Page 8 of Shifters Unifying (Shifters Destiny: Willow Creek Shifters #2)

CHAPTER EIGHT

logan

Six-Mile Manor

The Next Morning

My mate casts balefire…

The revelation pulsed through my head, and I fought to keep from replaying the last time I’d seen balefire. Acheron had been on the other end, and he’d used it to cut a hole through my chest. If not for Emma, I’d still be dead, unable to protect her.

Before sunrise, I stood on the porch of our headquarters, dressed in a t-shirt, tennis shoes, and gray sweats, surveying the acreage our pack owned.

Two work trucks with the Blackwood Construction logo on the doors were parked near the workout warehouse, probably still too early for those employees to be at their residential worksites.

I checked my phone for any business updates.

Finding none, I tucked it back into my pocket.

At least my construction company was a well-oiled machine.

It’d been a while since I’d been down to Vixen’s for Boss’s Buy Friday.

My cousin, Sheila, kept the tab open for my employees on Fridays, but I typically made a showing.

I’d need to rectify that as soon as possible, once I figured out what day of the week it was…

and after we sent Acheron to hell where he belonged.

As a people, we’d built so much here. Acheron threatened it all. Emma and Jasper had already left in the SUV, and I’d taken the opportunity to slap her ass as she climbed inside, and I wondered again if I should have followed them to Willow Creek.

One four-wheeler with a supply bag already waited on the circle drive in front of the sprawling, historical manor house, and the engine of the second one hummed in the distance.

Phil brought a larger one around from the storage building onto the circle drive in front of the historical house. He untethered a gas can and unscrewed the lid for the fuel tank.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll top ‘em off. You can get on with your normal duties.”

“We’ll be meeting you at Acheron’s encampment once we complete our patrol.” Phil grinned at me. “Glad to see you’re in a better mood now, Alpha.”

I chuckled. “Better mood than when I bested you and your workout buddy?”

“That would be the mood I meant,” he said. “None of us like to see you hurting or lonely, sir.”

“I appreciate the sentiment.”

Phil loped away without another word.

Olivia strolled out of the house, dressed in protective gear. She held a helmet under her arm, and she nodded to me. “Is that all you’re wearing?”

“Nothing is an option,” I said. “I’m a shifter, and a quick-heal is always an option. Why are you going all out?”

“Felt like it,” she said. “Besides, wearing more clothes means I have more pockets which means more weapons.” She turned toward me to show the hilt of three knives tucked into her riding suit.

I poured fuel into both tanks and placed the fuel can on the ground near the front steps. Either Phil would find it and return it to its place, and I’d take care of it when we got back from the dark magic encampment. Then I took my seat on the larger of the two four-wheelers.

“You okay?” she asked, settling on her four-wheeler.

A part of me wanted to bite Olivia’s head off. She shouldn’t have separated fated mates, especially her alpha’s, and she should have hell to pay for it.

“I’m not ready to talk about it.” Maybe I wasn’t as pissed as all that, but I wasn’t ready for her to know my grudge would be short-lived.

“Oh, stop pouting about it,” she said. “She’s the prophesied unifier of all the clans, so you have to expect her to be needed elsewhere sometimes.

Besides, I could use a break from keeping tabs on you two.

You’re pretty obnoxious as a couple right now, so stop whining and act like an alpha. Not a lovesick puppy.”

“We’re supposed to be obnoxious,” I said, starting my four-wheeler and revving the engine. “Besides, you did not ask for my input before you made a decision,” I began. “That is inappropriate.”

“I already knew your answer, so I didn’t ask. What’s that saying you like? ‘Better to ask forgiveness than permission.’” She started her four-wheeler.

“I think you’re the only one who likes that saying,” I growled.

“Well, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, and while it might work on Emma, we can’t use your dick to catch this one.”

“You should not have sent my mate with Jasper.”

“Jasper won’t do anything; he’s already proven that. If he’d wanted to try anything with her, he would have done it while he was training her back in Red Tail, and at the moment, he’s the only one around we can trust.”

Of course, she was right, but it was harder to get over it than I cared to admit. The conscious part of my brain understood that the bonding hormones had mostly short-circuited everything going on in my head, but the horny subconscious wanted to be pissed whether it was reasonable or not.

“He is a good mate for you, you know,” I commented. “He’s smitten with you.”

Her head whipped toward me. “What?”

“Jasper. He is a good mate for you.”

Without answering, she glared, dropped her helmet over her head, and launched her four-wheeler forward so aggressively she nearly tossed herself off the rear of it.

My canary-eating grin stretched ear to ear as I followed, and it didn’t fade for the duration of the ride to Acheron’s secret camp.

But the smile slid from my face as we approached the exposed encampment, now lit by the rising sun. It resembled a shantytown, made up of tents and hastily constructed buildings, made of flimsy wooden panels, built directly on the ground. The putrid rot of dark magic permeated the air.

When Olivia removed her helmet, her nose wrinkled. “Do you smell that?”

“Can’t miss it.”

“So, how did we miss this? All of the territories are on high-alert, and this is close enough that we should have picked it up during our patrols.”

“He had to be close to Emma, and he knows how to hide.”

She let out a low whistle. “Acheron must have retreated here once he’d been thrown out of his bunker. If we missed this, where has he gone now? Closer to her? If we can’t see him, how are we going to locate him with the normal patrols?”

We climbed from our four-wheelers, and dead leaves crunched beneath my tennis shoes.

More and louder than usual. I crouched to retrieve a handful of the dirt and lifted it to my nose.

After a deep breath, I recoiled at the stench of death, rapidly identifying the reason.

Bits of shredded bone littered the usual autumn tree shed.

