9. Logan #3
It was enough. It would have to be enough until I could take her in my arms again.
Once in the manor, I detoured through the kitchen for water on my way to the bedroom that would hold no one but me tonight.
I stopped there long enough to pull Emma’s bags out of our closet.
She’d packed them for Bear Trees but had left them behind in her hurry.
I carried them down and set them by the door with a note to Phil to run them east with the morning truck.
I should’ve sent them along earlier. Some husband I was turning out to be.
Mate, I corrected myself and grinned at nothing in the dark hallway. We could put a pin in the other word. She hadn’t proposed yet.
The Next Morning
7 AM
The morning came down cold and gray, and thirty-nine shifters stood on the frost in front of the training gym. Olivia walked the line like a drill sergeant who moonlighted as a runway model. Three more shifters had straggled in overnight.
“Bo staffs,” she announced to a chorus of groans from every shifter who’d assumed war training meant claws out on day one.
“Weapons before fangs. Steel is our last resort, and fangs are our second-to-last. Anybody who thinks sticks are beneath them can come take mine away from me.” She extended her collapsible staff with a flick of her wrist and a smile that had ended better shifters than these.
Nobody volunteered.
We worked them in mixed squads for two hours. Wolf beside cat beside raccoon, which had sounded aspirational in a conclave speech and looked, in practice, like a three-legged race where all the legs hated each other.
A Ville Platte cat swept a wolf’s feet and got tossed onto the mats for it.
A raven called a wolf ground-bound, and the wolf called the raven a feathered lawn ornament.
Olivia made them run the fence line together until they came back too winded to insult anybody.
I didn’t care for the ravens, but the flock hadn’t been banned from Six-Mile.
In the last drill, though, a bear held the center while two squirrels ran a screen over her shoulders and a fox lied his way around the flank, and for about ninety seconds, the whole mess moved like something with one spine.
Ninety seconds. On day one. I’d take it.
I left Olivia to run their cool-down and made it to the manor porch, sweat-soaked and steadier than I’d felt since Emma had run to Bear Trees without me.
Sophia had already taken a seat at my dining room table. Of course she was early. Dr. Wise sat beside her. Enough food had been laid out to overindulge a bear. Grits, biscuits, a platter of bacon that explained where Phil had disappeared to, and coffee in good cups that I hadn’t known I owned.
“You’re late, Logan,” Sophia said, in exactly the voice Emma used when she wasn’t actually mad. She looked me over, hunted for something to disapprove of, and settled on all of me at once. “And you’re not eating enough. Sit.”
I sat. As the alpha of Six-Mile, I had faced down balefire and shadow mages, but there wasn’t a force in Louisiana that argued with the multimorph’s mother over breakfast. Besides, I’d rather shift on the dining room table before admitting it aloud, but the fussing touched a place in my heart that had been empty since my own parents had died.
Emma’s mother had moved into my compound as a suspicious human and stayed to become the only person in our territory who had ever told me to wear a jacket.
“Any word from my daughter?” she asked, loading food onto my plate like it was a construction project.
“She’s been drilling Torbin’s warriors. Bears make good walls, Sophia.
Torbin’s people will keep her safe as houses.
” I decided the Marcus development could wait until Sophia had gotten to know her daughter’s alleged uncle from a nice, safe distance.
“I’m sure she’ll check in when she’s in range of a signal. Bear Trees isn’t big on cell towers.”
“Composting toilets,” Dr. Wise said, buttering a biscuit with surgical precision.
“Fascinating clan, the bears. Oldest unbroken territory in the state.” Her spectacles flashed as she looked up at me, and I caught the shrewdness behind them.
“You’ll want to hear this morning’s archive news, Alpha. Sophia found it, actually.”
Sophia flushed with unmistakable pride. “I’ve been helping Eleanor index the old parish records, scanning them into the computer. Somebody in this operation has to have a filing system that isn’t a leather satchel.”
“The emergence before Emma’s,” Dr. Wise continued, unbothered. “Eighteen forties, as near as we can date it. I’d always believed the record was lost to a wildfire. Instead, we discovered the volumes it should have been in. They had been removed.”
“Removed?” Two strips of bacon went into my mouth, followed by grits.
“The pages had been razored out of three separate parish histories, decades apart. Somebody didn’t want the ending of that story surviving.
” She lowered her butter knife. “Every multimorph emergence in the record ends the same way, Mr. Blackwood. The clans unify, the threat rises to meet them, and then there is a reckoning that the histories flinch from writing down. I intend to find out what was on those pages before Emma has to learn it the hard way.”
The grits turned to glue in my mouth. “What do you need?”
“Access to the diocesan archive in New Port Orleans and a driver.” She glanced sideways. “Sophia has volunteered.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
At the same moment, Sophia announced, “It’s settled, then.”
“You’re not going, Sophia, if I have to hog-tie you.”
“Logan Blackwood. How dare you speak to me like that…”
The argument continued. I was still losing the argument twenty minutes later when Phil came through the dining room door with his phone in his hand. He gestured toward me. “If I may interrupt, Alpha?”
“What is it?”
“Jace,” he said. “First pass came back.”
I took the phone and scrolled through the thermal maps while Sophia and Dr. Wise kept quiet. At least they weren’t still trying to convince me to let them go to New Port Orleans.
The drone man had been flying on my orders since we’d made it home from No Man’s Land.
His birds had been in the air for three days now, making a widening spiral over the state park, the parish roads, the burned scar where the plantation house had swallowed my team, and every acre of ground Acheron had ever soured.
Nothing current or fresh. Not a camp, not a corpse-pile, not one degree of heat that shouldn’t have been there. Three hundred square miles of Louisiana devoid of him.
“Trail runs south,” Phil said quietly. “Every trace Jace could pick up, every ruined spot, they string in a line toward the southern parishes, and then they stop.”
Far away. The scout news any sane man wanted—the monster had left the neighborhood.
But Acheron didn’t retreat. Acheron dug in.
Quiet meant he was feeding where we couldn’t see, getting stronger someplace we weren’t looking, and the longer the quiet held, the worse the bill would be when it came due.
“Tell Jace to refit for range and go south the way my mate asked,” I said. “Deep as his birds will fly. Whatever it costs, Blackwood pays it. I want eyes on whatever he’s building down there before the Beaver Moon.”
“Yes, Alpha.” Phil hesitated at the door. “Good news, though. Yeah? For now?”
“For now,” I echoed, but I didn’t believe a word of it.
Sophia reached over and put another biscuit on my plate, her hand steady, her eyes worried. Dr. Wise studied me over her spectacles the clinical way historians observe events they suspect they’ll be writing about later.
I ate the biscuit, and I drank the coffee.
Out past the windows, my compound rang with construction, training, complaints, and one long-suffering beta’s laughter.
More shifters had arrived. Now nearly four dozen strangers were learning to be one unit, and my mate was off teaching bears to watch the sky.
South of us all, in some shadowed corner of the map no drone had reached yet, Acheron was mobilizing. Let him believe he would win.
We were raising an army of shifters.
And we would send him to the depths of hell.