10. Emma #2
Sandy-haired Marcus opened the door, unfolded from the passenger seat on his own, and slammed the door behind him. Carefully, he moved with one hand trailing the truck’s panel line like it was a banister he was too proud to grip.
His face turned toward the clearing. His eyes pointed at nothing at all.
“Niece,” he said without leaving the side of the vehicle.
“Alleged niece.” I crossed to him, irritated that he’d called out the secret I wanted to keep under wraps. “Trying to keep that quiet, thank you.”
“Huh,” he grunted.
The bears soon found urgent business elsewhere and filtered into the forest with a tact I wouldn’t have credited to creatures the size of hay balers.
Every soul in the camp had sworn on the ancestors’ blood to keep what happened in each camp to themselves. It wasn’t the alliance Marcus feared. It was his own pride.
“You came,” I said.
“You summoned. It was a novel experience. I decided to encourage it.” He tilted his head, listening to the clearing.
He clearly was mentally cataloging the creek, the bears, and the wind in the brittle leaves.
“Twelve warriors. One of them slightly favors his left side. Your cornbread is almost gone, and Torbin still hasn’t bothered to install a generator behind his home. You see? I’m useful already.”
“Sure, you are,” I muttered, touching his elbow. “Please come with me. I’d rather discuss my request in private.”
Ignoring Torbin’s bear-eyed stare was easy enough as I led Marcus into the only semiprivate location in Bear Trees.
We made our halting way to the entrance of Torbin’s hollow, Marcus trailing after me.
When we reached the opening, I caught his hand and placed it on the wall of the tunnel and then continued ahead of him, making small talk so he could follow my sounds.
Once inside, we settled at the table in Torbin’s hollow, double-bagged Earl Grey between us since Torbin didn’t keep much coffee.
At least the solar-powered kettle worked well.
Della planted herself outside the doorway like an opinionated bouncer at Vixen’s.
Up close, Marcus seemed worse than he had at the creek, thinner, the beachy, blond-brown hair pushed back carelessly. A new chain gleamed at his collar. He held his chin at the angle of a man who would rather die than be led anywhere by the elbow. Or at least like a man who expected a sucker punch.
I’d stared into hundreds of animals’ eyes in my exam rooms. Fuck me. Marcus reminded me of Sully-Boy back in Willow Creek… If Callie’s wily old barn cat had ever been blinded, it would have killed his body by murdering his soul, and I was beginning to suspect Marcus wasn’t much different.
The current Ville Platte alpha lifted his chin, his amber eyes directed over my shoulder, still focused on nothing. “Why am I here, Multimorph?”
“I need your help,” I answered. “I’m training every clan that’ll stand still for it.
You earned special training by sending warriors, you know that, but I need ears better than mine and a meaner head for tactics than Torbin’s.
You’ve fought Acheron’s magic from the inside of you. Nobody else alive can teach that.”
“Flattery.”
“Recruitment.”
“Mmm.” He bounced his hand over the tabletop as he hunted for his mug.
When he located it, he turned the cup a slow quarter-circle and lifted it to his lips for a sip.
Then he continued, “In exchange, I’ll be obliged to stay away from Ville Platte for some weeks, unable to attend to my clan, my challengers, and the many friends sharpening their false enthusiasm for my homecoming.
” The smile that crossed his mouth had no humor in it, but there was obvious relief underneath.
“It might be a way to keep your alphahood until I can find a way to heal you. That counts for something.”
He grimaced, but his face cleared almost immediately. “I accept.”
“Della can manage the cat herd while you’re assisting your multimorph. The reckoning in Ville Platte can wait,” I added quietly.
“Reckonings rarely do. It’s their defining feature.” He set the tea down. “You have questions about your mother.”
The word went through me like a staff strike. The woman in the creek with her wrenched-wrong magic, screaming down and linking with her own brother. Crazy bitch would never be my mama. Sophia Carter was all the mom I needed.
“I have about four hundred questions about my alleged birth mother.”
“I’ll answer what I can.” He paused. For one bare second, his alpha armor slipped, and he was only a man at a table in someone else’s house. “Do you still have her bat pendant?”
“I do. It stayed in Six-Mile. You can have it back if you want it.”
“No, it was a gift.”
“Sounds good.”
The silence stretched awkwardly between us.
Finally, Marcus sighed. “Try the eyes first. I know you’re going to ask until I give in. Get it out of the way, and then neither of us has to be careful around the subject all week.”
Without a word, I placed my fingers against his temples and reached for the warm pool of magic in my chest. Rainbow light seeped out between my fingers and painted his face in colors.
I followed the damage inward, the way instinct and Dr. Wise had taught me to trail a wound to its source, and discovered the cruelest thing I’d ever diagnosed.
Nothing. Fucking nothing wrong at all. His eyes were whole and unmarred.
I delved deeper. The decay now lived farther inside him and had burned along the shifter energy channels.
His sister’s magic had been braided through the length of it, all twisted up with a foul magic that I recognized from when I’d been caged in a bunker.
Still, I probed gently until the foul binding pushed back, and it wasn’t nice at all.
When I finally released him, we were both breathing hard like we’d been escaping attack and running back from Wolf Moon Cave. “Marcus—”
“What did you find?”
“You are physically fine. It’s behind them, and it’s… it’s spellwork, not injury. Spellwork can be unworked.” I studied him. “But not today, and not by yanking on it. If I pull the wrong bits, I could take more than your sight.”
He was silent a moment as he took another sip of his tea. “Well, you’ve already got a better bedside manner than the last vet I saw. He tried to give me a heartworm pill.”
The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it, and outside the doorway, Della snorted.
“Twice more,” he said, gathering his armor back on, piece by piece. “You may attempt it twice more while we’re here. I doubt you would forgive yourself otherwise. After that, you save it for after the war. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Good.” His face turned toward the slanting afternoon light streaming in through the doorway.
“Now, about the shadows. They moved through my territory going south, Emma… His stink strung through the parishes south of Ville Platte like a trotline. Whatever hole he’s gone down, it’s in the deep south of the state, and holes are where he does his worst work.
” He shook his head as he leaned back. “If your mate’s drone man is as good as Logan brags, tell him to stop circling Six-Mile and look where the land turns to shadow and insects go quiet. ”
“Fine. I’ll send word as soon as an opportunity presents itself.” Working out how to tell Logan what to do without being there in person to make sure he did it… That’d take all afternoon. “Let’s get back to training.”
“As you wish, Multimorph.” Marcus inclined his head and then followed me out of Torbin’s home.
Hours later, I washed at the little stand by battery-powered lamplight, and I was already dead on my feet when I slid between the quilts in the bedroom chamber. Sore in the good way, fed in the better way, alone in a way I was still learning to survive.
Through the wall of the warding, faint as a voice from another room, warmth arrived. Sleep well, love.
I was too far gone to respond, so I pressed what I had back into the link, and I felt him settle the way he always did when he knew where I was. It was as though I’d climbed into bed with my back against him and his arm wrapped around my middle.
No nightmares found me that night. Tomorrow, there would be more bears, a quilted banner if I could get Torbin to agree to make it, and an annoyed blind cat calling footwork from a camp chair.
Yet, probably somewhere south of all of us, a hole in the map where an evil force was working, setting up traps, making weapons, and preparing to wipe us off the face of the earth.
I pressed my lips into a tight, determined line. Let Acheron work.
We had an army to build, and I’d met a quiltmaker with his heart set on making a war flag. He just didn’t know it yet.