15. Logan
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
logan
The South Road
That Same Night
We ran south beneath a waxing moon. I set a blistering pace that would cost us all, but we didn’t have any time to waste. Spider eyeshine glittered over the ground, reflecting the blanket of starlight above. Each of us had a small bag of supplies that we could carry in either of our forms.
Nine of us moved through the November dark. My wolves took up the road. John and a big, quiet wolf called Harlan ran near my flanks, their paws eating miles, momentum and murder in a double column.
Marcus’s two cats ran the ditches and the fence lines, vanishing every time a farm dog lifted its head and reappearing a quarter mile on like they’d never been gone.
They’d volunteered before I finished asking.
Ville Platte sat at the end of the south road, and the big cats weren’t sentimental about anything except their home territory.
Jasper and a Red Tail fox I didn’t know took the scout positions. They ran ahead, making wide sweeps east and west, their noses high in the air, suspicious about everything. Above us, threading power lines, Levi ran the top line, our group’s eyes in the canopy, mercifully too winded to smack-talk.
Olivia ran at my shoulder, where she’d been running for years.
Two weeks ago, this unit would have been a bar fight.
Tonight, nobody bristled when the cats crossed our line of travel.
Nobody snapped when Levi dropped out of a pecan tree into the middle of the wolves to relay Jasper’s hand signs.
Emma’s crazy-assed integration, the mixed houses, the banner drills, the shared tables her mother kept loading like a woman feeding the apocalypse into submission, was holding at speed, in the dark, under the weight of impending destruction.
My mate had built this without ever once raising a hammer, and I intended to tell her so at length, preferably unclothed. Naked as the night was long. The way I liked her best.
If. The word clung to my fur like a burr in my side. If the line holds. If Fern’s count is wrong. If we get back before—
I ran harder, pushing my paws to go as quickly as they wolfly could.
The strength of the bond reduced with every mile, Emma’s warmth stretching behind me, calling me home, a pull one-eighty from what I had to make happen.
Over a hundred warriors, her mother, her maybe-uncle, and the fragile miracle of the camp…
all of it hung on what we brought back. Racing away from her felt like running with a nail in my paw.
So I did what I always did with feelings that size.
We skirted Ville Platte territory two hours before dawn.
Their border markers came up out of the shadows.
Cat-scratched posts, old warding that smelled strongly of sour felines.
Beyond them, far off through the bare trees, their watchfires burned in a scatter sea of orange, a clan going about its night, prickly, proud, but alive, with a tide charging through the parishes toward them.
One of Marcus’s cats slowed by half a stride. The other one bumped her shoulder, but the first shook her head. They sprinted on.
Hold strong, I thought at the watchfires. We’re coming back this way.
Hours later, we lay up in an abandoned tobacco barn miles farther south to avoid being exposed by the daylight. Even shifters had limits on how to hide in plain sight.
“Eat,” Olivia said, dropping a ration bar on my chest where I rested against the wall, listening to the country outside. “Sleep. You’ve been setting a hell of a pace. The road didn’t call yo’ mama bitch, you know.”
“We’re ahead of schedule thanks to me.”
“We’re ahead of your schedule, which was insane, and that’s why I built a second schedule.” She slid down the wall beside me. Exhaustion washed out her features. She’d been scrutinizing me since we had crossed our own south fence.
No, she’d been eyeing me since that clearing in No Man’s Land where I’d torn the souls out of shadow mages and thrown them back at their maker, and my beta had wiped her face and asked me twice what the hell I was.
“Say it,” I told her.
“The closer we get, the more you smell like that day.” No preamble.
Years of never needing any. “‘Three parts desperate, one part reckless.’ Jasper’s words.
If we reach that line and it’s bad, Logan…
and it’s going to be bad… We all know it’s going to be bad.
I need to know my alpha is the one who builds shifters. ”
“Building shifters?” I echoed.
“Yeah. Not just destroys them.”
“Those deaths were on Acheron’s tally. Not mine,” I growled.
She glanced at our hodgepodge troop. The group had passed out in a dimly lit, unfathomable heap. Wolves and cats were spine to spine for warmth, Levi curled in the rafters above them. Jasper had first watch at the door with his beard tied down and his trinkets silenced. My people. Emma’s people.
The scar in the center of my chest ached. Balefire had skewered me there. Emma had knit it closed and restarted my heart with her magic, and ever since No Man’s Land, that patch of me hurt whenever Acheron’s ilk came near. A dead man’s barometer dropping wildly to announce a death storm.
