Page 56 of Shifters Reckoning

If. The word clung to my fur like a burr in my side. If the line holds. If Fern’s count is wrong. If we get back before⁠—

I ran harder, pushing my paws to go as quickly as they wolfly could.

The strength of the bond reduced with every mile, Emma’s warmth stretching behind me, calling me home, a pull one-eighty from what I had to make happen. Over a hundred warriors, her mother, her maybe-uncle, and the fragile miracle of the camp… all of it hung on what we brought back. Racing away from her felt like running with a nail in my paw. So I did what I always did with feelings that size.

We skirted Ville Platte territory two hours before dawn. Their border markers came up out of the shadows. Cat-scratched posts, old warding that smelled strongly of sour felines. Beyond them, far off through the bare trees, their watchfires burned in a scatter sea of orange, a clan going about its night, prickly, proud, but alive, with a tide charging through the parishes toward them.

One of Marcus’s cats slowed by half a stride. The other one bumped her shoulder, but the first shook her head. They sprinted on.

Hold strong, I thought at the watchfires. We’re coming back this way.

Hours later, we lay up in an abandoned tobacco barn miles farther south to avoid being exposed by the daylight. Even shifters had limits on how to hide in plain sight.

“Eat,” Olivia said, dropping a ration bar on my chest where I rested against the wall, listening to the country outside. “Sleep. You’ve been setting a hell of a pace. The road didn’t call yo’ mama bitch, you know.”

“We’re ahead of schedule thanks to me.”

“We’re ahead of your schedule, which was insane, and that’s why I built a second schedule.” She slid down the wall beside me. Exhaustion washed out her features. She’d been scrutinizing me since we had crossed our own south fence.

No, she’d been eyeing me since that clearing in No Man’s Land where I’d torn the souls out of shadow mages and thrown them back at their maker, and my beta had wiped her face and asked me twice what the hell I was.

“Say it,” I told her.

“The closer we get, the more you smell like that day.” No preamble. Years of never needing any. “‘Three parts desperate, one part reckless.’ Jasper’s words. If we reach that line and it’s bad, Logan… and it’s going to be bad… We all know it’s going to be bad. I need to know my alpha is the one who builds shifters.”

“Building shifters?” I echoed.

“Yeah. Not just destroys them.”

“Those deaths were on Acheron’s tally. Not mine,” I growled.

She glanced at our hodgepodge troop. The group had passed out in a dimly lit, unfathomable heap. Wolves and cats were spine to spine for warmth, Levi curled in the rafters above them. Jasper had first watch at the door with his beard tied down and his trinkets silenced. My people. Emma’s people.

The scar in the center of my chest ached. Balefire had skewered me there. Emma had knit it closed and restarted my heart with her magic, and ever since No Man’s Land, that patch of me hurt whenever Acheron’s ilk came near. A dead man’s barometer dropping wildly to announce a death storm.

It had been aching since midnight.

“The one who builds shifters,” I agreed. “That’s the alpha you’ve got. And if it stops being true out there, you have my permission to knock me on my ass and drag me home to my mate.”

“Permission.” Olivia snorted, already almost asleep sitting up, the way soldiers did. “Like I’d wait for permission.”

The Void Line

Dusk

Fern had told us the truth, but reality was worse in person.

We smelled death before we saw it—an absence of good. We continued through the unpopulated parts of Louisiana. The healthy tree line ahead of us disappeared.

Pewter trunks. Ashen canopy. Silvery grass stood dead in bleak, gray mud, drained of every color, as though Acheron had reached down and pulled the life out through the roots. No birdcall. No insects. Not one deer track pressed into ground that should have been lousy with them.

Static hit at forty yards. Jasper’s compass spun in unending circles. Jace had lost two drones to the Void from the safe side of a screen. Standing inside its hissy, overwhelming hum, I understood why.

“Mark it,” I said.

The unit went to work the way we’d drilled before we’d left Six-Mile. Cats paced the line east, foxes west, flagging the edge of the emptiness with surveyor’s tape every hundred feet. Levi ran the counts back from both directions while John kept the rally point and Olivia kept me.

It took less than an hour to learn what we’d come for.