21. Logan
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
logan
Six-Mile
Three Hours Later
Emma had managed to sleep two hours after I’d left the bed.
Then she’d trotted into my study and demanded to take over the evacuation training and the battle training for the morning despite my insistence she take an easy day.
She’d been adamant that it was better for the clans to work with her after she’d linked them all without permission.
“I am the multimorph,” she announced with her arms crossed and her gorgeous hips jutted to the side.
“I see your tattoo,” I said, leaning back in my desk chair.
Her mouth opened and then closed. Then a smile broke across her face. “You’re not going to argue with me?”
I shrugged. “Should but won’t.”
Then she dropped a kiss on my mouth and bounded off.
Thirty minutes later, Dr. Wise marched into my study, her arms filled with hard copies, her attaché case slung over her shoulder, and a stack of note cards in her hand.
These, she placed on my desk. I lifted my coffee and moved Torbin’s doily three inches to the left so it wouldn’t crowd her note cards.
“Sit down, Alpha,” she said as though she were speaking to a classroom. She closed the door behind her.
I quirked an eyebrow. “I’m already seated.”
She glanced at me over her glasses. “Oh, so you are. Then you stay there.” Her bag slipped to the floor with a thud as she placed the stack of books on the corner of my desk.
She settled in one of the upholstered seats, scooted to the front edge, and pulled her journal from her bag. A pen came out next, quickly uncapped.
“You heard the report,” I said. “You probably saw what I didn’t say in it.”
“I heard a man describe fighting free of a hundred shadow creatures without describing how.” She tapped her pen on her paper with an expression devoid of alarm or pity.
“Show me. Small version, please. I’ve only the one satchel, and the various archives would never forgive me if I lost any of their one-of-a-kind volumes. ”
Carefully, I reached down and let one thread up through my palm—silver-white, quiet, throwing shadows over the bookshelves in my study. The light didn’t flicker. It held until I released it.
Dr. Wise exhaled through her nose. Then she wrote for two full minutes while I sat there feeling like a soil sample.
“Well,” she said at last, “you’re not the first.”
The scar on my chest tingled. “Say that again.”
“The scraps from the 1840s pages concern themselves almost entirely with the multimorph of that emergence. However, an emergence is a braid, not a wire.” From her satchel, she removed a photostat with browned handwriting in the margins. The plastic sleeve around it crinkled.
She continued. “Her anchor appears multiple times in the surviving fragments. A blacksmith near St. Martinville. The fragments record him oddly. In earlier entries, he’s a man.
He shoes horses, argues at the land office, and concerns himself with human concerns, but the later entries…
” Her finger moved down the page to a line that had been half-eaten by water.
“Here. I’ll read it. ‘And her iron-man stood the night watch, and no shadow would cross his light.’”
She handed it to me, and I took it, careful with the delicate document. His light. The words could have described me.
Dr. Wise adjusted her glasses once more.
“The bond is a catalyst, Mr. Blackwood. That’s my working theory.
A fated bond to an ordinary shifter makes a strong pair.
A fated bond to a multimorph doesn’t leave the other half of the pair unchanged.
She is the sum of your people’s magic gathered in one woman, and you are united to her.
That power ran through you the day she saved your life and again in No Man’s Land.
Now the magic has left her and reaches you.
” She reclaimed the photostat, precise as a surgeon.
“She isn’t making you something else. She’s making you more of what you have always been.
You are her anchor. Iron made of light. That which the barrier shadows cannot cross. ”
I sat with that for a long moment. “And the blacksmith,” I asked, “how does his story end?”
Dr. Wise removed her spectacles, polished them on the hem of her shirt, and put them back on.
“You’re stalling.”
She winced. “Most are not as direct as you, Logan.”
“Most have time to waste. We do not.”
“There’s a razor’s edge to it,” she admitted finally.
“Every page that would tell me is gone, but I’ll say this much…
The fragments about her run to 1849. The fragments about him stop in 1848.
” She stared at me. “A year earlier. Whatever the price was, I believe he paid a portion of it first. I need three more days with the diocesan crates before either of you does anything.”
Three more days? Everyone kept asking me for time like I was the one supplying it. There was no reason to agree or disagree when Acheron’s actions would decide what came next for us.
“One more question,” I said. “The light. Shadows won’t cross it. Is that in your pages, or did I just tell you?”
