40. Annabella
Chapter forty
Annabella
The first witch went down before she knew we were there.
Gideon hooked his arm around her throat from behind and wrenched her off her chair in one savage motion.
She’d been typing notes about rowan concentrations, completely absorbed, and by the time her hands came up to claw at his forearm, Jem had already slammed two fingers against her temple hard enough to snap her head sideways.
Her eyes rolled back. Her body dropped, and Gideon lowered her to the floor.
The witch at the next station spun at the noise, mouth opening, magic already sparking at her fingertips.
Zeke’s binding spell hit her like a whip crack, snapping her arms to her sides and ripping her out of the chair.
She hit the concrete face-first, magic dying against the bindings before it could take shape.
But the witch in the purple scarf had already seen. Her head came up from the scanning equipment, dark eyes sweeping the floor, and she read the whole situation in half a second flat.
“Intruders!” Her voice cut across the space. “Security protocol! Now!”
Hex it all.
The remaining witches scattered from their stations, and moved into defensive patterns, magic building fast, and I had about two seconds to dive right before a blast of force hit the shelving unit beside me and sent wooden crates flying.
I skidded behind a desk. A cutting spell sliced the air above me, carving through the metal desk leg.
The whole thing tilted, groaning. I rolled under the collapsing desk, came up on the other side, and grabbed the attacking witch’s wrist. Contact.
My magic slammed into hers, disrupting her spell mid-cast, so it backfired.
The energy recoiled through her body like a rubber band snapping, and she gasped, staggering.
I didn’t give her time to recover. I grabbed her neck and drove her face into the computer monitor. The screen cracked. She went limp.
One of the notebooks lay on her desk, filled with detailed spell formulas. I snatched it and shoved it into my jacket. We’d need every scrap of intel.
“Sam, three o’clock!” Gideon’s shout had me spinning round in time to see Sam duck a bolt of green energy that scorched the air where his head had been.
He came up smooth, grabbed a metal supply box from a crate, and hurled it overhand.
It caught the witch square in the chest, and she went down wheezing.
Through the mate bond, I felt him—controlled, running hot but contained, that tactical mind of his clicking through the operation like clockwork. He wasn’t afraid. He was working. And underneath the calculation, a thread of awareness that tracked exactly where I was, every second, without looking.
I tracked him right back.
Across the warehouse, the purple scarf witch was directing the defense. “Station five, cover the research! Station seven, protect the test samples!”
She was good; organized. Three witches formed a defensive line, magic building between their raised hands. They were constructing something together—a combined spell that made the air taste like copper and ozone.
“Whatever it is, kill it!” Sam ordered.
I dropped to one knee and slammed my palm against the concrete floor.
My magic poured out, chasing the lines of the spell circle etched into the ground.
The circle was designed to contain and channel magical energy, but I could disrupt it.
Twist it. Turn the foundation they were standing on into quicksand.
Silver-green light raced along the grooves in the concrete. The three witches’ combined spell wobbled as the circle’s power stuttered beneath their feet.
“Now!” I shouted.
Jem and Gideon didn’t hesitate. They hit them. Jem caught one with a strike to the throat that sent her choking to her knees. Gideon grabbed another by the back of the neck and put him down hard. I heard bone crack.
The third tried to run. Zeke’s binding spell caught him mid-stride, and he went down skidding across the concrete.
But the purple scarf witch was already moving, heading toward a door at the back of the place. She was fast, and she had a head start.
“Sam!” I pointed.
We both sprinted after her. A witch stepped into our path, hands raised, magic gathering. Sam didn’t slow down. He sidestepped the spell, caught the witch’s arm, and redirected him into the shelving unit. Metal clanged. He crumpled.
I vaulted a desk and caught the trap a fraction before I hit it: tripwire stretched across the aisle between shelving units, almost invisible. I twisted mid-air, clearing it by inches.
Behind me, Sam swore and slid under it.
The purple scarf witch reached the door. Fumbled the handle. Looked back at us closing in…and smiled.
