It was good to be a shapeshifter.
Clotting my blood on command was one of the first skills my aunt had taught me, so I’d sealed the cuts and wounds, but the injuries were still there. My shoulders hurt, the flesh raw where the claws had pierced the muscle. Those claws hadn’t looked that clean. I’d pushed some blood out to purge the contamination, but I would need a visit to the medmage before some enterprising infection decided to make itself at home. My head hurt less than my shoulders, but I felt it.
The rest of our crew fared about as well. Keelan was hurt, but he stoically kept it to himself. Owen’s back had been sliced to ribbons. His wounds knitted themselves closed, but the muscle fibers would take longer to fix themselves, so right now his back looked strangely bumpy and uneven. We had to reset Troy’s broken arm on the spot, or it would heal badly and would need to be rebroken. Hakeem got the worst of it. His stomach was a mess, and Troy had chanted over him for a good twenty minutes, pushing the body into regeneration past the typical shapeshifter healing.
I glanced at Hakeem. He looked a little green, and he was walking in that slow deliberate way that meant every step was sending a fresh stab of pain through his body. A lacerated liver was a bitch.
The fight kept replaying in my mind, all thirty gory seconds of it. The shapeshifter’s momentum as she drove me back, the pressure against Sarrat as it pierced her heart, the fangs scraping my skull as she gnawed on my head, the hedgehog of my blood spikes in her mouth, her head falling off her shoulders, the power word, the mad dash of the pressurized five seconds, the slicing, the stabbing, the blood...
Ahead the trees thinned, hinting at the sunlit killing ground around Penderton.
I’d do it again. In a heartbeat. It had made me feel alive. More, it had made me feel…like myself.
I was a killer. Magic provided a barrier between me and the enemy. It insulated me from the visceral immediacy of direct violence, but in the end, I lived or died by my sword. I’d been taught to kill, encouraged to do it, praised when I did it well, and in the end, I liked it. It was in my nature, like breathing.
I’d all but given it up for the past seven years. I had focused on being a mother, on building a safe life, and now… Now I had some things to think about, and I wasn’t sure where I stood.
We cleared the tree line. I squinted against the sunlight.
The bell on the closest guard tower began to ring, striking a rapid, almost hysterical rhythm.
“Game faces on,” Curran said.
Everyone walked a little straighter. On my left, Jynx adjusted a collared shapeshifter’s body on her shoulders and raised her chin. This was our victory parade. The town didn’t need to know just how badly we got our asses kicked.
It wasn’t that Curran’s plan was bad or his tactics had been unsound. A team of four shapeshifters—one render, two renders-in-training, and one experienced alpha—should’ve cut their way through seven ordinary shapeshifters like they were butter, even without my or Curran’s help. It was just that the caliber of our enemy was far beyond what we expected and there was no way to know that until we fought them. Now we knew. We won but it was expensive. We’d need to adjust.
We kept walking.
The gates of Penderton swung out, and the first responders spilled into the open, two teams of three people each. Archers flooded the wall above the gate. The archers and the wall looked medieval, while the paramedics and EMTs looked decidedly modern in their reflective orange vests, and the contrast was jarring.
“Consort,” Hakeem said, his voice a little hoarse.
“Yes?” This was the first time he had called me Consort.
“Thank you.”
“No need. We’re a pack. You are one of ours, and you would do the same for me.”
He swallowed.
“Who are we?” Keelan asked.
“Wilmington Pack,” a chorus answered.
“Goddamn right we are.”
“Pack,” Curran said.
“Pack,” I answered with the rest of them.
Unity. Chosen family. There was strength in that.
We picked up the pace, falling into the familiar formation, Curran and I at the head, Keelan behind, and the rest of the shapeshifters forming a loose oval behind us. I remembered this from my time as the Consort. Ten years had passed, but some things left a lasting impression.
The first responders started toward us at a jog, and I caught the moment the leading team realized that we weren’t carrying our injured. The dark-haired medic in front braked and stopped, her face uncertain. She looked almost scared.
The same uncertainty spread from person to person, as if contagious. Bewilderment and surprise mixed with jittery nervousness.
This had never happened before. Nobody had ever gone into the woods and brought the bodies of the enemy out. The enemy was always invisible and invulnerable, watching and waiting. Now they were suddenly solid flesh. The residents of Penderton weren’t sure how to process it.
We reached them.
“I need full containment for seven bodies,” I told the leading medic. “Do you have loup cages?”
She blinked at me.
“Loup cages,” I repeated.
The medic’s brain restarted. “No loup cages, but we have cells. In the old prison.”
“That will work.” Magic was known to do all sorts of creative things to the dead bodies, but I’d never seen a shapeshifter survive decapitation. Even they had limits. Still, nobody ever regretted an abundance of caution when it came to magic’s ability to spawn weird crap.
“Lead the way,” Curran prompted.
“Follow me.” The medic strode down the street and we followed her, flanked by the EMTs and paramedics.
Heather, the wall guard captain, ran up to us.
“It will retaliate,” Curran told her. “Probably before the magic wave ends.”
“You might want to ease up on having your people walk the wall,” I added. “It will try to punish us, and the guards are an obvious target.”
Heather spun on her foot without a word and ran back the way she had come.
We walked down the street. People came out of their homes and businesses. They didn’t say anything. They just watched us go by with that same mix of excitement and apprehension on their faces.
The medic turned to look at us. “Can we help you in any way?”
“We’ll need food,” I said. “Meat. A lot of it. And we could use a coroner if you have one to help us examine the bodies. Our medmage has a broken left arm and regaining his dexterity will take some time.”
“My wife needs a medmage,” Curran said. “She will tell you that she is fine, and she doesn’t need help. She isn’t and she does.”
“You made your point,” I told him.
His eyes flashed gold. “I did. And I’m going to stand over you and watch you get treatment.”
As a married woman, I had learned that some fights weren’t worth fighting. “Your lack of trust is very disappointing.”
“I trust you with my life, not with yours,” my husband said.
I sat in a rocking chair on the top-floor balcony and sipped my iced tea. On my left, Owen rested on a blanket in the lotus pose. His eyes were closed. He said meditation helped him with the bison rage.
It was the golden hour, that magical sixty minutes before sunset when the light turned soft and warm, and the first hints of red and yellow tinted the sky. The world was beautiful, and the tree line at the end of the kill zone turned lovely enough to frame, the tall pines spreading their fluffy branches as if trying to hold on to sunlight.
We were overdue for the forest’s counterpunch. It would come. I had no doubt about it. The unseen force in the forest had ground Penderton under its heel for years, so long that it took compliance for granted. Now the town suddenly dared to fight back. It would try to stomp that resistance out, hard and fast, before hope took root.