17. Logan
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
logan
Inside the Void
Night
She smiled toward my hiding place, and then she did the one thing I hadn’t planned for.
She turned away.
No cry went up. No shadows peeled off the flowing dark to drag me out of the dead brush.
The woman simply turned back to the Void tide she walked ahead of and lifted one hand like a conductor, and the southbound edge of the horde bent.
A slow, oily curve in the current passed forty yards wide of the deadfall where I crouched with my heart trying to kick its way out through my old scar.
She moved hundreds of shadows around me like traffic cones, and she essentially ignored me.
Hmmm… Lock or key? I followed.
Tracking inside the murk of the Void was useless. No breezes. No insects, no healthy decay, no life to layer scents. My paws made no sound, but nothing in that fog made sound. The silence wasn’t peace. It was a church where the congregation had been eaten.
I’d promised Olivia half a day. I’d promised Emma an after. One night, I vowed in the dim, pacing the frontline of the enemy’s army, one night to learn how Acheron holds her, and then home.
For two hours, the shadows rolled forward, consuming trees, leaves, and anything that held life.
Except me. It was as though no one except Marcus’s sister understood that I was there.
I progressed with them until the gray void to my left folded sideways, and Jasper was simply there, downwind, red fox fur, and his eyes like struck matches, moving at my flank as though we’d planned it in the study over coffee.
He’d doubled back the moment the unit cleared Ville Platte and run the dark flat-out to reach me.
I bared my canine teeth and nearly took his head off.
We shifted human in the lee of a dead oak, close enough to share air. Whispering was the only sound either of us was willing to risk.
“You’re supposed to be halfway to Six-Mile,” I breathed.
“Aye, and ye’re supposed to be smarter than a bag of hammers, so we’re both a disappointment to our mothers.
” He tapped one ear. “Foxes hear their own bells across a battlefield, remember. Across a battlefield, Logan. Not across Louisiana. Somebody had to stay in range of the thing, or the bell’s just brass and sentiment.
” His gaze slid past me south toward the moving dark. “Olivia knows. I left her a note.”
“She’ll skin you.”
“Aye, she’ll try, and I’ll run, and she’ll catch me.” He sighed romantically. “Aye, it’ll be a lovely evening.” The twinkle died as fast as it came. “Now hush, lad. Ye’re following the lady, and the lady’s following, er, leading that.”
That was a sickly glow on the dead horizon, the color of a worsening bruise.
We went to see.
They’d made their base in a drowned cypress flat, where the black water stood so motionless it looked solid, and the trees came up out of it like giant, skeletal ribs. I counted ninety cloaked and hooded mages ringing the shallow water. In the middle, a wound split the sky.
I didn’t have better words for the wound.
A seam in the world, pried open the width of a hand, weeping the bruised light.
Looking at it hurt, and the scar in the center of my chest burned as though Acheron held a welding torch an inch from my skin.
The laceration hung low in the sky, and at least thirty of the living-dead mages attended the gash in turns.
The ritual moved like shift work, rows of robed figures facing the wound, droning, carving runes into the dead trunks in lines that dripped in dark red.
While they worked, the horde around them waited.
Hundreds of shapes settled into the ground like oil soaking into cloth.
They seemed to be dormant. Maybe refueling.
The fingers at the fore, the fast-raiding hands that had enveloped Fern’s watch post and the country ahead, those ran free, but the body stayed with its engine.
Break the engine, I thought, construction-brained even at the end of the world, and the whole job site stops. This work was the motor that propelled it all forward.
Through it all, my mate’s birth mother trudged. She moved down the rune lines like a foreman on inspection. The mages bent away from her as she passed. Her hands were never still. With her right, she commanded rising shadows, dispatching them north in thin, fast columns.
I watched as more fingers reached the countryside ahead of us. Acheron’s leash-bearer did her work while he was elsewhere doing what had to be worse.
It was Jasper who caught the left hand.
He froze beside me for a ten-count, and then his whisper came so soft it was hardly audible. “Watch her off hand, lad. Low. When she passes the new-cut runes.”
