Page 42 of Shifters Reckoning

The word went through me like a staff strike. The woman in the creek with her wrenched-wrong magic, screaming down and linking with her own brother. Crazy bitch would never be my mama. Sophia Carter was all the mom I needed.

“I have about four hundred questions about my alleged birth mother.”

“I’ll answer what I can.” He paused. For one bare second, his alpha armor slipped, and he was only a man at a table in someone else’s house. “Do you still have her bat pendant?”

“I do. It stayed in Six-Mile. You can have it back if you want it.”

“No, it was a gift.”

“Sounds good.”

The silence stretched awkwardly between us.

Finally, Marcus sighed. “Try the eyes first. I know you’re going to ask until I give in. Get it out of the way, and then neither of us has to be careful around the subject all week.”

Without a word, I placed my fingers against his temples and reached for the warm pool of magic in my chest. Rainbow light seeped out between my fingers and painted his face in colors. I followed the damage inward, the way instinct and Dr. Wise had taught me to trail a wound to its source, and discovered the cruelest thing I’d ever diagnosed.

Nothing. Fucking nothing wrong at all. His eyes were whole and unmarred.

I delved deeper. The decay now lived farther inside him and had burned along the shifter energy channels. His sister’s magic had been braided through the length of it, all twisted up with a foul magic that I recognized from when I’d been caged in a bunker. Still, I probed gently until the foul binding pushed back, and it wasn’t nice at all.

When I finally released him, we were both breathing hard like we’d been escaping attack and running back from Wolf Moon Cave. “Marcus⁠—”

“What did you find?”

“You are physically fine. It’s behind them, and it’s… it’s spellwork, not injury. Spellwork can be unworked.” I studied him. “But not today, and not by yanking on it. If I pull the wrong bits, I could take more than your sight.”

He was silent a moment as he took another sip of his tea. “Well, you’ve already got a better bedside manner than the last vet I saw. He tried to give me a heartworm pill.”

The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, and outside the doorway, Della snorted.

“Twice more,” he said, gathering his armor back on, piece by piece. “You may attempt it twice more while we’re here. I doubt you would forgive yourself otherwise. After that, you save it for after the war. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Good.” His face turned toward the slanting afternoon light streaming in through the doorway. “Now, about the shadows. They moved through my territory going south, Emma… His stink strung through the parishes south of Ville Platte like a trotline. Whatever hole he’s gone down, it’s in the deep south of the state, and holes are where he does his worst work.” He shook his head as he leaned back. “If your mate’s drone man is as good as Logan brags, tell him to stop circling Six-Mile and look where the land turns to shadow and insects go quiet.”

“Fine. I’ll send word as soon as an opportunity presents itself.” Working out how to tell Logan what to do without being there in person to make sure he did it… That’d take all afternoon. “Let’s get back to training.”

“As you wish, Multimorph.” Marcus inclined his head and then followed me out of Torbin’s home.

Hours later, I washed at the little stand by battery-powered lamplight, and I was already dead on my feet when I slid between the quilts in the bedroom chamber. Sore in the good way, fed in the better way, alone in a way I was still learning to survive.

Through the wall of the warding, faint as a voice from another room, warmth arrived. Sleep well, love.

I was too far gone to respond, so I pressed what I had back into the link, and I felt him settle the way he always did when he knew where I was. It was as though I’d climbed into bed with my back against him and his arm wrapped around my middle.

No nightmares found me that night. Tomorrow, there would be more bears, a quilted banner if I could get Torbin to agree to make it, and an annoyed blind cat calling footwork from a camp chair.

Yet, probably somewhere south of all of us, a hole in the map where an evil force was working, setting up traps, making weapons, and preparing to wipe us off the face of the earth.

I pressed my lips into a tight, determined line. Let Acheron work.

We had an army to build, and I’d met a quiltmaker with his heart set on making a war flag. He just didn’t know it yet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

emma