9. Logan #2
Phil manned the grill with a beer in one hand and a spatula in the other, flipping burgers for a collection of cliques.
The Six-Mile wolves clustered near the food table like they owned it, which they did.
The Ville Platte cats had claimed the picnic tables at the edge of the patio, close enough to be present, far enough to be unmistakably separate.
Four ravens perched in a row along the ridgeline of the frame of my brand-new mess hall like the world’s worst weather vanes, and two raccoon warriors stood at the water spigot, methodically washing their hamburger buns.
Washing. Their buns.
“Don’t say anything,” Olivia murmured beside me.
“The bread is dissolving.”
“It’s their way, Logan.”
“It’s soup. It’s burger soup.”
The East Nuttal squirrels kept to themselves at another far table, quieter than any other squirrel I’d yet met.
Grief rolled off them in a scent-wave every time the wind shifted, and I let them keep their distance.
Their alpha had betrayed us all, and then they’d had to execute her and bury her without clan attendance or a Death Rite.
The Cold Moon would give them a new alpha. Until then, they ate my burgers and watched everything with black, careful eyes, and I made sure Phil kept their end of the table stocked.
Emma had asked me to make her mixed-clan experiment work, so it was going to work, even if we had to grill a thousand burgers and referee every food-washing weirdo in Louisiana to do it. Still, I’d be glad when this shit was over.
At seven o’clock, I called them all into the training gym and stood on the mats where, a lifetime ago, my mate had nearly burned through a circle of nine linked shifters, a stone’s throw from where a traitor had later met her sentence.
If any of them were thinking about that, they had the good sense not to smell like it.
“Welcome to Six-Mile,” I said. “Here’s how this works.”
It took twenty minutes to lay it all out.
Housing assignments came first. No more than one of any kind of shifter to a tiny home, per the multimorph’s orders, which produced the cacophony of complaint I’d expected and zero challenges once I showed my teeth and let my eyes go wolf-bright and sweep the room.
Training at 7:00 a.m. No challenge fights outside the ring. No hunting another clan’s preferred game in my woods. The mess hall opened at six, and anyone with a food custom that required plumbing could speak to Phil, who was more patient than I was and often armed with a spatula.
“By the time we’re finished, if you work hard, you’ll have learned the art of partial shifting,” I promised.
A murmur ran through the assembled group.
“Questions,” I said in a tone that discouraged them.
A raven in the third row unfolded his arms. “The raccoon in my house has filled the bathtub with gravel.”
“It’s a filtration bed,” one of the raccoons protested. “For washing—”
“You each get half a bathroom,” I said. “Work it out like adults, or I’ll assign you a bear to mediate.”
Silence. Ravens and raccoons alike did the math on sharing a bathroom with a bear.
“Anything else?” I called.
Nothing else.
They filed out into the dark in a loose, wary shuffle that wasn’t a unit yet, wasn’t an army yet, wasn’t anything yet except three dozen strangers who all owed their grief to the same enemy.
It was a start. My compound had turned into a boarding school for feral children, and gods help me, I was the headmaster.
A middle school, I thought, watching a squirrel shift and take the shortest route to the door directly over the heads of two affronted cats. It’s a damned middle school.
Olivia fell into step beside me on the walk back to the manor. “That went well.”
“Nobody bled.”
“Like I said.” She flipped through the notes on her clipboard. “Oh. The raccoon alpha followed up. He wants to host Thanksgiving here under the Beaver Moon. He has opinions about the menu, Logan. He submitted a menu.”
“Tell him…” I shoved my hand through my hair. Emma had opened that door herself at the conclave, and if I slammed it, I’d be the alphahole undermining her program in front of all the shifters. “Tell him we’d be honored, and that nothing on that menu gets washed after it’s cooked.”
Her mouth twisted in a half-grin. “You’re growing as a person.”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
We’d nearly reached the porch when a young bear found us.
He came up the drive at a trot, still breathing hard from the run out of the east, and I smelled Bear Trees on him before he opened his mouth—old cypress, cold mud, and the particular musk of Torbin’s people.
A messenger. My heart slammed once, hard, and Olivia’s hand landed on my forearm before I could take a step.
“The multimorph is well,” the boy said quickly, which meant Torbin had coached him, which meant Torbin knew exactly what my first question would always be.
“Training began at first light this morning, and she worked the warriors until the sun quit. She is settled in the alpha’s own hollow, and the warding is strong.