I watched. She trailed her left hand along the fresh lines the way a farmer might trail his fingers through standing wheat—casual, idle, a woman caressing her work.
But the results changed. Nothing overt. A crossing stroke smudged a half inch out of true. A closing loop left a hair’s width open.
“She’s loosening the knots,” he murmured.
Knots tied before her but mis-tied after her, so slick and slight that a drowned flat full of mages bent to the labor never recognized it.
Three trunks past her touch, a birthing-line of runes guttered, and a dozen newborn shadows rose out of the black water, lost their shape, and slopped back down into it like failed bread.
The mage nearest the failure glanced at the line, looked at the sky, and recarved it, droning. Bad materials. Bad luck. Nobody audits the foreman.
“She’s sabotaging it,” I breathed. “She’s been sabotaging it. The lack of warding at the plantation, the map in Marcus’s head, tonight… Perhaps she’s been kicking the ladder out from under him for months.”
“Or,” Jasper murmured, “she’s the finest bait ever tied to a hook, and we’re the fattest fish in the parish.
No warding at the plantation was a lure.
” His gaze never left her hands. “Ye saw her smile at ye, lad. Ask yerself what it costs him to let ye see a smile and a mis-tied knot. Cheap, if it buys him the alpha of Six-Mile stepping deeper into the Void on hope.”
“And if it’s real, she’s the reason this army may lose, and we owe her the war.”
“Aye. Both true ’til one isn’t. That’s the hell of double lives.” He pronounced it as a man who had run his share of them. “There’s a thing I can’t unsee either way, Logan. Look what’s not here. Smell it.”
I did. Steele musk, mage rot, grief. Underneath it, nothing. No boy.
Wherever Acheron kept the boy now, the nephew Marcus mourned, the child I’d sworn to come back for, Acheron did not keep him with the army. He kept the leash and the collar in different places.
That was the report. That was worth the night—the engine, the schedule, the saboteur, the missing boy. Every part of me said go home.
“It’s enough,” I whispered to Jasper. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Aye.”
Then we slipped north without shifting, without adding a magical neon sign to our already risky location.
We’d only made it half a mile when a raven crossed the dead sky.
This one flew like a knife searching for a back. It made one slow circuit over the flat, one over the deadfall line. Then it screamed, and the forest came alive.
The ground to our east lifted. Not shapes rising out of it. The ground itself. A hundred yards of grayed soil peeled up into a wall of tendrils, and the silence of our surroundings fractured all at once. Wet, eager smacking rolled toward us.
“Run,” Jasper barked, and for once in his life, there was no lilt in it at all.
We shifted and fled two different directions, fox and wolf, flat-out through dead forests, and the sweep ran with us.
Not chasing us. Herding us. Columns of darkness flowed wide on both flanks exactly the way they’d done the night nine of us had marked the line.
I’d been boxed in once before and stepped out of it by sending everyone else home. This time, there was no one to send.
I scanned the surroundings and spotted Jasper, crouched and sprinting faster than me through the underbrush. A collapsed levee came up out of the gloom like a giant arm.
I spotted one gap to the north-northwest.
“The levee! They mean to bury us,” I snarled through my half-shifted face, now human enough to speak in legible words. “Over and split. You east, me west.”
He darted east along the crown of rising dirt, his streak the only living color in that whole void world.
I went west, and shifted fully.
The dark soil followed me. All of it.
The columns folded in behind me and clenched like a fist. Then I understood: the sweep had never been herding us anywhere. It had been cutting one out of the pair. Acheron wanted me.
The levee disappeared out from under my paws, turning into slumped mud. I slipped down the filth into black water, and it carried me to the edge of a dead bayou with no current, no far bank in sight. No sound but that smacking, ravenous tide closing in behind me.
Coughing and retching, I waited.
Shadow mages didn’t gloat. That was Acheron’s job.
The evil advanced slowly now because I had already been caught, tendrils reaching over the mud like the fingers of a hand closing over their prize.
