38. Sam
Chapter thirty-eight
Sam
Gideon fell into step beside me on point, his stride easy, his eyes doing that constant sweep-and-assess thing that made him genuinely good at his job despite his best efforts to seem like he didn’t give a shit. Annabella followed with Esme and Jem. Zeke brought up the rear.
Halfway down the slope, Gideon’s hand came up. Fist closed. Stop.
I froze. Everyone froze.
Gideon’s nostrils flared. He tilted his head east—toward the tree-line where the Pack patrol would eventually circle through—and held the position for three long seconds.
My wolf strained against my skin, reading the air.
Pine. Mud. Cold stone. And underneath it, fading but recent, wolf scent. Strong. Multiple animals.
“Patrol came through early,” Gideon murmured, barely moving his lips. “Not current. Maybe an hour ago. But they added a track. See the marks?”
I looked where he was looking. Paw prints in the soft mud, partially filled with water. A path that cut closer to the facility than the rotation Mina and Waylen had mapped.
“They’re tightening the pattern,” I said.
“Or someone told them to.”
That was a problem. If the Pack was running tighter rotations than our intel showed, our forty-five-minute window might be thirty. Maybe less.
“Mina,” I said into the comms. “Any deviation in current patrol patterns from the baseline?”
A pause. Keystrokes. “Shit. Yeah. The northern pair cut closer to the facility. Could be random variation, could be—”
“It’s not random,” Gideon said.
“There’s a sixty-four percent chance you are correct,” Mina said. “Adjusting timeline. I’d give you thirty minutes max before the Pack patrol team is on top of you.”
Thirty minutes. We’d already burned five.
“We need to move faster,” Gid said. No one argued with him.
The first unconscious guard was slumped against a pine tree; mid-thirties, athletic, residual magic still flickering at her fingertips even in sleep. Not amateurs. Webster paid well and hired better.
Zeke glanced at me. “Binding spells?”
“Save your energy,” Jem replied. “Esme’s sleep will hold longer than we need.”
We moved past the downed guards and closed on the barracks. According to intel, there would be eight more witches inside. Night shift, sleeping after rotation. Exhausted, hopefully deeply unconscious.
This was where things would get messy. Esme’s sleep spell was distance magic. Elegant, precise, devastating at range, but it took a lot out of her. Jem had warned us she wouldn’t be casting any more spells today.
I tested the door. Unlocked. Why bother, when you’ve got fifteen guards between you and trouble?
The hinges were silent. Good.
I eased the door open and scanned the room.
It was long, bunk beds on both walls, eight bodies under gray wool blankets.
Clothing chests at each bunk’s foot. Boots lined up underneath with the kind of military neatness that told me these weren’t freelancers—they were trained, disciplined, and they’d organize fast if given half a chance.
Metal lockers along the back wall. A small table near the door with scattered playing cards and the cold remains of someone’s coffee.
The air was stale; bodies, coffee, and underneath it, the electric scent of recently used magic.
Zeke moved to the center of the room, hands weaving. I felt the silence spell lock into place, a contained absence of sound wrapping around us. Whatever happened in here now, no-one outside this room would hear it.
I caught Annabella’s eye, jerked my chin toward the first bunk.
She moved with me, smooth, instinctive, both of us reading the other’s movements.
The guard in the bottom bunk stirred. His eyes cracked open, registered us, and went wide.
My hand clamped over his mouth before the shout reached his throat.
The guard’s hands started moving, and Annabella reached past me and pressed her fingers to the man’s temple.
I saw him freeze.
There was no other word for it. The defensive spell he’d been building just…stopped. One second, his hands were weaving, the next—nothing. His expression changed from combat-ready to panic in the space of a heartbeat.
I got an arm around his throat, applied pressure. Controlled. Ten seconds and he was out. I lowered him to the floor and thought, not for the first time, about what Annabella could do with that touch.
The room woke up fast after that.
A guard in a top bunk opposite us sat upright, hands already moving in quick gestures.
The air changed, thickened, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
Some magic was building. I couldn’t see it the way Annabella could, but I could sure as hell feel it.
The guard shouted, a commanding bark that had the ring of a drilled alarm call, and the room erupted.
The guard below her was up before the shout finished, then two more on either side, and suddenly we had seven conscious, trained witches in a confined space snapping into drilled responses.
Jem moved first. He snatched a boot from under the nearest bunk and hurled it, catching the top-bunk guard square in the face.
She tumbled backwards off the bunk, crashed through the clothing chest at its foot, and hit the floor in a tangle of splintered wood and gray blankets.
Jem was already reaching for a second boot before she’d stopped rolling.
The man was a born improviser; give him any object and he’d find a way to make it a weapon.
Zeke’s binding spell wrapped the downed guard before she could recover.
Across the room, two guards had found each other. Bottom bunks, opposite sides, but they’d locked eyes and their hands were moving in mirrored patterns. The air pressure dropped. My ears popped. Whatever they were weaving together, it was big, and it was coming fast.
“Zeke!” Annabella was moving fast and low, using the scattered debris as cover. She slid across playing cards on the floor and grabbed the nearest guard’s ankle.
