14. Emma
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
emma
Six-Mile Manor
One Week Later
From the low rise at the northern edge of the property, Six-Mile spread out below me like a model train set somebody had built out of my life. We had a new gate. A high fence now surrounded our main complex, and guard towers graced the corners. Our territory had become a fortified compound.
Two new rows of tiny homes rested along the western fence; their white siding had gone gold in the late-afternoon light. The mess hall breathed woodsmoke from the chimneys at either end of the building.
Logan’s crews had gotten the covered walkway framed before this last cold snap, and shifters moved beneath its skeleton in twos and threes, wolves beside raccoons, cats beside ravens, bears beside them all.
Thanksgiving was seven days out. So was the Beaver Moon.
We had the camp below me, over one hundred and fifty from every clan in Louisiana, plus the shifters in Six-Mile.
More clans sent their warriors around the time the feast invitations went out, and we were the only thing standing between the universe and the gray hole in the southern map where a monster and his minions were.
My heart sat heavy behind my ribs, the way it did every evening when I climbed up here to count what I could lose. My stomach churned.
We didn’t mirror an army yet, but we resembled a fragile miracle.
The ravens and the raccoons had opened their acquaintance with a brawl over a gravel-filled bathtub, but ran a joint operation from that same bathtub, some kind of filtration arrangement I’d been strongly advised not to ask about.
They sold cleaned pecans out of it on the honor system.
Marcus’s cats sparred with Six-Mile wolves in the training ring by choice now.
Two weeks ago, a treaty would have been required.
On the mess hall wall, Olivia had chalked a tournament bracket for banner drills.
Torbin’s quilted banner had become the most fought-over strip of cloth in the shifter world, and I didn’t have to see the odds column to know Levi was running book.
The raven contingent bunked at the far edge and posted their own watch, trusting nobody’s eyes but their own. It rankled, but I was unwilling to demand they fraternize more. The two wolf packs from up north ate at their own table, their backs to the wall.
Half my miracle was mingling, and half of it was maintaining a polite blast radius, and it was all held together tenuously by delicious food, drills, and the four little words I spent like a paycheck: I am the multimorph.
The truce would hold… or it wouldn’t.
“You’re brooding,” Marcus commented, approaching from behind me. “I can hear it, and it’s rather loud.”
He’d taken to climbing the rise with me in the evenings, my blind, alleged uncle, one hand dragging along the fence line he’d memorized the second day.
He said the camp sounded better from up here and that racket carried the truth better than staring at it ever did.
I suspected he came because Ville Platte sat somewhere south of that horizon, and this was as close to facing it as he let himself get.
“I’m surveying,” I said.
“You’re counting them.” He tipped his face toward the noise of the camp, the sprawl of it, the sparring, the hammering, and a sweet-potato dispute entering its second hour.
“I count them, too. It’s an alpha habit.
” He gestured. “Go give your speech, niece. They’re gathered by now, and speeches curdle if you let them sit. ”
“Any advice?”
“Shorter than you plan. Louder than you think. And if the raccoon alpha tries to read his menu aloud again, invoke your title.”
Before I could respond, my bond with Logan pinged from a location near the gym. Warmth flexed against me like a hand squeezing mine.
Logan knew I was stalling. Quit counting, love. Come down and lead them.
On my way, I pushed back. Save the argument about the sweet potatoes and marshmallows. I want to watch you sort it out.
I want to watch too. His suggestive growl echoed through my head, his desire rife in my mind. Images blipped through my head. But I don’t want to watch them…
A shiver worked through me as I made my way back down to the collected shifters. You better not do that shit while I’m giving my speech.
Might get us to bed faster.
Logan…
No promises, love.
Fuck my life.
Fuck you for life, you mean.
The assigned gathering place for tonight was the clearing between the gym and the new mess hall, and by the time I came down off the rise, it had filled with everyone.
The leaders stood loosely at the front of the group.
Logan waited with his arms crossed, his dark hair pushed back, observing me like I was the only thing in Louisiana that he wanted to devour.
You’re not wrong, love. Animal doctors are still my favorite thing to consume.
Logan… For fuck’s sake.
Olivia lingered at her alpha’s shoulder, holding her clipboard, Jasper at her side. His beard trinkets chimed faintly every time he leaned over to whisper something that made her jaw twitch with a suppressed smile.
