21. Logan #2
“You’re sending me,” I said. “I’m the lamp. Build the rest of the plan around that.”
Flynn and Jasper shared a look and nodded.
The foreman who thought he was the smartest asshole on the crew built wrong and built tardy.
Delegation was the way to go. I’d known it for twenty years, and every day of Emma’s war had been teaching it to me again with the subtlety of a nail gun, so in opposition to my instincts as an alpha, I didn’t direct or command.
Instead, I reacted and managed the flow.
The ravens went up, and I didn’t tell them where to look.
They’d been reading the ground from the sky for hundreds of years.
Their spotter-calls poured in, and the warriors adjusted to what the birds saw.
They found the finger’s burrow line and discovered two entries the current maps missed.
They located the softest portion of the collapse.
The one place the slumped hill was loose fill instead of sheared clay.
The bears attacked the soft edge. Otis set his shoulders at the point of the wedge, and the hill succumbed to six sets of paws.
When the young bear’s rhythm faltered, I didn’t order him to steady.
I placed my hand on his back and sent a thread of light into it.
Otis breathed once, huge, and dug with renewed enthusiasm.
It was weird as fuck for me, but it reminded me of the shit Emma did as a healer.
Soon, the ground opened to reveal the mouth of the corridor and the darkness within. Without hesitation, I sent strands of light into the underground hall, in the middle of the corridor.
Ville Platte cats took the lead, and foxes brought up the rear. We advanced into the connector. The shadows in the tunnel peeled back from my light, screaming and hissing. They receded into the ground.
The cats did the rest. Their eyes worked where even fox pupils strained, and they killed by battle geometry and skill with attack angles.
In this skirmish, keeping the light steady was my job, and I matched my pace to theirs.
Above ground, the shadow creatures screamed as they were torn apart by teams of shifters.
We found Della in a spacious grotto at the far end, tucked just inside the old warding’s boundary, standing in front of two hundred people who cowered in the dark. Her voice had worn down to a rasp after hours of reassuring shifters and convincing them to wait for rescue.
Her eyes luminesced and widened in the light coming up the tunnel, and her jaw went slack. “What’s up with that?”
“I took a second job as a lamp,” I said, my hands spread wide. “Alpha life got boring.”
“Well, took y’all long enough,” she rasped, ignoring my sarcasm.
“Traffic,” I said, reusing an old joke.
Ville Platte’s second laughed.
Behind her, two hundred souls smiled in the illumination where there’d been dark for six hours, and the thankful sound they made was going to live in my memory for the rest of my life.
We brought them out into the morning. All the ones that could be moved.
One gap-toothed raccoon boy came up in Otis’s arms. The kid took one look at me glowing and informed the entire hillside, “The multimorph does it better.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” I told him.
The ravens laughed their harsh laughter overhead where nothing could reach them.
After we counted the survivors, we determined we’d lost four. Two fox wardens who’d held the outer runs long enough for the rest to fall back behind the old warding, and two of the older Ville Platte cats who’d passed in the corridor before we arrived. Four new names for Dr. Wise’s casualty list.
Fern crumpled in the churned dirt before the last of the shifters came out.
At least she’d stopped pretending she weighed nothing.
Flynn scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the healers’ staging area.
Nobody in Red Tail was ever going to call her Bear Trees’s fox again.
Two hundred and some walking out of the earth alive.
Emma arrived with the second wave of reinforcements and the last of the daylight. Her rainbow magic bled through the copse of trees before I saw her. She carried her healer’s bag, tearful eyes, and her palms already filled with multicolored healing. The wounded turned toward her.
While she worked, I stood in the wreck of Red Tail’s dens and finally understood she was the fire. Every soul in Louisiana gathered to her warmth, and Acheron would happily waste two worlds trying to put her out.
I’d spent weeks afraid I was becoming something or someone else. Watching Emma kneel in the dirt and channel magic for our people, with my light still hanging over the ridge so the dig teams could work through the dark, I mulled over who I had become and how everything about my life had changed.
I wasn’t becoming something else. I already was.
Now, my job as the anchor was to be the iron that steadied Emma’s fire.
The light that illuminated the night watch.
Not her equal, not her rival. The premonition Acheron had burned in my mind could go to hell.
Shadows couldn’t cross me, and I stood between Acheron and everything he wanted.
And her iron-man stood the night watch.
The blacksmith’s pages stopped a year earlier than his multimorph mate’s had, but mine weren’t written yet, and I intended to make it a helluva story for Dr. Wise’s journals. I went to speak to my mate.