23. Logan
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
logan
Six-Mile
Two Days Later
Icouldn’t build a house to hold twice the people it was framed for. I’d spent twenty years telling clients exactly that in exactly those words, right before they asked me to do it anyway.
Six-Mile had been framed for a pack. By the time the survivors arrived, my compound held hundreds of warriors, a few hundred civilians, and now, the wounded remains of two clans who’d learned the hard way that warded ground only held until Acheron reached deeper than the map said he could.
So, we did the thing we did when the framing wouldn’t stretch. We overloaded it and prayed the joists held. Then I searched for Emma in our link. Her heart hadn’t come back.
We were three to a bed again, with four to a bed closing fast. The infirmary was now standing room only, cots wedged so close a healer had to heal from the head, and the tiny homes I’d been so proud of, turnkey and one-of-a-kind, had blown right past their design load.
Emma’s rule was a memory now. We housed frightened people wherever there was a floor.
I told them all we would sort out clan diplomacy later, if there was a later. Though, I kept the last part to myself.
Which was how I ended up refereeing a bathroom while trying to drink my coffee.
Emma?
She didn’t answer. Forty-eight hours of her not answering. She was pulling away from me, and it terrified me. I took a sip of java and attempted to focus on the bird in front of me.
“The raccoon fills the sink with gravel,” the raven said in the mess hall, arms folded, with the offended dignity only a raven can manage. “Every morning. And then he stands guard over it.”
“It’s a settling bed,” said a bear who could have worn the raven as a hat. “For the water. Your kind wouldn’t understand hydrology.”
“You each get a third of a bathroom,” I said. “Work it out like adults, or I’ll assign mediation to another bear.”
I’d meant it as a threat. The universe, which has a sense of humor I’d never appreciated, had somehow heard a suggestion. Now there was, in fact, going to be another bear in the bathroom that a raven, a raccoon, and a bear already shared.
Against every law of nature I knew, our fragile peace was holding. Barely. With spite, gravel, and the truce my own bad joke had accidentally built.
“He can keep the settling bed,” I told the raven. “You get the towel rack. Done. Next.”
There was always a next.
Near suppertime, I was at the front of a line of nexts that stretched out the door and around the mess hall, acting as the headmaster of the worst boarding school in Louisiana.
Bunk disputes. Ration math. A squirrel who’d climbed into the rafters of the new mess hall and declined, philosophically, to come down.
Phil grilling on a schedule that never stopped.
Eating kept the fear sated so it didn’t turn into panic.
Panic would have destroyed what we had, and I was not going to let this camp fall apart days from a war.
“I’ve got to go do something useful. My office is closed,” I barked. Then I stood, knocked my folding chair to the ground behind me, and marched away from the long line of disgruntled shifters with problems. Emma?
Nothing. Fucking nothing came back. Dread didn’t cover the half of it.
So, I did what I did with fear. I painted squares for two more rows of tiny homes I didn’t have time to place.
I trenched drainage against a winter that was coming whether or not the monster did, and I stood in the cold with a can of marking paint to let the work quiet the wolf panic over what had happened to my fated mate.
The bond had a damn gap in it. That was the only way I’d found to say it.
Emma had come back from the Red Tail changed. Not hurt. I’d have felt hurt. She’d come back quiet. She’d come back with a closed door between us, a warm room gone suddenly dark, and every time I reached for her the way I’d reached ten thousand times, I found nothing.
She was still there. I could feel the essence of her on the other side of the gap, but a wall blocked our link. Fuuuuuck. My mate had never once willfully closed a door on me.
At one time, she’d made me promise to never close her out, and now she was standing on the other side of a door she’d built, and she wouldn’t tell me why, and I was losing my mind one polite, unbearable inch at a time.
The sun set red, and I spotted my beta moving across the crowded complex. “Olivia!” I bellowed.
A few minutes later, she appeared with a clipboard. “Yes?”
“Walk with me.”
“To where?”
“The fence line.”
“Are you going to be this much joy the whole way?”
“Probably.”
“You’re practically grinding your teeth,” Olivia said.
“Wouldn’t you?”
She waved her arm wide. “With all of this to manage? Of course.” Her gaze narrowed. “Oh, wait. I have been managing it.”
