11. Emma
CHAPTER ELEVEN
emma
Bear Trees
One Week Later
“Ithink it’s nearly time for me to head to Red Tail,” I announced to Marcus, who sat in the corner of Torbin’s den in the rocking chair with a doily draped over one of its armrests and a cup of Earl Grey balanced on one of his knees.
Marcus inclined his head, his eyes pinned on the wall behind me, his pupils blown wide and useless. A week in Bear Trees hadn’t taught him to point his face directly at whoever he was talking to, mostly because he hadn’t cared enough to bother learning. “Running out on the bears already, niece?”
“Alleged niece.”
“Mmm.” He sipped without spilling a drop, which was more than I could say for myself most mornings. “You smell like the bayou side of my family when you get bossy. Did I mention that? It’s uncanny.”
“You’ve mentioned it each day this week.”
“And every day, it remains true.”
I dropped onto the bench beside the little kitchen table and wrapped my hands around my own cup.
Hot tea in a thousand-year-old cypress hollow, poured from a kettle older than my mother, and served by a bear alpha who crocheted his own doilies…
My life had gotten so odd that strange felt like an average Tuesday.
Multiple nights running, Acheron, wearing Riley’s skin, had chased me through my dreams. I’d given up on sleep around four each morning, padded past the composting toilet I still refused to dignify with a compliment, and found Marcus already awake in the main room, listening to the dark the way other people watched television.
“Come here,” I said. “Before the warriors show up.”
His jaw tightened. “No.”
“Marcus.”
“You’ve tried twice.”
“Third time’s the charm. I don’t make the rules.”
He held still while I crossed to him, which was as close as Marcus Steele ever came to saying please. Up close, his eyes resembled scratched glass, the sandy lashes throwing shadows over irises that didn’t track. I laid my fingertips against his temples.
Heat gathered in my palms. Rainbow light seeped between my fingers, and I followed the damage inward. Not the eyes. The eyes had been perfect since the first time I’d looked, and that was still the hell of it.
When I pushed, the foul damage shoved back. I released Marcus before it could take more from me than I could give, and I steadied myself on the arm of the rocker, breathing hard.
“Well?” he asked.
“Anything different for you?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Shadows. Shapes, maybe, if the light’s behind them.”
“That’s more than Monday.”
“It’s less than seeing.” He turned his face toward me then, unerring, as though he’d never needed eyes to find anything in his life. “Don’t spend yourself on me, Emma. You’ll want every drop of that for our battle.”
I crossed the room and sank back onto the bench. Outside, dawn grayed the gaps between the cypress knees, and above us, a woodpecker went to work. “When are you going home?”
“To Ville Platte?” His mouth curved downward.
“An alpha who can’t meet his challengers’ gaze doesn’t get to keep being an alpha.
Cats aren’t sentimental about weakness, so I can hardly complain about the outcome of the curriculum.
” He grasped the doily-draped arm and rocked once.
“When I go home, I go home whole, or I won’t go home at all. ”
The Ville Platte reckoning was going to be ugly whenever it came, and he was avoiding it. I allowed it because I was the multimorph, savior of shifter-kind, and I was avoiding plenty of things myself. We were quite the all-alike family in that way.
Alleged family.
“The bears are waiting for you,” Marcus said, tipping his head toward the entrance a full second before I heard the first heavy footfalls outside the warding. “And your squirrel is already in the trees, sharpening his mouth.”
A quick jog brought me to the clearing behind Torbin’s. It had gone silver with frost, and my breath fogged in front of my face. Perfect camping weather, my dad would have called it. Perfect training weather would have to do.
Twelve bear shifters waited in their line, hulking even in their human forms, wearing the collection of sweatpants and stony patience I’d come to expect from Torbin’s people.
The bears of Bear Trees mostly kept to themselves.
They valued size over speed and had spent the week regarding me with cautious courtesy.
I’d earned some of that. All of shifter-kind had watched the multimorph allow an alpha’s beheading, and bears had long memories to go with their long claws.
Scattered among them stood several of my exchange warriors, the first fruit of the program I’d rammed through the conclave.
A whip-thin raccoon shifter who washed her breakfast in the creek every morning.
A wiry Red Tail fox named Fern who had Jasper’s coloring and, thank God, about a tenth of his commentary.
