Page 88 of Shifters Reckoning

There it was, the rot I’d smelled coming since the fence.

Loitering shifters moved closer, collecting around us.

“Marcus Steele has fought Acheron from the inside,” I said. “He gave us the trail south. His clan is holding the eastern watch right now, while you stand here talking.”

“His clan?” Garrick stepped closer. “His sister is the enemy’s compass, Blackwood. His blood leads their army. He waited in your study for weeks and never once mentioned his sister. You call that ‘fought from the inside.’ I call him a spy who hasn’t been given his orders yet.” He turned, playing to the crowd, and they were listening. “Detain him. Keep him warded and watched until the multimorph deigns to return. Any alliance that won’t stand true is already broken.”

Behind me, Ville Platte yowled, offended by the charges of treachery. Their private clan affairs weren’t Garrick’s business. Clans managed themselves. It was a universal shifter truth.

Della had silently materialized beside us, and the cats came with her. Their blind alpha rested in a camping chair at the edge of the clearing we stood in, put on trial by wolves in front of the whole army. If I detained the cat alpha on suspicion, his people wouldn’t file a grievance. His clan would leave. If Ville Platte walked, the eastern side of my perimeter opened up… with my mate gone, the horde already nearby, and the Veil groaning overhead.

Sixty warriors lifted their chins, smelling for weakness, a dozen cats deciding whether they were still allies or already gone. The one authority who could have ended it with four little words was miles south and getting farther.

The job was mine now, the whole damned job of standing in the middle.

“Nobody detains anybody in my camp on a smell.” I swept the yard the way I had at orientation, back when the worst thing coming was a raccoon with a menu.

My glare bought me quiet, but it didn’t buy me agreement. The crowd was on the fence. Della’s cats were deciding, and the fragile miracle Emma had built hung in the balance.

Marcus stood up, one hand on the arm of the camping chair. He drew himself straight and then released the backrest. He aimed his damaged eyes at nothing and tipped his chin. He looked proud, and it appeared he had finally decided to stop being careful.

“Enough,” he said. The word wasn’t loud, but it didn’t need to be.

Ville Platte went still, and the griping wolves quieted enough to hear him.

His mouth contorted in a grimace. “Alpha Garrick is right about one thing. I’ve been lying to all of you.” He turned his face toward the sound of the crowd, giving each quarter of it its due. “By omission, which is the coward’s way. I’ll stop now. You’ve earned the truth, and the multimorph isn’t here to forbid me telling it.”

“Marcus.” Della warned and pleaded with that one word.

“It’s all right,” he assured her.

It wasn’t, and we all knew it.

Yet he faced the yard. “My sister is at the fore of Acheron’s horde. That much is true, and you’re right to be afraid.” He took a breath. “What I haven’t told you is that she’s also in my head. At the creek, when Acheron paraded her in front of us, she created a mind-link, and she didn’t let go. It cost me my eyes at the cave. It should have cost me my mind.” He bared his teeth. “Some nights, I think it did because she is still there, every hour, whispering with Acheron behind her, using her, warping her, the way he does with everything. I’ve spent every day since learning to tell which whispers are his and which ones are hers, fighting up through his filth to tell me something true.”

The assembled shifters didn’t breathe.

“You want to know why I’ve been quiet?” His blind gaze landed on me. “Because a man with the enemy’s voice in his skull does not get believed. He gets exactly this.” He gestured around himself. “He gets a circle and a verdict, so I’ve checked her whispers, alone, in the dark, against what I could prove, and some of them, Alpha Garrick, some of them have been true. She warned me they’d come north. They came. She told me the shape of his army. It held. And she has told me one thing more, over and over, so hard it wakes me. There’s a seam, a blind hour in his defenses.”

My pulse pounded in my ears.

“Every night,” Marcus said, “his mages must turn and face the Veil to feed the gash, and while they carve at the sky, the army stands dormant in the ground. They’re dumb, blind, and refueling. She says there’s an hour when his whole terrible Void is looking up and no one is watching the door.” His voice cracked. “She has been trying to hand me the knife for weeks, and I have been too afraid of being exactly what you all think I am to pick it up.”

Heavy silence settled over the camp. The hair stood up on my arms. We had seen it in a drowned cypress flat, robed mages in rows with their heads down and the horde soaking into the ground around them like oil into an earthen rag.

Marcus’s sister had whispered the reality I’d observed with my own eyes.

This was the complication. This was the whole knife-edged problem.

“Clear the yard,” I said. “Leaders in my study. Now.”

The alphas stampeded toward the manor. Garrick went last, and he went with a look that claimed his challenge wasn’t finished yet. Maybe he was right, but he joined them.

Once we were all in the study, with the door closed and the note still resting on Torbin’s doily, I settled my ass on the corner of my desk and laid it out for the ones who mattered—Olivia; Torbin; Flynn, gray around the eyes and a brother short; Della at Marcus’s shoulder; and Marcus in the good chair, spent, honest, dangerous. I didn’t care for the others… like Garrick and the raven alpha. Fuck, I didn’t even know the bird’s name.

“Now answer me,” I barked at Marcus. “Can you tell his whispers from hers?”

“Most of the time.” The Ville Platte alpha didn’t dress it up. “Not always. That’s the truth, Logan, and I won’t sand it smooth for you. He knows I sort them. He is perfectly capable of feeding me a true thing ten times, so I’ll swallow the eleventh.” His hands lay open on his knees, his palms pointed toward the ceiling. “The seam is real. I’d stake my eyes on it, if I had them, but whether he wants us to know it because it’s his weakness or because it’s his trap, I can’t tell you.”