Behind us, the boxes in the spell circle detonated.
The concussive wave ripped outward from the circle, flipping desks, shattering monitors, buckling a support beam that screamed as it twisted.
The air itself went wrong. Acrid and chemical, the taste of magic that was never meant to be released uncontrolled.
Jem was thrown sideways, crashing into a workstation.
Gideon took the blast wave in the chest and went through a shelving unit hard enough to buckle the frame.
I threw up a shield—light expanding from my hands. The tail end of the shockwave hammered against it.
Sam!
The bond answered before I could turn, a bright flare of pain, then controlled fury. I looked anyway. He was on his feet behind the overturned desk he’d used for cover, blood from a cut above his eyebrow running into his eye, already wiping it away with the back of his hand.
Alive. Moving. Angry.
Good enough.
When the ringing in my ears faded enough to hear, the purple scarf witch was gone. Through the door. Into whatever lay beyond.
Fuck!
I let the shield drop, shaking out my hands. They were trembling from the amount of magic I’d just channeled. “Howling hell. That detonation trick was nasty.”
“Webster trains them well.” Sam’s voice was tight, but he caught my eye and held it. Through the bond, a pulse of steady warmth. You good?
I gave him a short nod. Good enough.
I took stock. Most of the witches were unconscious.
A few were bound. The three Jem and Gideon had taken down weren’t getting up any time soon.
The facility was compromised: Mina’s data corruption, our physical destruction, and the purple scarf witch’s own desperate detonation had gutted the operation.
Not cleanly. Not completely. The pattern-keeper had escaped, which meant Webster could rebuild. But we’d set him back months, maybe longer.
Gideon picked himself up from the wreckage of the shelving unit, brushing drywall dust from his jacket. “Well, that was bracing. Shall we never do it again? Wonderful. Let’s add that to the plan.”
“You hurt?” Sam asked.
“Only my dignity.” Gideon rolled his shoulder and winced. “The witch who did that, she gone?”
“Yep,” I confirmed.
“Outstanding. Love it when the most dangerous person in the room escapes. Really adds to the overall ambiance of our consistently terrible luck.”
Zeke was already at the far end of the warehouse, methodical and grim, gathering blue-covered notebooks and shoving them into a bag. Evidence. Research. Everything we could carry.
“Time check,” Sam said.
“Twelve minutes,” Mina’s voice came through comms. “Maybe eleven. The Pack patrol picked up pace after the energy discharge. They felt that detonation.”
Eleven minutes. I filed it, let it tick in the back of my mind.
I’d kept half an eye on Lydia through the fight.
Couldn’t help it, even while I was disrupting spell circles and putting witches’ faces through monitors, part of me had been tracking that platinum blonde head moving through the warehouse.
She hadn’t changed; things looked toasty and she headed for an exit.
She’d been trying to work her way toward the back door, using the other witches’ defense as cover, slipping between shelving units while we were occupied.
She’d almost made it. Would have too, if Sam hadn’t positioned himself between her and the exit without her realizing it.
Now she stood twenty feet away, caught between two rows of shelving units with nowhere left to go. Her hair was still immaculate. Her posture still rigid and controlled.
The drawer I’d locked in my head? It blew open.
My fingers drifted to my silver streak before I caught myself and dropped them. I didn’t need comfort. I needed to be sharp.
“Stand down, Annabella.” Her voice was crisp, professional. “You’re making a mistake.”
Ah, she’s going to try to talk her way out of this.
“The only mistake I made was trusting you.”
“I was doing my job.” Her face was that cool, clinical mask she always wore. “Webster needed someone he trusted to watch over you. You were brilliant but unstable, and your wolf made you unpredictable.”
There it was. The prejudice repackaged in polished words and professional detachment.
“My wolf makes me strong,” I said quietly. “Both sides of me do.”