I wanted to rip her a new one. Instead, I didn’t answer.
“Should we walk the fence line now or after you punch someone?” she asked.
“Now,” I snapped.
We made our way to the fence line, counting heads that wouldn’t stay counted, and making plans to absorb more refugees. Olivia asked questions and took notes.
“Dammit, Logan. You’ll crack a molar, and then I’ll have to explain to your mate why the alpha of Six-Mile is eating soup until New Year’s. You know, I bet they don’t let you eat pussy after you crack a molar.”
I blinked. “What?” Then what she’d actually said registered in my preoccupied brain, and I chuckled. “Not being able to eat Emma’s pussy would be a problem.”
“Yeah, well, you’re grinding your teeth again. Every answer you’ve got is practically a grunt.”
I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath. “She’s hiding something.”
Olivia’s pen stopped. “From you?”
“From me.” The admission tasted like rust. “Since she came back from Red Tail. There’s a…” I didn’t want to explain it. “There’s a wall. In the bond. She put it there on purpose, and she won’t tell me what it’s for, and every time I ask, she looks at me like…”
Like it’s costing her more than it’s costing me. Like she’d rather cut off her own hand.
“Like she’s sorry, but she doesn’t relent,” I said.
Olivia remained quiet a long moment, watching a group of Ville Platte cats teach a Six-Mile youngling to stalk an enemy.
“Whatever it is,” she said carefully, “she’s carrying it, so you don’t have to.
That’s the only reason your mate ever carries anything alone.
” She started walking again. “You want to help her? Stop trying to pick the lock. Hold the field so she has somewhere to come home to.”
Good advice, but it was the kind a beta gave the alpha, and the kind the alpha, being an alphahole, could not take.
The strategy meeting was supposed to be about tactics.
We had packed into my study the night before the Beaver Moon, elbow to elbow.
Olivia at my shoulder. Jasper by the window, his beard tied down, no twinkle in him.
Torbin filled a corner like a mountain that had decided to sit.
Flynn, still gray around the eyes from digging his own foxes out of the ground.
Marcus sat in the good chair, his blind face aimed at the map he couldn’t see, Della planted behind him.
Garrick and his northern wolves. The raven speaker.
Dr. Wise with her satchel and her spectacles and her terrible calm.
My mate on the far side of the desk, her arms crossed, the closed wall between us like a live land mine.
Whispered conversations buzzed in the room, but I focused on the current alpha of the Ville Platte cats.
The big cats seemed hesitant to march into an army training facility to drag their alpha back to their territory for an inquisition, and overthrowing an alpha wasn’t supposed to happen on a rival clan’s land.
It probably helped that Marcus seemed to be favored by the multimorph. That had been shrewd of Emma.
“They’re calling for your resignation,” Della murmured to Marcus.
“We’ll deal with that after the full moon,” Marcus answered. “What’s a few more days?”
Della cursed under her breath, but she didn’t argue.
Olivia glanced at me, and I gave her a small nod of approval.
Then she cleared her throat. “My update isn’t encouraging.
The Void line is four days closer. The attacker counts are still climbing.
The rituals Jasper and our alpha had watched, chewing at the seam of the world in shifts…
those things are all still true. Acheron’s army stops every night to feed, and it will arrive, if its pace holds, on the Beaver Moon.
On the night of the planned feast. Any questions? ”
“We know of the ruined feast already,” the raven speaker announced.
“What is the plan?” Garrick asked.
“We’re no longer waiting for them to get here,” I answered.
“We hit the engine before it finishes the work. I’ve seen it…
We both have.” I gestured to Jasper, who nodded grimly.
“Many mages, rows of them, their heads down and blind while they carve. Every night, we assume it’s a stand-down.
That’s the window. Squirrels cut their lines, bears break the shell, cats and wolves into the seam, and we shatter the thing that’s been slowing him down and speeding him up at the same time.
We take the fight to him while he’s got his hands full of the Veil. ”
“And walk a hundred green warriors into dead country that grows his soldiers out of the dirt,” Emma said as her side of our connection withdrew behind her side of the wall. “Where the tree runes make his army.”
“We walked nine out and brought nine home. Those are good odds.” I despised that Acheron had wedged his way between us. It must have been him.