For the first time that morning, Eleanor Wise smiled. “‘No shadow would cross his light,’” she quoted. “1846. You corroborated it. History is a wheel, Alpha. Try to be the part that holds.”
The study door banged open. It was Phil. He’d gone so pale his lips were white. He had a radio in his hand, and any chance we had at any extra time had likely disappeared.
“The earth-dens,” he said. “Red Tail. A finger came out of the Atchafalaya side an hour before dawn, thirty miles past the deepest mark on Jace’s map.
The outer dens are down. They collapsed on the Ville Platte evacuees, and there are shadows in the runs.
Their radio set went down with the outer dens.
A runner didn’t reach a working one until now.
” He swallowed. “Flynn’s already gone. He said…
He said tell the alpha of Six-Mile he is requested. ”
I was moving before Phil had finished.
Dr. Wise began packing her satchel. “May the alpha of Six-Mile be the wheel that holds. God help us all.”
After weeks of drills, we assembled on the run.
Torbin’s bears charged toward the attack with Otis leading point.
Every Ville Platte warrior in camp joined us, running to dig their own kin out of somebody else’s ground.
Ravens flew overhead. The speaker had sent theirs without being asked, and I’d taken them without hesitating.
Emma met us at the gate with a healer’s bag she’d packed, and in one heartbeat, we did the whole argument through the bond without a word of it out loud. I’m coming.
You’re needed here.
Kids, Logan.
I know, love, I know.
Stage the wounded. I’ll follow with the second wave. “Take Fern,” she said out loud.
Fern was already there. The fox had risen off her infirmary cot, bandaged from collarbone to hip, kept upright by spite. She shook with the effort, and the glare she gave me shut down my objection.
“They’re my home dens, Alpha,” she said. “I was whelped and raised in the deep runs. Your maps show maybe half of what’s under that territory, and the half they don’t show is where my people will have taken the evacuees.”
“We can carry you.”
She bared her teeth. “You can carry me if I fall down, Alpha. I weigh nothing. Until then, I’ll carry myself.”
Raising my eyebrows sufficiently cowed her. “If you go, then you ride the four-wheeler, Fern, or I leave you behind. Forcibly.”
She didn’t argue this time.
I circled my hand in the air. “Let’s go.”
We sprinted from Six-Mile to Red Tail into the glare of the morning sun with a wounded fox on a four-wheeler bouncing ahead of us, through the country that still smelled alive.
Red Tail’s dens were some of the oldest dug-out ground in Louisiana, and coming over the ridge exposed what had been done to them overnight.
They’d been hit from below and behind, and the hillside above them had avalanched down onto them. Buckled entries and caved-in living spaces spread across the territory.
Cat families were trapped under the rubble, and gray smears moved over the ground, not a wall of them, not the boiling tide I’d seen in the south, but dozens, flowing between the broken entries. The shadow mages were trying to get at the survivors.
But the older runs on the low ridge held strong. The ancient heart of the hill hadn’t been breached. The council den, the deep galleries, and the ground the first foxes had claimed stood unbroken. The shadows pressed inward but couldn’t go in.
Everything new had fallen. Acheron’s attack hadn’t come to kill Ville Platte evacuees.
It had come to gnaw at the anchor chain, and the displaced shifters had been in the way, pinned between a collapse they couldn’t dig through and the warding lines the enemy couldn’t cross. It proved Dr. Wise’s research correct.
Flynn paced the tree line, his jaw set, his expression tight.
Jasper stood at his brother’s shoulder, torn arm and all, having outrun the order that told him to stay in his Six-Mile sickbed.
For once in his life, he had nothing smartassed to say.
Thirty foxes zipped from one end of the boundary to the other.
“Runs five and six are down,” Flynn said, no preamble, his eyes never leaving the hill. “The deepest gallery answered. Beauregard’s got maybe two hundred souls behind the old warding, and Della’s holding the connector against whatever’s inside with six cats and no light.”
“What’s the connector?” I asked.
“The connector’s a hundred-yard-long darkened corridor, Logan. There are shadows in it, and my people can’t fight what they can’t see. That’s the problem. I can’t send anyone into that.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You won’t.”
Silver-white light flared out of me and spread over the ridge like early frost. Every shadowy gray smear on that hillside stopped moving at once, the way roaches freeze when the kitchen light comes on. The brighter my light, the farther away they moved.