11. Emma #2
Nobody moved. Twelve bears stood shoulder to shoulder, the unconscious geometry of a clan closing ranks. Across from them, one squirrel shifter sulked in silence, which for Levi was the loudest thing he’d done all week. He shifted into his human form once more.
Words gathered in my chest, and I let them come out slowly.
“You want to talk about Salali? Fine. Let’s talk about Salali.
” I crossed the frost-crunched ground until I stood between them.
That was the job. Standing in the middle was my whole damned job.
“Her clan caught her. Her warriors carried her to the council with their own hands, and after the council delved her, it was Levi who had the guts to stand up in front of every alpha in Louisiana and declare the sentence, and Reuben carried it out. On their own alpha. Because I allowed it.”
Otis’s jaw worked. “I didn’t—”
“Salali must die.” Levi’s human voice came out flat, stripped of every ounce of its usual amusement.
He studied his hands instead of any of us.
“Three words. I hear them in my sleep. You want to know what East Nuttal got out of the bargain, bear? We got to execute the person we loved best in the world in front of strangers because of a mage none of us have ever seen.” His mouth twitched. “So, you know, fair trade.”
“Here’s what we will not do.” I glared and turned in place so all of them got a piece.
“We are not going to use our grief to attack each other. Acheron has taken enough from every clan standing in this clearing, and he does not get our peace too. Not for free. Not at all.” My gaze landed on Otis.
“Your brother’s name is on my list. I repeat it every night.
I am going to answer for every name on it, and the only way I can do that is if you save your fury for the enemy who earned it. ”
Otis stared at the ground for a long moment. Bears did their thinking slowly and all the way through.
“The multimorph speaks true,” Torbin said into the quiet, and the beads in his beard clicked once like a gavel.
When Otis finally moved, it was to walk to the foot of the oak and consider Levi in the branches.
I braced myself.
“Show me,” the young bear said gruffly.
Levi blinked. “Show you what?”
“What my left paw does. Apparently, squirrels can see my tell, so a shadow mage sure as hell will.” He rolled his enormous shoulders. “Fix it, and we’re square.”
For a second, Levi seemed younger than Riley. Then his grin came over his face, and he dropped out of the tree, landing light on the frost. “Oh, buddy,” he said, “we’re going to need all morning.”
The last round, I gave them the only instruction that mattered. “Fight like it’s real. Every one of you knows what’s coming. Not here, not today, but it’s coming, so show me what you can do when you stop being polite about it.”
“You sure about that?” Levi called from the canopy.
“I’m sure we need it.”
“Okay, but I want it on record that I asked.”
“Noted. Go.”
The forest erupted, and this time it was beautiful.
The bears didn’t wedge. They spread, four watching the canopy, the rest holding a rolling line that gave nothing up. Fern ran her misdirection once more, behaving as though she’d come across a copperhead, and got exactly one bear to buy it.
Della slipped through the gap that opened anyway. When Levi dropped for the banner, Otis was already under him, not swinging, just there, filling the landing zone, and the look on that squirrel’s face as he treadmilled backward through the air was worth the whole damn morning.
And me? I’d meant to stay out of it. Referee, observer, capital-L Leader, above the fray. I lasted four minutes.
It wasn’t the fray that pulled me in. All those bodies fighting hard and meaning it, every shifter in the clearing burning bright on their own frequency… Lately, since the linking, since the relic, I absorbed frequencies the way I used to feel the weather. A pressure beneath my skin. An invitation.
A gust of wind, a swirl of color, and I hit the ground on four cheetah paws.
I ran along the line of the drill, tagging two bears on my way through just to hear them huff.
Then the trees pulled at me, the squirrel-channel crackling at the edge of my mind, and I took that invitation too, shifting midstride, reconfiguring myself into verticals, launch points, and gaping distances.
For thirty glorious seconds, I was in the branches with Levi, and if I wasn’t as fast as a born squirrel, I was fast enough to make him work for his smugness.
Then I got greedy.
A raven had been sitting in the back of my head all week. Previously, ravens had been Acheron’s spies. They’d watched Six-Mile from the trees and had carried Salali’s treachery south in their ugly beaks. A stubborn, furious part of me wanted to own the sky.
From up there, I could see the drill, the whole territory. I reached for the winged shape, black feathers and hollow bones. With my wings outstretched, I’d never felt more powerful, and I drew more magic through my cells.
