25. Logan #2
“Every night,” Marcus said, “his mages must turn and face the Veil to feed the gash, and while they carve at the sky, the army stands dormant in the ground. They’re dumb, blind, and refueling.
She says there’s an hour when his whole terrible Void is looking up and no one is watching the door.
” His voice cracked. “She has been trying to hand me the knife for weeks, and I have been too afraid of being exactly what you all think I am to pick it up.”
Heavy silence settled over the camp. The hair stood up on my arms. We had seen it in a drowned cypress flat, robed mages in rows with their heads down and the horde soaking into the ground around them like oil into an earthen rag.
Marcus’s sister had whispered the reality I’d observed with my own eyes.
This was the complication. This was the whole knife-edged problem.
“Clear the yard,” I said. “Leaders in my study. Now.”
The alphas stampeded toward the manor. Garrick went last, and he went with a look that claimed his challenge wasn’t finished yet. Maybe he was right, but he joined them.
Once we were all in the study, with the door closed and the note still resting on Torbin’s doily, I settled my ass on the corner of my desk and laid it out for the ones who mattered—Olivia; Torbin; Flynn, gray around the eyes and a brother short; Della at Marcus’s shoulder; and Marcus in the good chair, spent, honest, dangerous.
I didn’t care for the others… like Garrick and the raven alpha.
Fuck, I didn’t even know the bird’s name.
“Now answer me,” I barked at Marcus. “Can you tell his whispers from hers?”
“Most of the time.” The Ville Platte alpha didn’t dress it up.
“Not always. That’s the truth, Logan, and I won’t sand it smooth for you.
He knows I sort them. He is perfectly capable of feeding me a true thing ten times, so I’ll swallow the eleventh.
” His hands lay open on his knees, his palms pointed toward the ceiling.
“The seam is real. I’d stake my eyes on it, if I had them, but whether he wants us to know it because it’s his weakness or because it’s his trap, I can’t tell you. ”
“It’s there,” I said. “I’ve seen it. Jasper and I spotted it the night we scouted the Void. All the mages, heads down, facing the hole. The horde stood down to feed it. Marcus’s sister is whispering the truth.”
“Then it is true,” Flynn said.
“True enough to depend on.” I pointed at the map on the wall. The pins clustered around Six-Mile. “Maybe formulate our plan around.”
Olivia’s gaze narrowed, and she crossed her arms as she considered me. “Or it’s the best bait he’s got.”
“Bait?” Garrick asked. “Bait, how?”
Olivia visibly rolled her eyes at the idiot.
I bit back a growl and crossed to the window behind my desk and stared through the glass before turning back toward the assembled shifters. Diplomacy wasn’t something alphas usually had to care about in their own effing territory.
“Well?” Garrick pressed.
Olivia snarled and showed her teeth at the fool. “Because it matches our recon, and that’s how you sell a lie, season it with a little truth.” Then she spoke to me. “You’ve said it yourself. Three parts desperate, one part reckless.”
She was right about the trap, if it was one.
We’d already verified a seam and a hero’s window at a ritual hour.
Six-Mile was filled with the shifters’ best just aching for a way to hit back at the enemy that had eaten their holiday.
Would marching our strength into the flat at the one hour it looked safest be wise?
We might only find out Acheron had been counting on exactly that.
I turned again to the window and stared out. My job wasn’t to win the war. Emma had gone to do that, God help her. My job was harder and smaller in scope. Keep the alliance whole. Keep Ville Platte in. Keep the horde off our fence. Make Six-Mile and the other clans survive.
A sigh whooshed out of me, and I shoved a hand through my hair. The only way I could see to do all four at once was to take the knife Marcus’s sister had offered and pray it wasn’t clutched in her master’s hand.
“We go at the ritual,” I said. “We stab at his heart without risking the entire army. We send a strike unit, our best shifters. Then we drag whatever we can out of that flat… starting with the woman whispering in Marcus’s head, because a leash in our hands is a leash that isn’t in his.
” I turned and faced them. “Maybe we’ll buy Emma’s patch weeks instead of nights, and it’ll double as the answer to the question of Marcus’s loyalty.
You want proof the Steeles aren’t spies? Fine. This’ll do it.”
Garrick grumbled but didn’t argue.
“Ville Platte leads the raid. Marcus plans it off his sister’s intel.”
Marcus’s cloudy amber eyes had gone bright. “And if it’s bait,” he added quietly, “I will have handed you the alliance’s best on the point of my own sister’s knife. You’re trusting a blind man with the enemy in his skull.”
“Yeah, I am.”
“Why?”
I glanced at the note. Trust me, love.
“Because holding doesn’t mean standing still,” I answered.
“It means I don’t get to wait for perfect.
She didn’t.” I picked up her note, folded it once, and pressed it to my scar.
Her scent clung to the paper. “Plan the raid, Marcus. Every hour, every angle, every lie your sister’s ever told you.
Olivia builds the unit. Torbin manages the camp while we’re gone. Della, your cats are the tip.”
Nobody argued. The only move left was the one that might be the trap.
“When?” Flynn asked.
“The next blind hour we reach,” I said. Then I turned back to the window. “Race ya home, love,” I whispered.
I didn’t give two shits if anyone heard me. A man said all sorts of fuckery to the air when the person he would die for had strolled into hell ahead of him.
Together, we bent over the maps, and we built the most dangerous thing we’d ever framed. It was a raid based on the word of a woman who lived in the enemy’s fist, planned by her blind brother, to buy time for a mate who hadn’t told me where she’d gone. Fuck…
If it was a trap, I would lead them into it myself.
If it wasn’t, it was our only option.
My barometer, the scar over my heart, ached, warning of the storm we were all running to meet. I’d never hated a job more, and I’d never done one that mattered as much.