Page 66 of Shifters Reckoning

Late for Thanksgiving. Not for this one, love. Not for any of them.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

emma

Six-Mile

That Night

They came up the south road two hours after full dark, and I knew it before the perimeter wolves did because the light in my chest went from ember to bonfire between one breath and the next.

I beat everyone to the gate except Olivia, only because Olivia cheats, and I was beginning to suspect Jasper might be her fated mate, not simply her bedmate. Once it was all over, I needed to have a serious heart-to-heart with that girl.

Logan came through first, human, upright, wearing borrowed gray sweats from some stopping point along the way and a stripe of scorched skin across both shoulders that made my healer’s hands itch. Jasper limped in behind him with one bloodied forearm and covered in dust.

I hit my mate at a dead run. He caught me, and for ten whole seconds, the war waited outside our circle.

He smelled different under the pine and the smoke. Clean, vast, and faintly smoldering like the air after lightning. My multimorph senses reached for his frequency out of two months of habit and found the shape of him changed. It was the same song, in the same key, played through an amplifier the size of a barn.

Later, he said to me alone.

“You’re late,” I said into his chest.

“Traffic was murder.”

Around us, a cheer went through the congregating shifters. Olivia grinned sheepishly as though she’d started it. Complaining wouldn’t help morale, so I shot her a dark look from the arms of my mate.

Logan’s arms tightened hard enough to bruise, honest enough to break my heart. Then he set me back, and the alpha came up over him like a drawbridge, and he turned to the crowd. “Council. The gym. Every leader, now.”

Beside us, Olivia looked Jasper up and down. She evaluated his limp, his damaged arm, the missing trinkets, and the guilt all over his face.

“Skinning’s tomorrow,” she said at last. “Six sharp. Bring your own knife.”

“Aye, beloved,” Jasper said meekly. He used his good arm to grab her ass as she hauled him toward the gym by his bad one.

It took Logan eleven minutes to end the world as every shifter in that gym understood it. He gave the report with no ornament. The drowned cypress flat. More than ninety living-dead mages working in shifts. The wound hanging above the black water, a seam in the world pried open, weeping dark energy. The scar on his chest had burned within sight of it, he explained. He let the shifters believe it was a battle scar. Only a handful of us knew Acheron had carved it. Dr. Wise’s recovered page lay on the map-covered table in its plastic sleeve while he talked, like an exhibit at a trial.

Dr. Wise took her page from the table, shoved her glasses up her nose, and referred to it. Then she returned it to the table. “You’ve found the Veil and a break in it.”

“Then Acheron isn’t marching on Six-Mile because he wants Six-Mile,” Logan said. “He isn’t even marching on the multimorph, except as a meal along the way. He’s following the warded grounds north like a man following a seam of ore. He means to bring down the boundary the first shifters raised. When it goes, there’s no shifter world and human world. There’s one world, no walls, and him feeding on both sides.”

“Two worlds’ worth of souls,” Dr. Wise said quietly into the heavy silence. “That is what 1849 was. The pages I’m still assembling suggest he got the seam this wide once before, and the cost of shutting it is what somebody spent a century razoring out of the record.” Her spectacles flashed toward me and then away.

The gym had gone silent. Hundreds of warriors packed the bleachers behind their leaders. We’d given up pretending the rank and file wouldn’t hear everything by breakfast anyway, and understanding moved through them like cold floodwater through a house.

Then Logan gave them the rest. The engine’s schedule, the body of the horde standing down every night while the mages fed, which meant Olivia’s landfall math, honest numbers taken in the only hours she’d had, had clocked the tide while it was coming in and had missed that it stopped to eat. Real landfall was the Beaver Moon. The night of the feast. Five days. Exactly. Acheron had chosen it.

And the sister. Logan spoke carefully, plainly. He explained who she was before, but now she was the right-hand commanding, the left-hand mis-tying, a dozen newborn shadows slipping back into the water. No scent of her son anywhere in that army.

While Logan told it, I watched Marcus in the front row do the hardest thing I’d ever seen him do. Nothing at all. His face never changed. His hand never left the spot where the bat pendant had probably once been. Down at the frequency where nobody could see, the flat note he’d carried since the creek cracked open, I detected something I hadn’t felt in him in weeks.

Hope. The terrible kind. The kind that costs everything.

“Saboteur or bait,” Logan finished, “we don’t know. Both, maybe. What we know is the engine, the schedule, and the clock.” He deposited something small on the table beside Dr. Wise’s page. A brass bell, absurd and tiny among the maps. “That’s the report.”

For a few seconds, the room held.

Then Phil appeared at the gym door with a phone in his hand and a twisted expression on his face. “Alpha. Multimorph. It’s…” He gave up on protocol. “Sheila’s on the line from Vixen’s, and she says turn on the news.”