” He swallowed. “Also. The alpha of Ville Platte arrived at midday per the multimorph’s summons. ”
The porch light buzzed. Somewhere out by the tiny homes, a raccoon laughed at something, high and chittering, but the sound came to me from a long way off, down a tunnel that had gone red at the edges. She hadn’t wanted me at the conclave.
“Marcus,” I said, “is in Bear Trees. With my mate.”
“At her summons, Alpha,” the boy repeated, backing up a step.
“She, uh, she said to tell you…” He cleared his throat.
“She said you’d make a face like that, and to tell you…
” He screwed his eyes shut and recited. “‘All consequences with Logan are mine and mine alone. Four little words, love. Look them up. I am the multimorph.’ And,” the boy hurried on, clearly determined to empty himself of the whole message before anyone shifted or attacked, “the Ville Platte alpha brought word that Acheron’s trail runs south past his territory.
The multimorph asks that your drone man turn his birds that way. ”
Olivia made a strangled sound.
I stood there in the November dark, my jaw working, while my inner wolf paced a trench in the floor of my skull.
Marcus Steele, blind, bitter, uncle-by-ambush, sitting in a rocking chair forty miles east, drinking coffee across the table from the only person I’d ever needed.
And Emma, who could have asked me, who hadn’t asked me, because she didn’t answer to me, because that had been the deal since the night she’d stomped out of my study and driven home to Willow Creek with my heart in her backseat.
I am the multimorph.
Four little words. I could hear her saying them, her hip cocked, her eyebrow up, daring me.
“Alpha?” the young bear ventured. “Any reply?”
“Tell Torbin I hold him to his promise. Personally.” I forced my shoulders down out of my ears. “And tell the multimorph…” A hundred things lined up to be said, most of them growls. “Tell her the drones fly south. Tell her Six-Mile stands, and that I’m keeping score.”
The boy fled at a pace that did his clan credit.
Olivia waited until he was out of earshot before she said mildly, “You handled that better than I expected.”
“I’m going to go spray-paint more squares on the ground now.”
“That’s what I would do,” my beta said, straight-faced, and she went inside.
I didn’t have to say it out loud. Painting was the only thing that helped right now.
I worked by floodlight and moonlight on the far side of the compound, walking off the grid for tomorrow’s deliveries with a can of marking paint and a pocket full of survey flags.
Two more rows of tiny homes. A covered walkway would come later because Louisiana winter meant six weeks of cold rain, and I wasn’t raising an army with trench foot.
Wider squares for the pair of portable classrooms I’d ordered after it had sunk in that Emma’s war camp was going to need somewhere to teach warding and field medicine after the weather turned.
Additional septic tanks in black. Water in blue.
Power in red, double-striped where the trenching crew needed to mind the oak roots.
The paint cans hissed. Flags went in at the corners. The knot between my shoulders loosened one line at a time. Blackwood Construction hadn’t won a bid in a month, and it turned out that was fine because every crew I had was building the only project that mattered.
After the last square was down, I stood in the middle of my marked-up field, and I reached through the bond the way a man checks his phone at midnight, knowing better.
The distance between us had stretched it thin. Torbin’s warding made it wispier, but my mate was there, a banked glow forty miles east.
Last night, I’d come out of a dead sleep at some dark hour with terror ringing across our link, and then her white-hot fury followed it. She had bared her teeth at whatever had attacked her. Then her feelings had disappeared as quickly as they had come.
After I’d climbed out of our bed, I stood at the window until dawn.
She hadn’t reached for me or called to me.
By morning, the bond had settled to its usual muffled hum, and Jasper, freshly returned from checking on her, had sworn on his brother’s beard that she was whole, walking, and bossing the bears.
A nightmare, then. My mate was fighting Acheron in her sleep now, alone, under a tree, in a warded hollow I couldn’t reach in under two hours at a dead run.
I’d counted the days to the Beaver Moon twice already tonight. Making my way across the lawn toward our mate bed didn’t ease the ache of missing my mate or the emptiness of my unsatisfied cravings.
Fuck. How long had it been since we’d been together?
Emma, I pushed through the miles, not expecting anything. Sleep easy, love. I sensed her shifting in her bed and rolling over, and for half a second, something warm pressed back against me through all that distance—wordless, drowsy, mine. Then the warding obscured her.