It had been aching since midnight.
“The one who builds shifters,” I agreed. “That’s the alpha you’ve got. And if it stops being true out there, you have my permission to knock me on my ass and drag me home to my mate.”
“Permission.” Olivia snorted, already almost asleep sitting up, the way soldiers did. “Like I’d wait for permission.”
The Void Line
Dusk
Fern had told us the truth, but reality was worse in person.
We smelled death before we saw it—an absence of good. We continued through the unpopulated parts of Louisiana. The healthy tree line ahead of us disappeared.
Pewter trunks. Ashen canopy. Silvery grass stood dead in bleak, gray mud, drained of every color, as though Acheron had reached down and pulled the life out through the roots. No birdcall. No insects. Not one deer track pressed into ground that should have been lousy with them.
Static hit at forty yards. Jasper’s compass spun in unending circles. Jace had lost two drones to the Void from the safe side of a screen. Standing inside its hissy, overwhelming hum, I understood why.
“Mark it,” I said.
The unit went to work the way we’d drilled before we’d left Six-Mile. Cats paced the line east, foxes west, flagging the edge of the emptiness with surveyor’s tape every hundred feet. Levi ran the counts back from both directions while John kept the rally point and Olivia kept me.
It took less than an hour to learn what we’d come for.
The tape didn’t stay at the edge.
The first flag we’d planted stood three feet inside the Void cloud by the time it absorbed the latest one. It wasn’t creeping. It was breathing, advancing in slow pulses. A cacophony of noises reverberated, and shapes moved inside. They had to know we were here.
But they didn’t give a rat’s ass. That’s how certain Acheron was.
I crouched at the line with a stopwatch and calculated its speed.
My chest ached, and my stomach churned, and I bit back a rush of vomit. The numbers came up filthy. Faster than Fern’s count. Faster than yesterday.
“A week was generous,” Olivia murmured, reading over my shoulder. “Six days. Maybe five.”
Motherfucker. That meant Thanksgiving.
The table decorations Sophia was already planning, the bracket on the mess hall wall, my mate on a flatbed trailer promising one people under the Beaver Moon…
Shit. The horde was going to arrive like an unwanted dinner guest.
And there was a horde. Deep in the gray, past the ruined forest, the shapes moved without hesitating, forcing my count to stall out somewhere north of two hundred. They didn’t march toward us. Instead, they rolled and boiled inside the Void cloud.
Fern had said it true. They flowed, pooling and thinning like oil on water, and every few minutes, one of them lifted out of the ground where there’d been nothing but shadow. Growing. Acheron wasn’t just marching an army up the parishes.
He was manufacturing one along the way.
My scar burned like a brand. Behind my sternum, in the place where I’d once reached out and twisted, a voice whispered that I knew how to unmake every shape in that forest, that I’d done it before, that all it would cost was another piece of whatever I’d been before No Man’s Land.
I clenched my teeth, and my hands turned to fists while I breathed through the desire to tap into all the energy I could.
“You good?” Olivia whispered.
The one who builds. I mentally recorded the count, logged the pace, and turned to give the order to fall back and run the report home.
“Yeah, good,” I bit out. “Fall back and run the report home.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
That was when the wind shifted, and I smelled him. The scent came rolling out of the cloud. Marcus. Sandy, feline, and unmistakable.
My hackles went up like razors along my spine. Marcus in the dead zone. Marcus moving with the horde. Marcus whom I’d left standing behind my warding, posted on watch beside my mate, trusted at the heart of everything I—
No.
“Logan!” Olivia barked. “Come back to me, Logan.”
A grunt escaped me, but I forced myself to stop and made myself evaluate the scent the way Emma assessed a wound.
I took a deep breath. It was the Steele musk, sure, but this scent ran finer and colder, threaded with mage-stink and old grief.
I’d smelled it once before… at the creek crossing, coming off a woman who’d been wrenched up into the air like a puppet and made to open her own brother’s arms to the bone, and again at Acheron’s abandoned mansion before we’d destroyed it.
Their genetics were similar. Marcus had said it himself, after. It has to be her.
Not Marcus.
His sister.
Emma’s birth mother.
A chill went down my spine and kept going all the way into the frosty ground.
She was here, alive or something adjacent to it, and she was moving along the vanguard of Acheron’s army where the shapes ran thickest. Acheron hadn’t completely consumed her yet. He was using her—a leash-bearer, a compass, bait. Son of a bitch. Maybe all three.
