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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.
