Page 80 of Shifters Reckoning

Like it’s costing her more than it’s costing me. Like she’d rather cut off her own hand.

“Like she’s sorry, but she doesn’t relent,” I said.

Olivia remained quiet a long moment, watching a group of Ville Platte cats teach a Six-Mile youngling to stalk an enemy. “Whatever it is,” she said carefully, “she’s carrying it, so you don’t have to. That’s the only reason your mate ever carries anything alone.” She started walking again. “You want to help her? Stop trying to pick the lock. Hold the field so she has somewhere to come home to.”

Good advice, but it was the kind a beta gave the alpha, and the kind the alpha, being an alphahole, could not take.

The strategy meeting was supposed to be about tactics.

We had packed into my study the night before the Beaver Moon, elbow to elbow. Olivia at my shoulder. Jasper by the window, his beard tied down, no twinkle in him. Torbin filled a corner like a mountain that had decided to sit. Flynn, still gray around the eyes from digging his own foxes out of the ground. Marcus sat in the good chair, his blind face aimed at the map he couldn’t see, Della planted behind him. Garrick and his northern wolves. The raven speaker. Dr. Wise with her satchel and her spectacles and her terrible calm. My mate on the far side of the desk, her arms crossed, the closed wall between us like a live land mine.

Whispered conversations buzzed in the room, but I focused on the current alpha of the Ville Platte cats. The big cats seemed hesitant to march into an army training facility to drag their alpha back to their territory for an inquisition, and overthrowing an alpha wasn’t supposed to happen on a rival clan’s land. It probably helped that Marcus seemed to be favored by the multimorph. That had been shrewd of Emma.

“They’re calling for your resignation,” Della murmured to Marcus.

“We’ll deal with that after the full moon,” Marcus answered. “What’s a few more days?”

Della cursed under her breath, but she didn’t argue.

Olivia glanced at me, and I gave her a small nod of approval. Then she cleared her throat. “My update isn’t encouraging. The Void line is four days closer. The attacker counts are still climbing. The rituals Jasper and our alpha had watched, chewing at the seam of the world in shifts… those things are all still true. Acheron’s army stops every night to feed, and it will arrive, if its pace holds, on the Beaver Moon. On the night of the planned feast. Any questions?”

“We know of the ruined feast already,” the raven speaker announced.

“What is the plan?” Garrick asked.

“We’re no longer waiting for them to get here,” I answered. “We hit the engine before it finishes the work. I’ve seen it… We both have.” I gestured to Jasper, who nodded grimly. “Many mages, rows of them, their heads down and blind while they carve. Every night, we assume it’s a stand-down. That’s the window. Squirrels cut their lines, bears break the shell, cats and wolves into the seam, and we shatter the thing that’s been slowing him down and speeding him up at the same time. We take the fight to him while he’s got his hands full of the Veil.”

“And walk a hundred green warriors into dead country that grows his soldiers out of the dirt,” Emma said as her side of our connection withdrew behind her side of the wall. “Where the tree runes make his army.”

“We walked nine out and brought nine home. Those are good odds.” I despised that Acheron had wedged his way between us. It must have been him.

“You brought eight home and one changed man.” Her eyes came up to mine, and there it was… the distance between us. “Dr. Wise found the original warding grounds. We hold there, Logan. The old, protected earth defies his creatures the way plain dirt can’t. We resist where the first shifters already dug the trenches. We make him come to us across ground that’s ours, and we do not hand him the multimorph on his own doorstep, which is the one thing he has wanted for hundreds of years. With you, as… as…” She paused. “As the magic lamp you are now, he can’t even make good on his blood feud. We. Hold. There.”

“Holding is losing slower.” My voice rose, and I couldn’t stop it. She was being ridiculous. “Every night we delay, the wound gets wider and the horde gets bigger. You want to fight him at full strength when he’s ready?” I yelled. “That’s not a plan, Emma. That’s a funeral with good seating.” And I can’t let you martyr yourself inside a dome…

“Striking is exactly what he wants.” She kept her voice even. “He has spent this entire war trying to pull us south. Trying to pull me south. And you want to run at him because—” She stopped.

“Say it.”

“Because you think you can end it.” Her voice broke. “Because there’s a woman walking at the front of that horde. You left her behind once, and you have not forgiven yourself for a single hour since. You would burn down the Void to reach her. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“It’s not for her…” I rasped. My heart clenched. “It’s for you.”

Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “It’s not your choice.”

Garrick shifted his shoulders. “The alpha’s not wrong about the window⁠—”

“Out,” I roared. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t spare a glance for any of them. “All of you. Now.”

They all exited. Even Torbin, who paused in the doorway long enough to set one enormous hand on the frame like he was reminding the house to be there when he got back, and then he was gone.

Our study door clicked shut, closing the two of us in with a wall between us and the maps of a war neither of us was arguing about anymore.

“You want to know what I’m afraid of?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer, but tears glittered in her emerald eyes.

Let me in, Emma. What happened to us?