16. Emma
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
emma
Six-Mile
Dawn
The perimeter wolves announced them home at first light, and I was at the gate before the second howl finished. Logan! You surprised me!
They came down the driveway like the survivors of a flood, Olivia in the lead with her gear gone gray with dust, Levi draped over Harlan’s shoulders like a scarf that had given up, the Ville Platte cats flanking a Red Tail fox whose paws must have worn through somewhere around mile eighty.
John brought up the rear. Nine of them had gone through our gate two nights ago.
Seven came back.
I counted twice, the way I counted every group now, and the bottom dropped out of my morning before Olivia had even shifted to speak.
Logan! Where are you? It echoed through my mind in a wailing howl. The threadbare bond still stretched between us, but I couldn’t make out my mate’s answer. Each cell in my body trembled at the rush of worry.
“He’s alive,” she said first. “Alive as of dusk last night. At least he was when we left him at the edge of the Void. Let me get them fed, and I’ll report.”
We made our way into Six-Mile Manor, the headquarters for our offensive, determined to attempt privacy. Marcus trailed after us.
I warded the study against sound and took a seat at the desk in Logan’s chair.
I’d slept a week under Torbin’s warding at Bear Trees, and it was easy to replicate.
My mother materialized out of the mess hall with coffee and a mountain of eggs and the usual briskness she deployed instead of screaming, and the camp’s leaders packed into Logan’s study while the runners ate like newb shifters after their first shift.
Olivia gave the report standing, her spine straight, her tone even, the surveyor’s tape and the stopwatch math spread across Logan’s desk next to Torbin’s doily. The Void cloud was on the move, consuming whatever life it touched.
“Five days, six if it’s lazy. Landfall happens at the Thanksgiving feast we’ve promised.” Then she stopped, considered me, and I knew the rest was going to be worse.
“Say it,” I commanded.
“There’s a Steele marching with the horde.
” She said it easily, as though it had cost her nothing to communicate.
“At the fore in the thick of the shapes. Logan scented her at the line and took the scent apart twice to be sure.” Her gaze flicked to Marcus, standing motionless by the window with his face aimed at the glass he couldn’t see through.
“Your sister. Alive, moving under her own power, and walking point for Acheron’s army. ”
The study went so quiet I could hear the percolator two rooms away.
My birth mother. The words wouldn’t fit anywhere I put them. The woman from the creek, the one who’d linked with her brother and nearly destroyed him, the one Logan had left behind a warding with her son and mourned ever since.
Marcus’s hand had risen to the thin chain at his collar. Maybe he was looking for the bat pendant I’d left in my bedroom, but he made no comment.
“And Logan,” Olivia went on, quieter, “stayed. He sent us home with the intel and jogged into the thick of it alone to figure how Acheron holds her, whether she’s a lock or a key. His words.” A muscle ticked in her jaw. “Jasper peeled off near Ville Platte.”
“To warn them?” That came from Marcus.
Olivia shook her head. “Don’t think so. He left me a note. It says…” She produced a scrap of paper with two fingers. “‘Gone to mind the bell.’”
“Of course it does,” I said, my thoughts far away.
“He promised half a day behind us, Emma. He has until tonight.”
The room erupted in conversation after that.
Torbin asked engineer’s questions about the line’s pulse rate.
Flynn wanted his fox’s route home mapped against the gray.
Somebody said the word evacuation for the first time, and somebody else said it back, and the war went on being planned in my mate’s study while I stood there holding two facts that wouldn’t leave me alone.
My birth mother was strolling toward us at the front of a horde. She was one of the genetic sources of every bit of magic I had in me. And my idiotic, beloved, magnificent fated mate was trapped in a cloud of death, alone with her and Acheron.
Fuck my life. She was alive, leashed, and aimed at us. I didn’t know how to process it. Things had been different since Logan had his last confrontation with Acheron, and now my mate intended to risk another showdown. This shit was for the birds. You promised me an after, Logan!
My insides churned, and I shook, fighting the nausea.
I made it out the door, across the lawn, past the fence line, and into the trees before my self-control gave way.
Then I let the wind and the colors morph me into a she-bear, the first shape I ever was, the one that knew what to do with a feeling too big for a human body, and I put a dead oak on the ground in eleven seconds and screamed at the splinters. Crows cawed their displeasure overhead.