The bell was in my fist. Cold brass, a fox gift, one ring from rescue. I’d never rung it with intention, but Jasper had come anyway.
This time, I rang it.
Jasper wheeled back at the sound, coming down off that levee into a hundred yards of risen ground.
No. Shit. I’d gotten cornered playing scout miles from my mate.
Then I put the bell between my teeth. If I fell, let them find where. Then I summoned as much deep magic as I could, drawing it in.
A whisper echoed in my head. It offered, helpful as ever, You know how to unmake them. Take the souls. Spend them.
Not that kind of magic.
Beyond it. Below it. Down where the flood had gone when Emma’s power had torn through me the first time and had left its channels behind like a spring flood remade a riverbed. The riverbed was mine. It had always been mine. Hers was the water that showed me where it ran.
I threw open the floodgates.
White light spread over my skin. No screaming souls.
No stolen anything. Just power, mine, clean and roaring, the alpha of Six-Mile burning at a wattage I had no gauge for.
In my head, the wolf that rose up was more wolf than I had ever been: bigger, brighter, silver light running off dark fur like water.
The darkness flinched around me. Whole tendrils recoiled from the burst the way night recoils from a light.
I didn’t unmake a single one of them. Instead, my magic sliced through them.
My claws became light, my energy became momentum. A wedge of the army broke off, and I ripped the closing half circle open at its thinnest joint.
Then I ran over risen ground that whipped, grasped, but could not hold me. Columns broke around my power like fog around high beams, north, north, north, my lungs full of knives and my chest scar singing. The bell rattling against my teeth like a mad little heartbeat.
The Void boundary came up out of the dark, the surveyor’s tape ghostly pale where my own people had flagged it hours earlier.
I sailed over it, and the world reacted. Wind. Insects. Rustling weeds. An owl somewhere, complaining about the interruption. I fled through the living weeds on living dirt with white light guttering off my fur like the last of a downpour. I could have wept at the sheer noise of ordinary darkness.
The illumination went out slowly, on its own schedule, like it wanted me to remember where the switch was. Scorch lines crisscrossed my shoulders where tendrils had grabbed and lost me. The frost melted in a circle around where I sat as the last of the magic light died along my arms.
I shifted to human fully, sat down hard in the frost, and shook. The bell dropped from my mouth to the dirt beside me.
Jasper found me before moonset. He came up out of the dark on two legs, torn along one forearm, dust in his beard. He stood over me for a long moment, scrutinizing everything.
He didn’t say most of the things he was entitled to.
All he said quietly was, “That wasn’t the other thing you did. The thing from No Man’s Land.”
“No.”
“I saw. It was clean.” He crouched and took the bell, and instead of hooking it back into his beard, he pressed it into my palm and folded my fingers over it. “Keep it, lad. Ye’re the one who keeps standing in places where a man needs a bell.”
We patched what needed patching. The shadow-made tears wouldn’t close from shifting, no matter how many times we traded from animal to human, so bandages had to make do.
Then we ran north through the day, trading lead.
The country got warmer and louder and more alive with every parish, and somewhere in the running, the fear burned down into purpose.
We had the engine. We had the schedule. We had a saboteur and a hostage held off the playing board, and I had a glow stick inside my own chest that answered when everything else was spent.
Emma was going to have questions. Dr. Wise was going to have theories. Olivia was going to have my hide.
Home first.
Dusk was coming down when Emma’s warmth finally reached me through the bond. Unmistakably hers, filtering south into me the way a candle in a window beckoned down a long dark drive.
Her voice arrived thread-thin and furious with love. Half a day, Logan Blackwood. You promised Olivia half a day. Don’t make me come teach you what happens to men who are late for Thanksgiving.
A laugh boiled out of me from somewhere under my chest scar, ragged and whole at the same time, and beside me, Jasper’s ears twitched at the sound as if he’d been waiting for it.
I pushed the flicker back down the line to her. Alive, running, yours. And I lengthened my stride toward my rainbow light.
Late for Thanksgiving. Not for this one, love. Not for any of them.