Page 38 of Shifters Unifying (Shifters Destiny: Willow Creek Shifters #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

emma

On the border of Bear Trees

When you get back to Six-Mile…

Logan had gone to direct shifters back to Six-Mile by way of Bear Trees, but his words echoed in my head. Rubbing my temples and squeezing the bridge of my nose didn’t alleviate the headache beginning to form.

With a nod my direction, Torbin lumbered by.

An uninjured Salali sped from place to place, speaking to a dozen people in the time it took Torbin to cross the battleground.

Phil was still alive. Olivia and Jasper, too.

I didn’t spot the younglings, but I hoped someone had the sense to send them back to Six-Mile, away from the fighting.

I spun in place, searching the other faces, and each injury took a notch out of my heart and threatened to buckle my knees.

I did this to them. We rushed in with no plan, no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

The multimorph should be more skilled in the art of warfare than that.

I should be much better than that. I still had so much to learn.

Fuck. Acheron had put on one hell of a show. Our enemy meant to break me, that was what Logan said, because Acheron was frightened of me. I’m not sure I bought all that, but it gave me a little hope, and a little hope would have to carry me the rest of the way.

My mate wasn’t going to be happy when he figured out that my intention hadn’t been to go back to Six-Mile immediately. No, we needed the relic, and we needed it now. Acheron’s theatrics had made that incredibly clear. Logan was going to be livid I didn’t regroup with everyone back at the manor.

Dealing with the fact that Acheron might have—probably had—my birth mother and forced her to attack her own brother wasn’t something I could process right now.

Maybe her actions had been to save her son, maybe they had been because she wasn’t really Marcus’s sister anymore.

Either way, none of it mattered… I had to find Marcus, and we had to flee, but my alleged uncle had disappeared from the creek bed.

Searching the growing crowd of injured shifters was taking too long, so I caught the arm of a lumbering passer-by I didn’t recognize. “Have you seen Marcus Steele?”

He spun around, his right eye flashing, his left eyeball bloodied and bulging so far out of the eye socket that he couldn’t close his eyelids over it. Cuts covered the left side of his face, with bruising so bad it looked like blood blisters.

“Is that a fucking joke?” he snapped.

“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.” I released his arm as though it was a hot fire poker. “No, wait, I can help you. May I?”

He gestured to his mangled eye. “You think you can help? You a healer?”

“Yeah.” I placed my hands on his shoulders, staring intently at the visibly wounded parts of his face. Gently, I delved in the inexperienced, clumsy way I could, shocked to find broken ribs, wrist, and femur on the other side of his body.

Healing… healing…

In my head, I pictured the bones around his eye and the cells inside knitting back together, being made whole again. Then I turned my attention to his ribs, wrist, and femur. A rainbow cloud formed around him, and he gasped, choking on the impact.

“Shit, that’s a lot… of that,” he muttered. “Who… the… hell… are… you?”

I lowered my hands, pleased that his eye had returned to its socket, and the bruising on his face only looked slightly yellow. “I am the multimorph.”

He dropped to his knees on the ground beside me. “Multimorph, I had no idea.”

“Why would you? We’ve not been introduced.” I hooked my arm through his and tugged him to her feet. “Don’t do that. What’s your name?”

“Homer Jones.”

“Well, Homer, I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Emma. Do you know Marcus Steele?”

His expression turned guarded, as though I had asked a trick question. “Yeah, I’ve met him a time or two. What of it.”

“Well, if you see him, tell him I’m looking for him.”

He dropped his head and half-bowed. “Yes, multimorph.”

I hurried away before the exchange became more awkward than it already had. Healing everybody would exhaust me before our trip to the cave, so I continued my search without helping.

Soon, I spotted Marcus, standing a little way away, pale and shellshocked, staring at the place his sister had been lifted into the air and commanded to attack him.

“Marcus,” I yelled. “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here. Without the deer piss.”

Somewhere in Louisiana

“You’re telling me you’re not sure which way to go?” Unbelievable.

Marcus shook his head and shoved his hand through his sandy brown hair. “The terrain seems different than I recall… somehow.”

“You can’t be serious.” I waved my arms. Shit. “What’s wrong with you? That’s the whole reason you’re here, Marcus. You have got to focus.”

He stared at something in the distance, something I couldn’t see. “It’s like my brain isn’t altogether or there’s something I’m trying to remember. Something important. It’s pulling at me, like my memories are being sifted. It’s unsettling…”

“Do you have any idea what it is?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he frowned at the half-closed gashes in his skin. Blood dribbled from the largest one on his forearm. I’d never seen him look so uncertain. Normally, he was well-dressed, put together, and wholly in control alphahole.

For two hours, we’d been running west. Once we left Bear Trees, we shifted from our human forms to our animal forms and back again on and off, to discuss our journey.

Despite the shifter magic, Marcus hadn’t yet been able to heal completely.

Maybe it was unfair of me, but my frustration with him had been increasing for nearly as long as we had been traveling.

“Let me see if I can help,” I said, reaching for him. “It might be as simple as suffering the shock of seeing your sister or maybe I can heal you.”

He shied away. “Do you think that’s a good idea? If anybody’s following us, they’ll sense the healing. Like I did when you healed that damn cat in your office.”

