Page 82 of Shifters Reckoning

Nobody ate.

No one spoke.

That was what I’d remember. Hundreds of warriors and many of Louisiana’s frightened civilians sat at a Thanksgiving spread that stretched a football field long under a fat orange moon, and not one fork moved.

The camp held its breath so long the food went cold, and every soul in that clearing sat with their eyes turned south. We could all feel it now. The Void tide climbed through the last of the parishes toward a compound that smelled of woodsmoke, good food, and fear.

My mate sat beside me at the head of the longest table, close enough to touch but still behind the separation. Her mother sat on Emma’s other side and piled food on Emma’s plate.

Down the tables, I took in all of it. Torbin still as a mountain, Marcus with his blind face lifted toward a moon he couldn’t see, wearing the golden, ruby-eyed bat pendant that Emma had returned to him in honor of Thanksgiving. Levi not saying a word, Fern pale and upright in a chair she should not have gotten out of her cot for. Jasper found Olivia’s hand on the table. Even Garrick’s northern wolves had gone silent.

One people.

Emma had promised them that from a flatbed trailer. Here it was. It had just taken the end of the world to build it, and it turned out one people looked like a whole lot of scared strangers refusing to touch their food. Together.

I found Emma’s hand on the bench between us. I grasped it and held on. She let me, small mercy.

The lower portion of the moon cleared the tree line. The warding vibrated its warning through all of us as our enemies arrived at our boundary, the deathly pressure cresting at the edge of our lives. We all shared a single indrawn breath running the length of the tables like wind through wheat.

Right on time. Exactly on the feast it had promised to eat.

And then every relic in Six-Mile screamed at once. The trove behind the manor, in the back of the gym where we kept the old magic objects—the healing medallions, the linking stone, the katana that had taken a traitor’s head, every anchor and artifact the pack had gathered in hundreds of years. They all cried out at once with a sound that struck above and below hearing and cut through bone and tooth. The once-dead scar in the center of my chest caught fire.

Dr. Wise was on her feet before the echo died out, her spectacles flashing, her satchel clutched to her chest, and her face gone the color of the white linen tablecloth.

“That’s the Veil,” she called. “Every ward in Louisiana is a knot from the same net, and he’s just taken hold of the net.” Her eyes found Emma, then me, and then the moon. “It’s begun. He’s tearing it down.”

Beside me, my mate rose. The closed door in the bond blazed with something she wouldn’t let me see, and the rainbow tattoo on her hip lit up, and every relic in Six-Mile went on begging with the same word. Over and over.

Now. Now. Now.

The feast, untouched, glowed cold under the Beaver Moon.

And the war we’d prepared the table for came to dinner at last.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

emma

Six-Mile

Night of the Beaver Moon

The relics still shrieked when the tree line came apart, exposing the advancing horde and its flowing tide. Shadows poured out of the woods on every side of the south fence at once. Dark shapes came from under the earth and over it.

God. I shouldn’t have waited…

They flowed over the cool ground. More rose straight up out of the dirt. Above it, the sky itself had a seam in it now, a wound weeping that same sickness I’d sensed in Marcus’s ruined eyeball.

Every relic in Six-Mile screeched the same repeated word into my marrow. Now. Now. Now.

I’d promised these people a feast as one people. Instead, I was going to hand them a war dancing across their set tables, and there wasn’t one more second to regret it. I should never have fucking delayed my trip to Wolf Moon Cave for Logan’s sake. My sentiment was going to get us all killed. Worrying about breaking his heart shouldn’t have kept me there.

“Positions!” I bellowed and put the power of the multimorph into my roar. It carried over the clearing.

Hundreds of warriors came off the benches, leaving cold sweet potatoes behind, and they morphed into the well-trained army we’d been building for the last five weeks.

Dozens of squirrels shifted and darted away from the table, skittering out the windows and up the nearest tree trunks. Wind burst through the table decorations, sending the red and yellow leaves across the mashed potatoes.