Page 57 of Shifters Reckoning

The tape didn’t stay at the edge.

The first flag we’d planted stood three feet inside the Void cloud by the time it absorbed the latest one. It wasn’t creeping. It was breathing, advancing in slow pulses. A cacophony of noises reverberated, and shapes moved inside. They had to know we were here.

But they didn’t give a rat’s ass. That’s how certain Acheron was.

I crouched at the line with a stopwatch and calculated its speed.

My chest ached, and my stomach churned, and I bit back a rush of vomit. The numbers came up filthy. Faster than Fern’s count. Faster than yesterday.

“A week was generous,” Olivia murmured, reading over my shoulder. “Six days. Maybe five.”

Motherfucker. That meant Thanksgiving.

The table decorations Sophia was already planning, the bracket on the mess hall wall, my mate on a flatbed trailer promising one people under the Beaver Moon…

Shit. The horde was going to arrive like an unwanted dinner guest.

And there was a horde. Deep in the gray, past the ruined forest, the shapes moved without hesitating, forcing my count to stall out somewhere north of two hundred. They didn’t march toward us. Instead, they rolled and boiled inside the Void cloud.

Fern had said it true. They flowed, pooling and thinning like oil on water, and every few minutes, one of them lifted out of the ground where there’d been nothing but shadow. Growing. Acheron wasn’t just marching an army up the parishes.

He was manufacturing one along the way.

My scar burned like a brand. Behind my sternum, in the place where I’d once reached out and twisted, a voice whispered that I knew how to unmake every shape in that forest, that I’d done it before, that all it would cost was another piece of whatever I’d been before No Man’s Land.

I clenched my teeth, and my hands turned to fists while I breathed through the desire to tap into all the energy I could.

“You good?” Olivia whispered.

The one who builds. I mentally recorded the count, logged the pace, and turned to give the order to fall back and run the report home.

“Yeah, good,” I bit out. “Fall back and run the report home.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

That was when the wind shifted, and I smelled him. The scent came rolling out of the cloud. Marcus. Sandy, feline, and unmistakable.

My hackles went up like razors along my spine. Marcus in the dead zone. Marcus moving with the horde. Marcus whom I’d left standing behind my warding, posted on watch beside my mate, trusted at the heart of everything I⁠—

No.

“Logan!” Olivia barked. “Come back to me, Logan.”

A grunt escaped me, but I forced myself to stop and made myself evaluate the scent the way Emma assessed a wound.

I took a deep breath. It was the Steele musk, sure, but this scent ran finer and colder, threaded with mage-stink and old grief. I’d smelled it once before… at the creek crossing, coming off a woman who’d been wrenched up into the air like a puppet and made to open her own brother’s arms to the bone, and again at Acheron’s abandoned mansion before we’d destroyed it.

Their genetics were similar. Marcus had said it himself, after. It has to be her.

Not Marcus.

His sister.

Emma’s birth mother.

A chill went down my spine and kept going all the way into the frosty ground.