Fuck.

Olivia jogged closer. “What is it?”

“Probably shifters.”

“What?” She dropped to her knees, sank her hands into the earth, and brought her own handful up to examine. As she studied it, her shoulders sank lower and lower. “Oh, my god,” she rasped, her voice strangled. “How many?”

“Enough to mulch the forest.”

“How long has he been doing this? Right beneath our noses.”

I didn’t have an answer. Acheron’s hatred knew no bounds. Our kind was only a means to an end for him, and he used us like a commodity, absorbing the magic in the cells of those he captured. He’d tried to do it to Emma, but she’d stopped him.

The low hum of approaching four-wheelers was at odds with the natural twittering of morning songbirds. Sunbeams sliced through bloody red clouds. My inner wolf snarled and snapped at the edges of my consciousness.

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.

If Acheron had his way, he’d consume us all and move on to conquer the human realm, too. It wasn’t just our way of life at stake, the whole world depended on us to stop him—depended on Emma to stop him.

Me… Emma… Our lives together…

Nothing else mattered more than ending him.

And I despised Acheron for it, hated him for it.

My heart clenched in my chest. I’d already failed to save Emma during our last encounter with the dark mage himself. Another confrontation would be inevitable. Would the same thing happen again? Who would protect her then? Torbin? Marcus?

I whirled on Olivia. “Drones.”

She frowned. “Drones?”

“Call Jace, he’s the subcontractor we use when we need a detailed scan of any worksite. See if he can set his drones up to make low-flying pass over all of Six-Mile. Maybe there’s something we can pick up. Ask him if he can trace heat signatures. If he can’t, find me someone who can.”

“Won’t be cheap.”

“Do you think I care?” I snapped.

Her mouth pressed into a tight line, a maroon slash across her face.

Phil arrived on four-wheelers with two more bodyguard shifters in tow. Henry and Theo had been a part of Six-Mile for at least a decade each.

Olivia straightened. “You three cover the grounds, use a search grid, be thorough. Check for anything, everything that might point us in the right direction. We have to figure out where’s he’s gone.”

They shifted into their wolf selves and peeled off. Their paws would make quick work of the area.

She pulled her phone from one of her pockets, knocking a knife to the ground. With one hand, she scooped it up and with the other, she scrolled on her screen. Her eyes lit up, and she tapped the screen before pressing the cell to her ear.

“Yeah, is this Jace?” she asked a moment later, walking back to her four-wheeler and leaning against it. She started working out the details for the drone scan of Six-Mile.

While she worked out the details of the drone scan of Six-Mile, I made my way into the center of the collection of throw-away buildings. My skin prickled and set off my inner wolf again. How many mages had he convinced to live in near poverty while he captured shifters and absorbed them?

A dark spot on the ground caught my eye, and I approached it cautiously.

It resembled an animal borrow. As I leaned over it, the edge crumbled inward, revealing a tunnel down into the ground, much like the entrances into the Red Tail underground dens.

A wooden frame supported the entrance—much like the entrance to an old mine.

The cross member had been marked by a rune I didn’t recognize.

Another kick at the earth exposed the dugout entrance more fully and made it large enough for a man to descend.

When I stepped down, my heel settled on a piece of obscured wood, serving as the riser for a dirt staircase.

Using my toe, I brushed the dirt from it.

Another rune had been carved into the strip.

Three more steps brought me body-deep into the den, leaving only my head visible to anyone on the surface.

After another glance around, I ducked down and descended into the darkness.

The light on my phone illuminated the interior of the tunnel and the small, cube-shaped room beyond.

It was about ten feet tall, ten feet wide, and ten feet long.

A rough-hewn, empty table rested in the center of the room with Acheron’s Iron Maiden contraption next to it.

My stomach twisted. It was the same setup he’d had back in his bunker.

At least some of the dark smears on the side of the Iron Maiden were residual from Riley’s torture inside.

I laid my hand on the metal and shuddered.

Outside, Olivia shouted my name. She sounded like she was running, probably concerned I’d disappeared. “Logan,” she called, closing the distance between her four-wheeler and the underground workspace. “So help me…”

“Down here,” I yelled back. “I’m fine.” To answer your next question.

A shadow blocked the little light, and Olivia’s scent filtered down the stairs.

“What’d you find?” she asked as she hurried down the stair with her own cell lighting her way. She gasped.

“Oh, shit. That’s…”

“Yeah,” I said. “He set up another one.”

“Anything down here?”

“Haven’t checked yet.”

“I’ll help,” she said.

After a thorough search, we found nothing, but a series of runes written into the walls.

Neither of us recognized them. Runes had been etched into the trees at the last gathering place and used in magic trap.

Maybe these were used in another Acheron spell.

They hadn’t reacted to our arrival, so maybe that meant they weren’t activated.

When we returned to the surface, a grim Phil had returned. Henry and Theo both sat on the ground, each one ashen. Somebody had thrown up.

“Where did you two get off to?” he asked.

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “Hidden workroom. You find anything?”

He shook his head. “Nothing but the stench and piles of contorted bones. Evidence of some gnarly torture.”

“Logan, look out,” Olivia cried. “We must have triggered something when we were in the dugout. They’re coming this way.”

I spun around. In the distance, three oily shadows slithered over the ground toward us. “Stay alive, Phil. You, too, Henry and Theo,” I roared. “We need every single one of you for our future. Give ‘em hell, Olivia.”

“And you don’t make me tell Emma you’re dead again,” Olivia yelled back. She settled into a fighter’s crouch and braced for the onslaught.

“What are they?” Phil called in a shaky voice.

“Shadow mages.”