The premonition he’d burned into my head in No Man’s Land had ended with Emma dead in a dome of her own making, and here was the woman who might be her mother, walking point for an attack that was scheduled to arrive at my gate in time for the holiday my mate had promised her people.
What a fucking tangle.
I had to get the report home, alert Ville Platte, and warn Six-Mile.
The Void is days out. The horde grows as it moves, consuming energy from everything it touches, and Acheron is driving your mother ahead of it like a goad, Emma.
Our undertaking had to continue. Fern had bled for the first half. My unit had flagged the second. The smart alpha, the builder, would take his people and his numbers and escape north. Live to fight another day.
But the report now had a hole in it. Is this woman his creature or his captive?
If she was the leash steering two hundred shadows, then she was also the leash that could be cut. One woman. One tether. Maybe the whole horde stumbling blind in the Void if someone got close enough to see how the knot was tied.
Nobody at Six-Mile could answer that from a map or a recon mission, and by the time we returned with an army, the line would be three parishes north, and the answer might be standing in my front yard.
I studied the mist. My scar burned, and an invisible fattening moon climbed beyond it.
“Fall back to the rally point,” I said. “Olivia has command. You run the flags, the counts, and the pace home to the multimorph. All of it. Get to them as quickly as you can. No rests longer than water. Tell her the line lands in six days, five if it’s eager.
Tell her to move the camp behind the warding and call in every clan.
Tell her to use those four magic words she loves so well. ”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
I rolled my shoulders and let the wolf come up warm under my skin. “Tell her about her mother after she’s standing somewhere she can break things. Keep her safe.”
The unit froze.
Olivia went still, but her eyes flashed. “And you,” she said, “will you be delivering part of this report? Perhaps comforting your mate in person?”
“Yes, but that part isn’t written yet. He’s moving her with the Void.
I can shadow it for tonight and figure out how she is tied to all this.
I’ll be half a day behind you.” I met my beta’s gaze.
“If that woman is the lock, Emma will spend herself trying to pick it in the middle of a battle. If the woman’s a key, I’m not leaving her in Acheron’s pocket.
Either way, I go look. It’s her mother.”
“It’s a trap. He knows your scent, Logan, and he’s murdered you once already.”
“Then he knows I’m coming, and I’m not inclined to disappoint him.” I softened one degree. “This isn’t No Man’s Land. I’m not going in to burn anything. I’m going in to see. First fox rule.” I glanced at Jasper. “Tell her. We must know.”
I have to know so I can protect her.
“Aye, seein’s the whole art,” Jasper said quietly, and there was no twinkle in him at all.
He unhooked something from his tied-down beard and tied it around my wrist—one small brass bell, cold as a creek stone.
“It’ll stay with ye now it’s tied. Ye ring that with intention if the seein’ goes wrong, ye great fool.
Foxes hear their own bells across a battlefield.
I’ll come, and I’ll bring the reckoning with me. ”
Olivia peered at me for long moments, doing the same math I’d done… order versus alpha, mission versus mate, the builder versus the man.
“Half a day,” she said. “Then I tell Emma where you are, and God have mercy on the dead zone because she won’t.” She spun on the unit. “You heard the alpha. North! As though our world depends on it.”
They disappeared as one. Wolves, cats, two foxes, and a squirrel worked as one machine in the dark. My mate’s miracle carried the worst news in Louisiana home at a dead sprint.
Levi paused one heartbeat on a dead branch, glanced back at me, and said nothing at all, but he raised a squirrel paw in salute and flicked his tail. Then he was gone, too.
I remained alone at the edge of the Void with a brass bell around my wrist and my heart fleeing north without me.
There will always be an after, Emma.
I pressed my vow into the diminished bond, too far gone for words to carry, and I felt, or wanted to feel, the hint of her flickering in my mind.
Race ya home, she’d said before she’d climbed onto her Ducati.
“I’m taking the long way around,” I whispered, “but I’ll be racing to you as soon as I can, love.”
Then I took a deep breath, shifted to wolf, and stepped across the boundary, and every sound in the world snuffed out.
Ahead, deep in the colorless trees, the shapes flowed around a singular point. A woman-shaped shadow stood in the ruin as though she’d been waiting for my crossing to reach her ears.
She turned toward me, and I ducked behind the trunk of a dead tree.
And her face twisted in a sickly smile.