Page 25 of Shifters Unifying

“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.”

CHAPTER NINE

logan

Shadows mages—that’s the only thing I knew to call them—zig-zagged across the ground, slowly expanding from two-dimensional stain on the earth to a three-dimensional spider-crawler. It raised up and writhed across the surface in jerky movements, hissing and cursing with words none of us understood.

Phil and Henry positioned themselves to take the one on the left, and Olivia and Theo readied themselves to take the one on the right.

“That’s the middle for me,” I said.

Olivia unzipped the top of her riding suit and drew two knives from the holder strapped across her chest. “One for each hand,” she sang in the tune of a popular bar song we’d probably heard back in Vixen’s. She grinned. “Now, how do we beat them?”

“Fuck if I know,” I grunted. “They’re closing fast.”

“Good thing you know what they are,” she said

“I’ve never seen them before.”

“Then how did you know?”

“It must be Acheron, so it must be mages. There’s no way he’d let shifters live around him. These are more like the mageswith the shifter blood on them. Maybe he raised their souls from the dead and turned them into a new kind of mage.”

“Sure,” she said, rocking from side to side. “Dead things reanimated with shifter energy. Just a normal day in the life…”

“Here we go,” I growled and launched myself toward the middle one, now the closest one, shifting and shedding clothes and shoes as I flew toward it.

I landed on four paws on the back of one of two-dimensional shadows as it turned into a three-dimensional crawler, more twisted and grotesque than anything we’d seen out of Acheron yet. Its legs widened until they were more like stumps as though it needed to stay in contact with the ground. Clawing at its solid back did nothing to slow its assault.

Its head turned on its neck and bent around backward, staring up at me with its transparent, eyeless skull as it crawled. It stopped short, flinging me off its back. A practiced tuck and roll brought me upright, and I charged the form again, sparing a glance for the shifters under my care.

The other mages had slammed into the legs of Olivia, Phil, Theo, and Henry and knocked them to the ground like bowling pins. They scrambled back to their feet and reformed in a cluster to take on the two now circling them.

Twisting back to my own attacker, my teeth sank into its back and grabbed hold of nothing but acrid smoke. I had been able to stand on its solid back before, now it was like biting a dark cloud. It still maintained as much contact with the earth as it could while remaining ephemeral. Though, it left a thick tar on my canines. Snarling, I spat the black ick on the ground.