“Your wolf makes you a liability.” Frost crept across the concrete floor beneath Lydia’s feet, spreading outward in thin white lines. “Yet Simon gave you purpose, gave you a place, and you’re throwing it away for…What? A Council spy who lied to you for months?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam moving silently into position. Felt Gideon circling from the other side. She was so focused on me that she didn’t notice.
Good. Keep her talking.
“And you and Simon didn’t?” I said, holding her attention. “We’re in a facility that makes ripple, Lydia. Fucking ripple!”
“You’re naive.” Lydia shook her head. Something that looked like genuine disappointment crossed her face. “Simon’s methods might be extreme, but he’s trying to create real change —”
“And how many innocent people die while he’s doing that?” Sam’s voice came from behind her.
Lydia spun—too slow. Sam was already inside her reach, one hand closing on the back of her neck, the other sweeping her feet off the frost-slicked concrete she’d been channeling through. She hit the ground hard, the ice spell shattering as her contact with the floor pattern broke.
But Lydia had spent years embedded with field operatives.
Her hand shot up and clamped onto Sam’s forearm.
Ice bloomed across his skin on contact, biting deep, and Sam released her with a snarl.
That half-second was all she needed. She rolled free, flung a wild blast of ice at Gideon that caught his shoulder and spread frost across his jacket, and ran.
Not for the exit but toward the computer stations.
She grabbed something from beside a keyboard. A flash drive. Backup data.
I caught her before she reached the next station. Tackled her from behind, both of us crashing into a desk. The monitor toppled, shattering on concrete. Papers scattered, spell formulas, test results, months of research falling like snow around us.
She drove her palm into my gut. The magic hit like being plunged into arctic water. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Ice was forming inside my chest, in my lungs, crystallizing from the inside out.
No.
My body Shifted—not completely, but enough. My frame changed, became denser. My internal temperature spiked as Shifter heat battled the ice magic spreading through my chest. Steam rose from my skin where the two forces collided. The ice in my lungs began to melt.
I gasped. Air flooded back in, burning, raw, and I could breathe. I could breathe.
Lydia’s composure cracked. For the first time since I’d known her, something unguarded broke across her face. “The magical strain should be killing you. You shouldn’t be able to sustain that—”
Neither Pack nor coven. Something else. Something whole.
I punched her.
Her head snapped back. Blood sprayed from her nose. She went limp beneath me.
I knelt there for a moment. Breathing hard, Lydia unconscious below me, her perfect hair finally mussed, blood on her pristine collar.
“Annabella.” Sam’s hand was on my shoulder. “We need to keep moving. Time’s running out.”
I nodded. Forced myself to stand. I caught myself reaching for my silver streak, and this time I let it happen. Wound a strand around my finger, tugged once, and let go.
“We’ve got the notebooks,” Zeke reported, appearing from behind a row of shelving units with a bag slung over one shoulder. The bag was stuffed. “Everything I could grab.”
“Computers at two, five, and seven are destroyed,” Gideon said. He was cradling his frosted shoulder, but his voice was steady. “Hard drives smashed. Whatever Mina didn’t corrupt remotely, we’ve handled physically.”
“Test boxes?” Sam asked.
“Torch them,” I said. “All of them.”
Zeke pulled an incendiary charge from his pack—small, controlled, military-grade—and placed it in the center of the spell circle, among the remaining boxes. The witches who built these things had designed them to contain magic. They hadn’t designed them to withstand thermite.
Smoke was thickening from the earlier damage, shattered equipment, scorched wiring, a small fire already spreading. The incendiary would finish the job.
“Time,” Sam said.
“Eight minutes,” Mina reported. “Move your asses.”
Esme touched one of the unconscious witches gently on the forehead, her expression soft with something that looked like sadness. “They were just following orders. Making spells because they were told to.”
Sam was moving toward the tunnel exit when the door we’d come through opened.
And Duke stepped through.
Eight minutes on the clock. Foreign Pack wolves closing in. A burning facility behind us and a man who used to be family blocking the only other exit.
Witch’s fangs.
This was about to get ugly.