Earlier that afternoon, Flynn had come across from Red Tail. His beard was growing back in, bare of jewelry, and when I’d hugged him hello, the biting scent of sorrow had drenched him. He’d spent the last two weeks quietly reopening his search for his mate, one cold-case clue at a time.
Torbin had arrived yesterday with six of his warriors and a washtub of honey. Otis, whose left paw no longer dropped, had already made the semifinals of the banner bracket.
Across the meeting area, the raccoon alpha clutched his menu. Giselda cackled at something. The vixen had left her death-den. Dying could wait until the war couldn’t kill anyone else.
Blaze and Izzie had wedged themselves into the front row. The blue of Blaze’s hair had turned as bright as a jay’s wing in the light of the setting sun.
My mom stood at the mess hall door in her apron, flour dusted to her elbows. She gave me the nod she used to give me before spelling bees.
Only Dr. Wise was missing. She and the archive managers in New Port Orleans were still circling each other, and her last message, relayed through my surprisingly calm mother, had included little information. Found the razor marks. Following the pages. Tell Emma to do nothing primal until I return.
Nothing about that was comforting.
I stepped up onto a flatbed trailer that Phil had set up to serve as a stage, and the camp noise dwindled as the collected shifters anticipated a monumental proclamation from the multimorph.
That was when I felt it. Not an audible sound. A stutter.
I’d spent weeks learning to feel shifters as frequencies, and the camp hummed like a hundred and fifty orchestra instruments almost in tune, but to the south, out past the last torch, something had gone awry in the music. A dropped note.
I scanned the dimness past the fence line and found nothing. The perimeter wolves hadn’t sounded. The warding at the gate hadn’t broken, so I raised my hands to silence the residual murmur of conversations.
Steady, I told myself. You’re the multimorph. Multimorph first. Scared woman second.
“Three months ago,” I began, my voice carrying in the cold air, “I was a vet with a rainbow dye job, and every single one of you belonged to a clan that locked its doors against the others.”
Low laughter here and there. The ravens didn’t laugh, but they turned to listen.
“Tonight, I observed a raccoon teaching a wolf to wash pecans. I watched cats run banner drill with bears… and lose. Torbin, gracefully conceding.”
The bears roared, Otis loudest.
“We’ve created something incredible, and in seven days, under the Beaver Moon, we are going to set every table this camp owns and eat Thanksgiving dinner together like one clan.
That’s what we are now. When Acheron comes, he will not find wolves and cats and foxes and squirrels.
Squirrels distract. Bears hold. Cats finish. ”
That had become a camp proverb. Half the crowd chanted it with me.
Abruptly, Levi’s voice rang loudest from a rooftop, adding the unofficial fourth line. “Foxes lie!”
A ripple of laughter answered, and Jasper accepted it like a knighthood.
“He will find one people,” I said, and the laughter stilled. “One army. One—”
The southern perimeter guard howled. Not one wolf. All of them. A rising chain of alarm exploded through the camp, and the stutter I’d felt was suddenly rushing toward our boundary.
“Open the gate!” I jumped off the trailer and ran.
Logan appeared half a stride behind me, the crowd tearing itself out of assembly and into formation with a speed that made two weeks of drills worth every bruise.
A fox came through the gate at a dying sprint.
Her red coat was black to the shoulder. Not with mud but with a substance that moved.
The wiry, quiet fox had Jasper’s coloring and a tenth of his mouth but had volunteered for the southern watch when the training rotation had ended because foxes noticed what others missed.
Dark veins crawled through her fur, and blood gushed down her body.
She was running on three legs by the time she crossed into the outdoor lights.
Ten feet in, her legs gave out. She skidded, rolled, and came up as human on the frosted grass, and my heart broke sideways in my chest. Then she fell over.
“Fern!” Levi bellowed.
Gashes raked her from collarbone to hip, and the flesh around them had gone gray-black and cold, stinking of death.
Acheron’s calling card.
The last time someone was carried in torn open like this, it had been Phil with Rachel in his arms, and the healer had barely pulled her back. In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Acheron had still enticed her into the woods alone to be devoured.
Not this time. Not this one.
“Fern.” I hit my knees beside her, and rainbow light spilled out of me into her wounds. Shadow mage work resisted healing the way Marcus’s eyes refused it. The foulness battered against me for every centimeter I healed. I gritted my teeth and kept on.