10. Emma
CHAPTER TEN
emma
Bear Trees
After Midnight
Along corridor stretched in front of me, and a magnetic pull forced me down the hall, where I stopped at the threshold of a dark but empty, vast stone room with no visible ceiling overhead. It reminded me of another place I’d been…
Energy throbbed in the room, and goose bumps rose all over my skin. A cloud-shaped form consolidated in the farthest corner, vaguely taking the shape of a human.
How had I wound up here? Had Acheron kidnapped me? Had Torbin betrayed me? Was he the latest lousy use of my trust? Shit. Shit. Shit. I have to get away.
I took a step back and turned to leave, but the opening had vanished. Smoothing my fingers over the surface, I couldn’t locate the handle. The wall had turned slick.
I’m trapped!
Crap. How had I gotten into this fricking mess? It had to be Acheron. One shifter had to have helped him. My stomach clenched. A shiver worked down my spine, sending bits of ice out through my nervous system.
Emma. Emma. Emma. Please… A breathy plea reverberated in my thoughts.
A gasp escaped me, and I turned slowly to face whoever or whatever had been ensnared with me. “Who’s there? Do you need help?”
A weak whimper answered. The shattered sound echoed off the stone walls. An authentic voice this time. “Emma, help me.”
My heart squeezed in my chest. “Riley?”
“Help me,” she repeated.
Dark red eyes glared at me from an obscured corner, and I stared back from where the entrance had been. A weight settled in my chest. Inky shadows dripped down the walls, swirling round and round, working toward the center of the room.
No. Fuck this shit. I’m not allowing this.
White-hot fury shot through me, and I drew on my shifter magic. A gust of wind exploded in the chamber. I lifted my hands, and blades of rainbow light shot out of my fingers, lighting up the dark.
Riley stood in the corner with Acheron’s robed arms wrapped around her. Black flames blazed in his red eyes. “She’s mine,” he growled. “Mine.”
“No,” I screamed, and the blades of illuminated magic knit together, circled around Riley, and took hold of Acheron’s form. “She’s mine!”
He lunged for me…
A scream tangled in my throat, and a full-body jump launched me out of my nightmare. My hands gripped the quilt, my palms full of fabric instead of rainbow fire.
Near-complete darkness surrounded me inside the bedroom chamber of Torbin’s hollow.
The old cypress creaked around me like a ship at anchor.
My heart slammed against my ribs. The extra warding Torbin had placed around me hummed against my skin, steady and unbroken, exactly the way it had been when I’d gone to sleep.
Delving was his talent, but every elder could craft a warding.
No stone room. No dripping shadows. No Riley.
Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a—
Bullshit. I’d been in that stone room before or close enough to be its ugly cousin. Acheron’s bunker had smelled like that—blood, herbs, and decay. Somehow, my brain had furnished the nightmare straight out of my inventory of memories.
Riley wrapped in his arms. She’s mine.
My stomach rolled, and I sat up, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed behind them. Ordinary, unmagical colors, mine, nobody else’s.
Through the bond, faint and far away, sensations flared.
Logan. He was awake, to the west, his hackles up.
Even through Torbin’s extra-heavy warding, my mate had responded to my nightmare, and every selfish cell in my body wanted to grab the line stretched between us and pull. Run. Be here by dawn.
I banked it instead by taking slow breaths until I loosened my fists.
If I called for him now, he’d come. He’d leave dozens of half-feral strangers, a construction site, and my mother, and Acheron would have gotten exactly what a nightmare was for. Fear was free. Making my people risk their safety… Well, that part was up to me.
I’m okay, I thought at the warding, not pushing it through, just setting it down where the bond could absorb it. Nightmare. Not news.
I lay back down and stared up at the ceiling.
Riley was home in Willow Creek, sleeping behind her parents’ locks with headaches that were finally fading.
Flynn’s foxes drifted past her house often.
She was fine. She was guarded. The next time I stood in Red Tail, Flynn and I were going to have a long talk about whether guarded was the same thing as safe. I needed to be sure.
“You don’t get her,” I muttered aloud. “You don’t get any of them.”
Mom had always said snackies and nappies healed a million ills, so I ate the snack Torbin had left behind, drank half the jug of well water, and slept without dreaming again until a woodpecker landed in the branches for the day shift.
Acheron would never get any of them. Even if it killed me.