When I came back to myself, human and heaving on the grass, Marcus was leaning against a pine at the clearing’s edge, his arms crossed, his face pointed politely elsewhere.
“Better?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good. It shouldn’t be.” He pushed off the tree.
“You’re doing the math he did. Whether you can reach the Void line by tonight if you run your fastest shapes and don’t stop.
You can’t. It’s too far, and you’d arrive spent, alone, and delivered exactly as he wants you.
He’s been trying to pull you south, niece. Don’t be as idiotic as your mate.”
“But it’s Logan.” I stifled a rush of hot tears and lifted my chin, trying to put myself back together after the break in my control.
“It’s Logan, who is the second-most stubborn creature in Louisiana, mated to the first.” He spoke kindly.
“And it’s my sister. You think I haven’t run the same numbers?
I’ve been running them since Olivia said Steele.
I can’t see the road, and I’d still leave tonight if I thought it would buy either of them one hour.
” He turned back toward the noise of a war camp waking up.
“It wouldn’t. What buys them hours is everything you’re about to do today, so come do it. ”
Marcus took halting steps, and I followed him without speaking. Torbin waited at the fence, vast and patient as always. He didn’t say anything. He just strolled beside me all the way back to the training gym.
I scanned the assembled shifters. With a clap of my hands, I yelled, “Seven a.m. Time to train like you mean it!”
Midmorning, Dr. Wise’s green Subaru came up the long drive, and I jogged toward the manor and up onto the porch to meet her.
She had mud up to her door handles and a bumper sticker I’d never noticed before that read I brAKE FOR ARCHIVES.
Maybe she’d gotten it while she had been off in New Port Orleans.
My mother burst out of the mess hall and reached Dr. Wise first. The two hugged like old friends.
Dr. Wise straightened her spectacles and marched onto the porch. She nodded toward me. “Multimorph, I have news.”
“Let’s go in.”
Once we were in the study, she unpacked her leather satchel onto Logan’s desk. The smells of old books and salt water wafted out.
“I went through every parish history from 1841 to 1849,” she said.
“Church registries. Land offices. Two family Bibles. Somebody spent a century making sure the ending of the last emergence stayed hidden, but they missed the diocesan water-damage crate. Who wants to spend time in the middle of mold and mildew?” She laid a page in a plastic sleeve on the desk, gently. “And so…”
The page had browned with age, and the handwriting had faded. The inscription was partially English, partially a language I didn’t recognize.
“The first shifters didn’t just learn to change,” Dr. Wise said.
“They also created a partition. The page calls it the Veil. It’s a boundary woven between the magical world and the human one, anchored to the old, warded grounds.
It is why humans don’t typically stumble into shifter magic.
It is why your wardings work at all. Every ward in Louisiana is a knot tied into the same net.
” Her finger hovered over the last legible line.
“And in 1849, something tried to tear it down, and the cost of stopping it is the missing part.”
“Acheron,” Flynn said.
“Or whatever Acheron used to be.” Dr. Wise peered over her spectacles at me, and her matter-of-factness unsettled me. “The old, warded grounds, Emma. The earth-dens at Red Tail. The hollows in Bear Trees. The Gathering Place.”
“The new Gathering Place?” I asked.
“Not the benches your people raised last month, but the old warded ground the elders insist Gathering Places be raised upon. They aren’t just safe houses.
They’re anchor points, and they will hold against his creatures the way plain ground won’t.
If you’re moving civilians, you move them there.
” She began repacking the satchel with terrible calm.
“Also, I’ve read enough now to say this plainly instead of through your mother, whatever this power is that you keep almost using, do nothing primal until I’ve finished the pages.
The last one who improvised with primal magic is the reason I’m reading fragments. ”
“Understood,” I said, and I mostly meant it. If Logan came back, a primal-level orgasm was probably the first order of business, and I might have tapped into the primal a little bit when healing Fern, but none of that seemed important enough to say.
By noon the map on the study wall wore a new constellation of pins. Warded ground, north and east. Everything vulnerable, south and west. And a Void tide between them, coming up through the parishes.
Evacuation wasn’t just a possibility anymore.
It was on the schedule.
“Head south first, to Ville Platte,” I instructed the shifters collected once more in the study. “Bring as many shifters as you can to Six-Mile. Warriors, farmers, homebodies, all of them. As many as will come.”