Bear, cat, fox, squirrel, and raccoon poured in through the seams I’d left unguarded, all those energies speaking at once, and the magic rushed up my spine like floodwater.
For one stretched, lurching second, I wasn’t fully anything, but I was everything all at once, and the surroundings went white at the edges. Too much. Too much.
The warehouse. Izzie crumpling. Blaze screaming, naked and burned. Rainbow fire. My friends on the ground because I couldn’t hold what I’d called.
Not again. Never again. I’d vowed.
I stopped fighting the flood and aimed the rush away.
Anywhere but into my shifters. I opened my hands and let the overflow of power tear out of me in a column of harmless color, a soundless firework that lit the underside of the canopy in every shade my hair had ever been.
The pressure screamed through me, burst out, and disappeared as I came back to myself in the crook of an oak as a human, gasping, trying to remember which lungs I was currently using.
Below me, the clearing had gone silent. A ring of frost around my tree had melted to steaming grass.
At the edge, Marcus sat with his blind face tipped up toward the last of my light show, and he asked no one in particular, “What did it look like?”
“Aurora,” Della said quietly.
“Shame,” Marcus murmured, and for once, he didn’t make it a snide comment or turn it into a joke.
I climbed down the tree on legs that mostly worked.
Nobody had been hurt. Nobody had been knocked down.
Twelve bears and four exchange warriors watched me with the cocktail I was learning to live with: one part concern, one part calculation.
Everyone was probably quietly deciding whether what they’d just seen was a weapon they were glad to have or a disaster they were standing too close to.
That’s what I’d have been thinking right about now.
“We’re all improving our skills. That means keep going,” I commanded.
We took a water break afterward, and it was almost peaceful. The bears hauled out more cornbread and a jug of honey the size of a badger. Bears didn’t believe in snacks, only in provisions.
My stomach roared loud enough to turn heads. I shot a sheepish look at Torbin. “Multiple shifts in an hour will do that.”
Silently, Otis cut me a chunk of cornbread. Levi sat on the stump beside him, narrating the young bear’s footwork flaws between bites, and Otis bore it with the heavy patience of a glacier being lectured by a sparkler.
Progress. It didn’t look like much. It never did.
Torbin lowered himself to the ground beside me. For a while, the old bear said nothing. “The linking,” he said finally. Not a question.
“You felt it.”
“All of Bear Trees felt it, Multimorph. I suspect the worms felt it.” He tugged once on his beaded beard. “You almost lost control.”
“I know. I saw the steaming grass.” I turned the cornbread over in my hands.
“No one was harmed,” he said. “This time, you bent the flood instead of breaking beneath it. That is new.” Under all that white hair, his gaze found mine. “Almost is a good teacher, Emma. A kind one. It lets you keep both the lesson and the students.”
“And when it stops being almost?”
“Then you will be glad you trained beside bears,” he rumbled, “who are sturdy and difficult to break, whether they drop their left paw or not.”
I doubled over and laughed hard, and it came out rawer than I had expected.
Above us, the breeze shook the leaves in the canopy, and for one borrowed hour, the war felt far away.
Afour-wheeler came up the trail at dusk, its engine noise scattering birds, and my heart did the stupid hopeful thing it always did before my head could remind it that Logan was in the west, holding the bigger part of the mess together.
It was Phil, grinning, wind-chapped, on a four-wheeler and towing a small trailer with my bags on it. He rolled to a stop in front of Torbin’s den. The bears had gone to scavenge and hunt, and I had been discussing the day’s training with Torbin and Marcus.
“You’re a week late,” I called to Phil, cupping my hands around my mouth so he could hear me over the engine.
“I’m aware, Multimorph.” He killed the engine and swung off.
“In my defense, every time I loaded the truck, your mate found something more urgent for it to carry. Tiny-house supplies. Lumber. More tiny-house supplies. I brought the four-wheeler as soon as I got it out of the shop.” He handed my duffel to me. “Want a ride back to Six-Mile?”
“I’ve ridden bitch on your four-wheeler before, Phil. Once was plenty. Besides, I’m needed here.”
“You were also naked that time,” he said serenely, “so we can only improve.”
He’d brought more than bags. While the bears drifted home through the dark-trunked trees, we sat on Torbin’s porch mound as Phil made his report the way he did everything, thoroughly and in order, while Marcus listened from the doorway and Torbin loomed politely.
The exchange program was working. Mostly. Sort of.