Page 101 of Shifters Unifying
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 tellwhyhe was disgruntled. The reverse was probably also true. He could probably tell I was mad but not the reason. Orwhohad 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.
