a half-mile south of these runs, close enough to count as home turf. This ground. These trees.

Now she was spending what was left of her very long life on a boy who wasn’t hers, and she didn’t so much as look up when I dropped down beside her.

“I thought you’d be dead by now,” I said.

She cackled at me. “Not yet, and you should be glad for it.”

“How many?”

“Nineteen and one vixen that needs primal. About time, Rainbow,” she crooned. “Put your hands here. I’ve stopped the bleeding. You do the shiny thing you do.”

I put my hands where she said, pressing my fingers in beside her gnarled, bony ones, and the wound glowed in multiple colors. The boundaries of the wound brightened, twisted, and moved together, linked by sutures of light.

With a gasp, the injured cat shuddered. “Oof,” he said. “That smarts, Gigi.”

I met Giselda’s gaze over the injured feline. “Gigi?”

“Easier on the dying than Giselda,” she muttered.

I’d been knitting creatures back together since I learned how to use sutures, first on Willow Creek’s fur babies and then on shifters, and I’d grown skilled in the art of magical healing.

But this big cat’s injuries resisted healing. Shadow-mage damage fought back. It rejected healing the way Marcus’s ruined eyes refused it, the foulness shoving back for every centimeter as it gave way. When we finished, I stood.

“Vixen?”

Giselda pointed to the far end of the prone bodies. “Over there. At the end. Hurry.”

When I knelt beside the dark-haired shifter, she beamed up at me as though any day she met the multimorph was a good day. Her fast, shallow breaths made me regret not following the rules of triage and stopping here first. Only one side of her chest rose and fell with her breath. Death had almost claimed her.

Bloodied gashes covered her naked body, and her matted hair stuck to her. I summoned my magic, reached through the shifting power and into the healing energies. Then I shoved one of my hands into the earthen floor of the corridor and drew deeper, into the borrowed places. A rumble vibrated beneath us.

Multicolored magic rolled up out of the ground and slid over the trembling fox. Carefully, I worked through every inch of her, knitting her collapsed lung back together and drawing her wounds closed. Finally, I broke our link and sat back with a sigh.