The Next Morning
“Let me see you shift,” I called to the group of twelve bear shifters assembled in front of me, mostly in a line in the clearing behind Torbin’s den.
A gust of wind burst through, and they crunched down before looming large in their animal versions. Several of them shook their fur, sending long strings of slobber flying in the burst of sunlight through the autumn leaves. Strings of spit wrapped their muzzles, and they snuffed at the air.
I turned in a slow circle and took an inventory of what I had to work with. Mass. Sweet mother of shifter pearl, their mass. Twelve bears standing shoulder to shoulder made a wall I could have built a highway on. The brisk morning steamed off their backs as if they were a row of parked engines.
Black bears, brown bears, one cream-colored giant who was probably kin to Torbin, all of them broader than anything I’d treated in my exam rooms and about a hundred times more patient.
Bears endured. Ursids held the line. Bruins studied a rainbow-haired outsider who’d let shifter justice take an alpha’s head, and they waited, polite and unreadable, to see what I would do next.
Time to join them.
I didn’t give them the cheetah or the squirrel or any of the flashy stuff.
Instead, I reached for the first form I’d ever taken, the one that had come roaring up out of me at a campsite in Magnolia State Park when a mountain lion had decided to make me its dinner.
I let the wind and the colors crunch me down and remake me into the she-bear.
The line in front of me went still. Then the dirty-white giant huffed, a big, gusty, unmistakably approving sound, and twelve bears relaxed by one collective inch.
Note to self: when in Bear Trees, be a bear.
Some diplomacy I could accomplish without words. Thank freaking God.
We worked shifts until the frost burned off.
Human form to bear form and back. A shifter who could change twice in a fight could heal in the middle of it, and Acheron’s mages wouldn’t stop swinging while we caught our breath.
I made them time each other and made them shift lying down, midstride, half-submerged in the creek that cut across the back of the clearing.
The newer, younger ones came up from every change ravenous, and a washtub of chicken cornbread sandwiches emptied.
That was where Otis came in.
He was the youngest of the twelve, and he trained because the attacks had targeted his family.
The far side of the Bear Trees territory had burned while Acheron’s shadow mages had harvested whoever they caught, and Otis’s older brother had been on the wrong side of those assaults.
His name lived on Dr. Wise’s list now. Otis hit each exercise first, left every drill last, and telegraphed every damn pivot with a dropped left paw that was going to get him killed.
“Again,” I commanded.
After the third time, I put his human nose down in the frost with a move Olivia had taught me back when I couldn’t hold a bo staff without bruising my own toes. Then I growled at him. “Your left paw drops when you turn. Dammit. A squirrel could see it from the next parish over.”
He shook himself and set his jaw. “Then I’ll turn faster.”
“Or you’ll turn smarter.”
So much to do, so little time.
He gritted his teeth, and he winced. His grief sharply scented the air.
Training to save an already-dead ghost was a helluva soul-sucking monster to live with, so I softened my disapproval. “We’ve got all week, Otis. I’m not going anywhere.”
It was midmorning, all of us human again, sweating in the cold, munching on cornbread, and arguing about footwork, when a raven crossed over the clearing. The approaching shadow made me wince, then brace for an attack.
Just a bird. Probably just a bird. It had come in high over the cypress crowns, circled once, twice, and slid away south without a single wasted wingbeat.
The cornbread turned to sawdust in my mouth as I counted the ways birds had become a threat category.
Nobody else so much as glanced up. Twelve warriors, the pride of Bear Trees, and not one of them had eyes anywhere above their own shoulder height.
“New drill tomorrow,” I announced. “Anybody got anything red?”
Torbin, who had watched the entire morning from his stump with the patience of continental drift, went into his hollow and came back with a strip of red cloth as long as my arm.
“It was to be a quilt border,” he rumbled, in the tone of a man donating a kidney, “for a quilt meant to bring comfort to a grieving shifter.”
“You’ll get it back.”
How many more shifters would lose members of their family before we bested Acheron?
“I’ll return it,” I promised, biting back a rush of tears.
“You will not,” he said, “but the cause is worthy.”
Marcus arrived at midday.
The Ville Platte truck came up the track with a shifter I’d met at one of the recent conclaves.
Della, Marcus’s second, was a broad-shouldered woman with a deep voice built for calling cattle across a parish.
She parked the truck, climbed out, and assessed twelve bears and one multimorph with a single sweep of her gaze.