25. Logan
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
logan
Six-Mile
The Morning After the Beaver Moon
Iwoke in my desk chair with a crick in my neck.
The note had been propped against Torbin’s doily. Two lines. That was all she’d left me. Two lines and a closed door.
There will always be an after. Trust me, love.
I read it four times before my brain caught up to what my gut had known the second my eyes had opened. The study was cold, and the house was too quiet. In the bond, there was only that blasted wall, but it moved now, receding south. Alive, but gone.
You’ve got to be kidding me, Emma. Shit. What had she done?
Roaring wasn’t an option. Later, Olivia would want to tell people I’d taken it “like an alpha,” which was a lie we could both let stand, so I sat in my chair and held a piece of paper with only two lines as a vow and a farewell.
Trust me, love.
My mate had outengineered me in my own study. God, I love her.
“Logan.” Olivia stood in the doorway, grim-faced. Her gaze dropped to the note in my hand. “Jasper’s gone too. And the historian.” She crossed her arms. “She took my fox, Logan.”
“She took the only three people in Louisiana he’s never really touched,” I said.
Hearing it out loud, I finally understood it.
Not a betrayal. A blueprint. “Jasper ran the Void but came out clean. Dr. Wise knows it all but has never been within a hundred miles of the bastard. And Emma…” I placed the note on the doily, carefully, as though it might disappear.
“Emma’s the gate to victory. Wherever that path goes, it must open only for her, and she can’t take anybody he can reach.
” I met my beta’s eyes. “Which is everybody else. You. Me. Marcus. The whole camp.”
Olivia remained quiet for a long moment, her chin quivering. Then she boxed up her own grief, straightened her features, and nodded. “So, what do we do?”
“The only thing she left us room to do.” I stood, and my neck screamed.
The scar in my chest ached, low and steady, which meant Acheron’s work was close and getting closer.
“We hold. We make sure there’s a Six-Mile standing when she comes back.
” I picked up Jasper’s brass bell off the desk, where it had sat since a bayou at the end of the world, and closed my fist around it.
“Get the leaders in the study, and, Olivia…”
She paused at the door.
I continued, “Frame it however you must. The multimorph is running a mission only she can run, and she’ll be back before the Cold Moon. Say it like you believe it.”
“I do believe it… I have to,” she said, and then she left to go lie beautifully to warriors who needed it.
After gritting my teeth and punching the air, I made my way outside the manor for a sitrep.
The horde had pulled back to the forest, exactly where Emma’s rainbow detonation had thrown it, and it waited there now in the gray daylight like a tide deciding whether to come back in.
It probed. All morning, fingers of it peeled off the mass and tested our fence. A rush here, a feint there, three shadow-shapes rising out of the frosty grasses inside our own south pasture before the bears put them down.
Each test cost us. A cat with her chest laid open. A young wolf from the northern packs who wouldn’t drill with anybody again. Two more names for a list that didn’t have a keeper anymore because the woman who repeated it every night was somewhere south of all of us, running toward her destiny.
And above it all, the seam in the sky held.
Barely. Emma’s stubborn patch strained across the wound in the world and leaked murky light down over a camp that was realizing the reinforcement was a bandage and not a cure.
At least the relics in the trove had stopped screaming.
Now they just moaned like a house caught in a windstorm settling on a bad foundation.
I wore determination like a coat of armor and went to work, walking the fence, examining the gate, and checking the blockades.
Then I reset the watch in mixed squads the way Emma had drilled them, with squirrels up high, bears on the line, cats and foxes in the gaps.
I was careful to say her name while I did it, her drills, her plan, her camp, so that every frightened warrior understood the multimorph hadn’t abandoned them.
No, she’d gone to win the war a different way and left them the alpha of Six-Mile to keep them safe. We would hold.
But half of holding a line was believing it was held. The other half was not letting them find out I was afraid.
At noon, Garrick found me in the mess hall with the raven speaker at his elbow and sixty warriors arranged behind him in the loose geometry of a challenge.
Northern packs, mostly. A few minor alphas who’d been muttering since the exchange program and now had a moon-shaped hole in their courage where the multimorph used to stand.
“Where is she?” Garrick demanded.
“Running a mission only she can run.” I kept my face and my tone relaxed. “She’ll be back before the Cold Moon.”
