Page 96 of Shifters Reckoning

Marcus didn’t hesitate. He set back on his feline haunches and sailed out of the circle as I dove toward his would-be attackers. I landed on my feet and summoned a burst of energy that shot out of me like a grenade made of light.

The figures shattered, and the shards sank into the soil.

Levi’s forces broke the rune-line, and the dead earth stopped birthing misshapen shadows, and the Void stopped growing. Still no sign of his hollow court, and we were quickly running out of shadow mages.

Ten, eleven, twelve more times the fully formed creatures attacked our line and fractured against our united power. If Marcus’s sister was the bait, Acheron was sacrificing his forces to spring his trap. Perhaps she had masterminded her own escape.

Marcus shifted to his human form, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled, “We’re almost there.”

Her face twisted, but she sent the final contingent zigzagging across the ground toward us. We converged on them and ripped them apart. With a roar, we bested the last of them, and the fog pulsed around us.

The last of the rune-lines went dark under Levi’s warriors, the shells of mages fell to bears, and the great droning wrongness that had been chewing at the seam of the world simply… slowed to a stop. The Void over the flat guttered and shrank, and the general dropped into the black water.

All around us, the Void lurched as it diminished, and forty of the alliance’s best stood in the wreck of it, alive. Together. One beast with one spine.

She’d been at the heart of the Void. She had been the still point the shadows ran around, Steele musk gone wrong under the stink of mage rot and grief.

Della’s cats rushed in and plucked Marcus’s sister from the gray interior. The second they pulled her clear of the rune-ring, something tore loose in my chest, and warmth spread through my torso.

Marcus felt it worse. He made a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life. His yowl cut off mid-shriek, and his knees buckled.

Ville Platte dragged our prize out of the black water puddle. Yet what we hauled onto the shore of the bog wasn’t one woman. Two were wearing one body and fighting over it. At least half of her was still Acheron’s. One iris was black, the other was green. Half of her contorted mouth shaped words in a voice with Acheron behind it.

The other half of her cried out. “Where is my son? Where’s Eli?”

“Cora, Cora. Don’t worry. We have you.” Marcus dropped to his knees beside her.

In all this time, he’d never spoken her name.

Unerring, he found her face with his hands, and he pressed his forehead to hers. The two ruined Steeles knelt in the wreckage. He held her as she shook, rolling and fighting against Acheron inside her. For us, the fight had ended. For her, it still raged.

Her voice rose two octaves, and she screamed, “Where is Eli? Tell me. Tell me.” She whimpered.

“He’s not here anymore,” Marcus said. “He hasn’t been with you since the plantation, has he? Acheron split you up and keeps him somewhere else now. That’s the collar. That’s why you…” His voice broke. “That’s why you did all of this.”

She sobbed. “It’s the only way to save my son.”

The truth came out in pieces. Acheron had taken her long before the creek, had sensed the origins and the genetic strength of the multimorph, and had taken her son with her. He’d kept the boy at her side until I breached the plantation. After her treachery, he’d swallowed the child into the harvest as a leash for his leash, and she’d spent every hour since doing exactly enough to keep her child breathing and not one inch more.

The mis-tied knots. The warding smudged a half-degree out of true. The map she’d let slip into Marcus’s head at the creek. The knife she’d been trying to hand us for weeks. All those stolen parts of a woman being used as a weapon and using every scrap of herself she could steal back to sabotage the one who held her leash.

Not a traitor. The longest-running act of resistance in the whole war.

Marcus reached for the thin chain at his neck and yanked until it broke. Then he unhooked the red-eyed golden bat pendant. I’d seen it in Emma’s hand and around Marcus’s neck a hundred times and taken it for jewelry. It wasn’t jewelry. It was hers.

“You gave me this, Cora,” he told her, folding it into her palm, closing her fingers over it. “‘Bats see in dark places,’ you’d said the day they made me alpha, and I couldn’t stop shaking. Then I gave it back when you gave her up for adoption, and I found it again at the creek. I’ve carried it since. Every night his voice tried to tell me which whispers were his, I held this and listened for the ones that were yours. Maybe the pendant kept us connected.” He pressed her fist to his chest. “I always knew you weren’t gone. Though I couldn’t prove it to anyone. Eli’s not gone. We’ll find him too.”

Cora clutched the little bat against her heart. For one whole breath, the weeping half of her won. Both her irises cleared to a familiar green, as green as my mate’s, and she looked at her brother like a drowning woman surfacing from beneath deep water.

Then the other half dragged her back under, and she screamed, and it wasn’t grief anymore. It was Acheron, furious, feeling his weapon being pried from his grip. Both her eyes turned black.

“Bind her,” I commanded Levi and Della. “Gently. She can come home to Six-Mile. Maybe he won’t be able to reach her if we put her in the relic trove. Torbin may be able to do something.” Then I turned to Marcus and lowered my voice so only he could hear it. “You held the line nobody knew was a line. You kept the enemy’s own compass pointed at true north for as long as he held her, one whisper at a time. When this is over, that’s the story they’ll tell about the alpha of Ville Platte.”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t.

Tears streamed over his cheeks as he held his sister’s bound hands around the gold bat. He was the blind man who’d been able to see reality the whole time.

I gave them the moments we could spare, and then we began the battle back to Six-Mile.