Della, the Ville Platte second, who had arrived with Marcus and whose voice could carry across a parish when she wanted it to.
And Levi.
“Morning, boss,” he called from twenty feet up the nearest oak, lounging along a thick branch. “Great news. I’ve done a full audit, and the bears still move like furry landslides.”
“Levi.”
“Majestic landslides,” he amended. “Landslides with hearts of gold.”
One of the bears cracked his knuckles. It sounded like branches snapping off a tree trunk.
Torbin arrived at the training last, unhurried, a mountain on a stroll. He had taken a moment to himself every morning since I’d invaded his personal space.
His shaggy white hair hung nearly into his hazel eyes, and the beads braided into his beard clicked softly when he settled onto his observation post, the broad stump at the clearing’s edge.
Della helped Marcus to a camp chair beside it. He folded his hands and aimed his blind stare at the middle distance.
“Same drill as yesterday,” I announced, holding up the strip of red cloth we’d been fighting over all week. “Banner goes in the center. Any team that takes it and holds it for thirty seconds wins. Bears, you’re one team. Everybody else, you’re the other.”
“Four of us against twelve of them?” Fern asked.
“Acheron won’t count heads before he comes for us, and he won’t wait for fair.” I stalked to the center of the clearing and staked the banner. “Neither will I.” I stepped back to the tree line. “Shift.”
A gust of wind burst through the clearing, sharp with magic, and colors danced over the twelve bear shifters’ bodies at once.
The bears crunched down and then up, looming into the animal versions of themselves.
On my side of the clearing, the raccoon flowed down into her ring-tailed self.
Fern went red and low to the ground, and Della simply seemed to pour out of her own clothes into a sleek tawny shape.
Levi had already disappeared. That was the thing about squirrel shifters. Wolves were momentum. Cats were silk. Squirrels were static electricity, there and gone before I finished a sentence. The canopy over the clearing shook once and went suspiciously still.
“Go,” I commanded.
The bears did what bears do. They formed a wedge you could have marched down Main Street, unhurried, unstoppable, and utterly certain that mass wins wars. It would have been genuinely impressive if our fight had been limited to the soil.
But their challenge was not on the ground.
Levi slammed into the banner, dropping from above, before the bear wedge had covered half the distance.
He had it unfastened and snatched, and made it back into the branches so fast that the biggest bear stared at the empty stake with an expression of pure, baffled outrage.
Fern trotted brazenly across the far end of the clearing, her brush high, and four bears swung to track the fox, which was exactly the kind of misdirection I’d asked her for.
By the time they remembered the banner, Della had taken the handoff from Levi, and she had passed it to the raccoon.
Now the raccoon was sitting on the stake itself, wearing the red cloth like a scarf.
“Time,” I called. “Thirty seconds. Banner team.”
The lead bear shifted back to his human shape. “They cheated.”
“They went up,” I said. “Up isn’t cheating. Up is where the enemy will go while you’re all watching the fox on the ground.” I raked my gaze along the line of them. “Again. This time, one of you watch the sky.”
By the third round, they were learning, and that was when it went wrong.
Otis had spent the entire week training hard. I’d spent three mornings breaking the tell of his dropped left paw, and to his credit, he’d nearly fixed it. To Otis’s detriment, Levi had already noticed the habit.
Levi, fast, bored, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, flickered past him at head height. “Left paw still drops when you turn, big guy,” he called. “Half a lighthouse now. Real improvement.”
Otis pivoted. His left paw did not drop. It came around in a swat that took the entire branch out from under the squirrel, and Levi hit the root system below with a crack that stopped my heart and every other sound in the clearing.
Levi shifted to his human self and back to his squirrel self. The crack in his wrist knitted together between one shape and the next. Then he was up the closest tree in a second, cradling his dignity, more furious than hurt.
The bears went quiet.
Otis shifted back to his human form, his chest heaving, and the look on his face wasn’t apologetic.
“Stay out of our trees,” he snarled. “Your alpha sold us to Acheron. My brother is dead because East Nuttal’s alpha decided fawning over the multimorph wasn’t getting her enough. You don’t get to laugh here.”
“Otis.” Torbin rumbled a warning from his spot on the stump.
“It’s true,” the young bear growled, and his voice cracked down. “Everyone thinks it. I’m just the only one rude enough to say it.”