“Convenient.” The raven speaker’s rasp slid into the word. “The multimorph vanishes in the dark, and we’re to hold a bleeding line on her word passed to us by her mate.”
Garrick’s black eyes cut across the yard. “And while we bleed, there’s a Steele walking at the front of that horde. We all heard Olivia’s report. There’s another Steele sleeping inside our warding, eating our food, and sitting in the councils of a fortress he could sell out in a single night.”
There it was, the rot I’d smelled coming since the fence.
Loitering shifters moved closer, collecting around us.
“Marcus Steele has fought Acheron from the inside,” I said. “He gave us the trail south. His clan is holding the eastern watch right now, while you stand here talking.”
“His clan?” Garrick stepped closer. “His sister is the enemy’s compass, Blackwood.
His blood leads their army. He waited in your study for weeks and never once mentioned his sister.
You call that ‘fought from the inside.’ I call him a spy who hasn’t been given his orders yet.
” He turned, playing to the crowd, and they were listening.
“Detain him. Keep him warded and watched until the multimorph deigns to return. Any alliance that won’t stand true is already broken. ”
Behind me, Ville Platte yowled, offended by the charges of treachery. Their private clan affairs weren’t Garrick’s business. Clans managed themselves. It was a universal shifter truth.
Della had silently materialized beside us, and the cats came with her.
Their blind alpha rested in a camping chair at the edge of the clearing we stood in, put on trial by wolves in front of the whole army.
If I detained the cat alpha on suspicion, his people wouldn’t file a grievance.
His clan would leave. If Ville Platte walked, the eastern side of my perimeter opened up…
with my mate gone, the horde already nearby, and the Veil groaning overhead.
Sixty warriors lifted their chins, smelling for weakness, a dozen cats deciding whether they were still allies or already gone. The one authority who could have ended it with four little words was miles south and getting farther.
The job was mine now, the whole damned job of standing in the middle.
“Nobody detains anybody in my camp on a smell.” I swept the yard the way I had at orientation, back when the worst thing coming was a raccoon with a menu.
My glare bought me quiet, but it didn’t buy me agreement. The crowd was on the fence. Della’s cats were deciding, and the fragile miracle Emma had built hung in the balance.
Marcus stood up, one hand on the arm of the camping chair. He drew himself straight and then released the backrest. He aimed his damaged eyes at nothing and tipped his chin. He looked proud, and it appeared he had finally decided to stop being careful.
“Enough,” he said. The word wasn’t loud, but it didn’t need to be.
Ville Platte went still, and the griping wolves quieted enough to hear him.
His mouth contorted in a grimace. “Alpha Garrick is right about one thing. I’ve been lying to all of you.
” He turned his face toward the sound of the crowd, giving each quarter of it its due.
“By omission, which is the coward’s way.
I’ll stop now. You’ve earned the truth, and the multimorph isn’t here to forbid me telling it. ”
“Marcus.” Della warned and pleaded with that one word.
“It’s all right,” he assured her.
It wasn’t, and we all knew it.
Yet he faced the yard. “My sister is at the fore of Acheron’s horde.
That much is true, and you’re right to be afraid.
” He took a breath. “What I haven’t told you is that she’s also in my head.
At the creek, when Acheron paraded her in front of us, she created a mind-link, and she didn’t let go.
It cost me my eyes at the cave. It should have cost me my mind.
” He bared his teeth. “Some nights, I think it did because she is still there, every hour, whispering with Acheron behind her, using her, warping her, the way he does with everything. I’ve spent every day since learning to tell which whispers are his and which ones are hers, fighting up through his filth to tell me something true. ”
The assembled shifters didn’t breathe.
“You want to know why I’ve been quiet?” His blind gaze landed on me.
“Because a man with the enemy’s voice in his skull does not get believed.
He gets exactly this.” He gestured around himself.
“He gets a circle and a verdict, so I’ve checked her whispers, alone, in the dark, against what I could prove, and some of them, Alpha Garrick, some of them have been true.
She warned me they’d come north. They came.
She told me the shape of his army. It held.
And she has told me one thing more, over and over, so hard it wakes me.
There’s a seam, a blind hour in his defenses. ”
My pulse pounded in my ears.