My mouth twisted into a weak smile. “Sully-Boy,” I murmured, watching a hawk circle lazily overhead. Could be an enemy or it could be a bird of prey looking for a meal. “That’s been a lifetime ago.”

Marcus glanced over his shoulder, flinching when he caught sight of the raptor, but he didn’t take his eyes from it. “It’s bad enough that we’re shifting as much as we are.”

“Hold still.” I took a step and caught his arm while he was distracted, sending small tendrils of magic into him, examining him to determine what might be keeping his injuries from healing.

Instead of normal shifter cells, the cells around his wounds seemed necrotic, as though each piece of him had been killed while still attached to his body, leaving a ring of death around each wound.

When I released him, he shot me a dark look. “Well, multimorph? What’s the prognosis?”

“You won’t heal completely until the dead cells are removed. If I had a nurse and we had the time, I’d prescribe debridement.”

“You’re not my doctor, so I’ll take it under advisement,” he said. “And I’ll get a second opinion if our trip doesn’t manage to kill us.”

“Well, I’m a vet, and I’m here. That makes me enough of a doctor for you.”

“Touché.” He crossed his arms and stuck a nonchalant pose, reminiscent of the old Marcus. “Are we going to talk about my sister? Maybe that you might be my niece?”

“No.”

His expression hardened, but he ducked his head. “As you wish.”

Logan was too far away to sense much more than his own irritation through our bond.

At this distance, I couldn’t tell why he was disgruntled.

The reverse was probably also true. He could probably tell I was mad but not the reason.

Or who had pissed me off. Maybe he wouldn’t haul off and leave Six-Mile to fend for itself.

Marcus sighed. He gestured blandly in the way we’d been going. “It’s this way. Do you smell that?”

I took a deep breath and sniffed at the air using my shifter sense. “I don’t smell anything out of the ordinary.”

“Just me then. Figures.”

“Figures,” I agreed, but I glanced over my shoulder, feeling abruptly like we were being watched. A shiver tripped up my spine. The trees might not have eyes, but hundreds of creatures lived in them. Any of those might be shifters working for Acheron.

Marcus summoned his shift, and I joined him, this time choosing a cheetah form, and we resumed our sprint.

Three hours later, we crested a ridge line, and Marcus stopped on the summit, contorted, and shifted back to his human self. “It’s around here.” He halted. “But we’re not the only shifters who have been here.”

I stepped from cheetah form into human form, ignoring the gnawing in my stomach. How long had it been since I’d eaten? “Can you tell how old the scents are?”

His gaze narrowed. “You don’t know how to tell?”

“Other than they exist? No. Scent training hasn’t been high on my priority list. It’s not like I need to know how old smells are when Acheron is standing right in front of me.”

“They’ve crisscrossed here as recently as this morning,” he offered, quietly crossing toward the edge of the rise. “But their trail is different…. Uglier somehow.”

I dropped into my wolf form and sniffed at the air. Not uglier… Deathier. Like the dead cells at the edges of his wounds. Shit. That meant… I whined. But Marcus couldn’t understand me unless I spoke the words, so I shifted back to my human form. “It’s—”

A rotting log flew through the air and slammed into the back of Marcus’s unsuspecting head. He grunted and dropped to the ground, lying still. His wounds had broken open again, and blood dripped onto the ground. They’d tracked us. Whatever his sister had done, they’d found us.

Fury burned through me, and I shifted, faster than I ever had before. As a bear, I barreled toward him and spun toward the direction the log had come from, snarling and snapping. Growling shadows ran back and forth in the underbrush, but I couldn’t tell how many were coming.

Beside me, Marcus’s face pressed into the ground, and I dug the earth out from around his nose. His breath warmed my paw, and his torso rose and fell.

Not dead. Thank god.

A look over the edge of the rise exposed the sheer, two-story drop to the ground in front of what resembled an opening in the earthen wall below us.

I stood up on my rear paws and roared. Another log, larger than the first, angled toward us, and I batted it away, exploding bits of decomposing wood and bark over the both of us.

A boulder sailed toward us, and my punch only adjusted its trajectory. It landed with a thud beside Marcus’s head. The shadow shifters inched closer, running back and forth, unrelenting fluid shapes, toying with us.

The crush of underbrush from the other side of the ridge warned that we were being surrounded, and I couldn’t defend more than one direction, not alone, even as the multimorph. Shit. I had to get down to the cave before our attackers could get inside it.

The stench of death filled my nostrils, and I pulled at a flood of wind and magic. If I could link with Marcus, I might be able to save us both, even surrounded. But he was unconscious. No shifter could hold onto their energy while they were dazed or inert.

A shadow raised out of the ground, eyes glowing and reaching toward us. Three more coalesced behind the first. They clapped their hands together and a concussive blast nearly pushed me off the ridge.

The distance down was too far to toss Marcus over the edge, not without killing him or knowing what bones the attack on him had broken. He might have cracked vertebrae in his neck. No way I was risking that without delving him first.

I had to be something big to be able to heft Marcus. Flying wasn’t an option, and jumping as a human would kills us both, if I would even be able to lift him.

We were out of time.

The magic in me had to be enough to keep my legs from being crushed by the fall. So, I knocked another flying rock aside, scooped Marcus into my furred arms…

…and stepped off the cliff.