The pressure vanished. Just—gone. Like a door slamming shut on a gale. The guard she’d grabbed went rigid, her hands falling limp. Her partner staggered, clutching his own head; a backlash of the failed spell maybe?
Gideon and Jem were right behind Annabella.
The guard whose magic had died swung at Gideon—a solid right hook that he barely ducked—and followed it with a knee aimed at his ribs.
Gideon caught the knee, twisted, and drove his elbow into the side of her neck.
She dropped. He looked mildly offended that she’d made him work for it.
Her partner came at Jem with both fists and a fury that said he didn’t need magic to be dangerous. He caught him once across the jaw—a good hit, his head rocking sideways—before Jem found his angle and put him down with a headbutt that made me wince.
The rest was fast, ugly, and functional.
One guard kicked his locker open, reaching for something inside.
I slammed the locker door on his arm—bones cracked—and he raked his nails down my forearm hard enough to draw blood.
I grabbed the front of his shirt before he could pull his arm loose, hauled him up, and slammed him through the card table.
He tried to get up. Got halfway. A swift kick to the head put him down.
Another two had backed against the far wall, the air around them growing dense and electric.
One of them was bleeding from a cut above her eye—caught by debris from the table—but it hadn’t slowed her down.
Annabella grabbed her by the wrist and the charge in the air died instantly.
The guard threw a wild punch with her free hand that Annabella blocked without letting go, wrenched the arm down and swept the guard’s legs out from under her.
She hit the ground hard, and Annabella’s hand tightened on her wrist, silver-green light flaring once.
The guard’s eyes rolled back, and she went slack.
Like pulling a plug. Zeke’s binding spell caught the second guard mid-gesture.
He fought it—thrashing, snarling, teeth bared in a way that would’ve impressed a wolf—until Gideon ended the discussion with a boot behind his knee and a jab to his temple.
The last guard—young, mid-twenties—tried to run.
Not toward us, not toward the door. Toward the lockers.
What did they have in there? I caught his collar three steps short, spun him, and he surprised me, twisted out of his shirt entirely, bare-chested and scrambling.
I tackled him into the bunks. The frame buckled under the impact.
He got one good kick into my thigh—dead leg, the little shit—before I pinned him and choked him out.
It was done.
The barracks was a wreck. Splintered furniture, scattered playing cards, boots everywhere, eight unconscious guards on the floor. Zeke moved between them, casting binding spells.
“Not bad,” I said, rolling my shoulders to shed the tension. “What’s the count?”
“Thirty-two seconds,” Waylen’s voice came through the comms, smug. “I was rounding—”
“Nobody asked you,” Mina cut in. “And your count started early. I had twenty-eight.”
“Your timing is off by four seconds, which is frankly—”
I muted the earpiece. Gideon did the same, his mouth twitching. Annabella shot me a look—half-amused, half-exasperated—and reached up to silence hers.
“They do know we can just turn them off, right?” Gideon asked mildly.
“I think they’ve forgotten we exist,” I said. “We’re just background noise to the main event at this point.”
“I feel so valued,” Annabella murmured.
I nearly smiled. Didn’t. Operation wasn’t over.
Jem helped Esme stand. She’d stayed clear of the fight, conserving her strength. She looked at each of us in turn, her expression soft with concern.
“Everyone okay? No bumps or scrapes?”
“Clean,” I confirmed.
Annabella flexed her fingers, but her hands were steady. Something warm pushed through the bond…not from her, from me. Pride. I didn’t try to hide it.
She glanced at me. A small crease appeared between her eyebrows, like she’d felt it and didn’t know what to do with it. Then the crease smoothed out, and she looked away.
Yeah. We’d deal with that later. Add it to the list.
“Hey.” Jem’s voice, quiet, from the back of the room. He’d moved behind the row of lockers while the rest of us were catching our breath, because Jem never stopped working. “What’s this?”
He was looking at the wall. I moved closer and saw it; a door, painted the same flat gray as everything around it. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking. Jem was always looking.
It explained what the last guard was doing, not going for the lockers but around them for an escape.
A steep concrete staircase dropped into darkness. Dim fluorescent strips gave about three feet of visibility before the shadows swallowed everything. The air rolling up from below was cold and carried something my wolf didn’t like: metal, ozone, and a deeper note underneath. Something wrong.
Esme went still. The humming stopped.
“The magic is much stronger down there,” she whispered. “Much, much stronger. A river of it, running fast-fast underneath the ground.”
She looked at me. “Fast and dark, Sam-wolf. And it wants to be found.”
Awesome.
I unmuted the comms. “Time check.”
“Twenty-two minutes until Pack patrol circles back,” Mina reported. “And that’s the adjusted estimate. Could be less.”
Twenty-two minutes. Maybe fewer. To get down there, figure out what Webster was building, destroy it, and get out before the Meute des Montagnes came to tear us apart on their own territory.
I looked down the stairs. My wolf’s hackles were up, every instinct screaming at me to grab Annabella and drag her in the opposite direction.
Twenty-two minutes on the clock.
I went down.