Page 65 of Shifters Reckoning

This time, I rang it.

Jasper wheeled back at the sound, coming down off that levee into a hundred yards of risen ground.

No. Shit. I’d gotten cornered playing scout miles from my mate.

Then I put the bell between my teeth. If I fell, let them find where. Then I summoned as much deep magic as I could, drawing it in.

A whisper echoed in my head. It offered, helpful as ever, You know how to unmake them. Take the souls. Spend them.

Not that kind of magic.

Beyond it. Below it. Down where the flood had gone when Emma’s power had torn through me the first time and had left its channels behind like a spring flood remade a riverbed. The riverbed was mine. It had always been mine. Hers was the water that showed me where it ran.

I threw open the floodgates.

White light spread over my skin. No screaming souls. No stolen anything. Just power, mine, clean and roaring, the alpha of Six-Mile burning at a wattage I had no gauge for. In my head, the wolf that rose up was more wolf than I had ever been: bigger, brighter, silver light running off dark fur like water.

The darkness flinched around me. Whole tendrils recoiled from the burst the way night recoils from a light.

I didn’t unmake a single one of them. Instead, my magic sliced through them.

My claws became light, my energy became momentum. A wedge of the army broke off, and I ripped the closing half circle open at its thinnest joint.

Then I ran over risen ground that whipped, grasped, but could not hold me. Columns broke around my power like fog around high beams, north, north, north, my lungs full of knives and my chest scar singing. The bell rattling against my teeth like a mad little heartbeat.

The Void boundary came up out of the dark, the surveyor’s tape ghostly pale where my own people had flagged it hours earlier.

I sailed over it, and the world reacted. Wind. Insects. Rustling weeds. An owl somewhere, complaining about the interruption. I fled through the living weeds on living dirt with white light guttering off my fur like the last of a downpour. I could have wept at the sheer noise of ordinary darkness.

The illumination went out slowly, on its own schedule, like it wanted me to remember where the switch was. Scorch lines crisscrossed my shoulders where tendrils had grabbed and lost me. The frost melted in a circle around where I sat as the last of the magic light died along my arms.

I shifted to human fully, sat down hard in the frost, and shook. The bell dropped from my mouth to the dirt beside me.

Jasper found me before moonset. He came up out of the dark on two legs, torn along one forearm, dust in his beard. He stood over me for a long moment, scrutinizing everything.

He didn’t say most of the things he was entitled to.

All he said quietly was, “That wasn’t the other thing you did. The thing from No Man’s Land.”

“No.”

“I saw. It was clean.” He crouched and took the bell, and instead of hooking it back into his beard, he pressed it into my palm and folded my fingers over it. “Keep it, lad. Ye’re the one who keeps standing in places where a man needs a bell.”

We patched what needed patching. The shadow-made tears wouldn’t close from shifting, no matter how many times we traded from animal to human, so bandages had to make do. Then we ran north through the day, trading lead. The country got warmer and louder and more alive with every parish, and somewhere in the running, the fear burned down into purpose.

We had the engine. We had the schedule. We had a saboteur and a hostage held off the playing board, and I had a glow stick inside my own chest that answered when everything else was spent.

Emma was going to have questions. Dr. Wise was going to have theories. Olivia was going to have my hide.

Home first.

Dusk was coming down when Emma’s warmth finally reached me through the bond. Unmistakably hers, filtering south into me the way a candle in a window beckoned down a long dark drive.

Her voice arrived thread-thin and furious with love. Half a day, Logan Blackwood. You promised Olivia half a day. Don’t make me come teach you what happens to men who are late for Thanksgiving.

A laugh boiled out of me from somewhere under my chest scar, ragged and whole at the same time, and beside me, Jasper’s ears twitched at the sound as if he’d been waiting for it.

I pushed the flicker back down the line to her. Alive, running, yours. And I lengthened my stride toward my rainbow light.