61. Annabella
Chapter sixty-one
Annabella
“The ward points are singing worried songs,” Esme said, tilting her head like a bird listening to something only she could hear. “They feel the bad things coming. All teeth and terrible.”
“Kane’s forces,” I translated. “How close?”
“Close-close. But not here yet. Time to make the wards happy again.” She smiled, and it was both innocent and knowing. “Annabella’s magic will help. Sparkly-different. The wards like sparkly-different.”
Three months ago, being called sparkly-different would have felt like another way of saying wrong. Another reminder that I didn’t fit anywhere.
I smiled at her words. “Show me where to start.”
Esme’s grin widened. “But you already know!”
She was right. I did know. Some part of me could feel the weak points in the ward network like bruises on skin. Places where the magical boundaries were thin and vulnerable.
Carlito caught my eye as I moved toward the first one. “I’ll get the ground teams positioned along the secondary approach,” he said. “Anything gets past the wards, they hit us first.”
“Nothing’s getting past these wards,” I said, with more conviction than I probably should have felt.
His mouth twitched, and the scar on his jaw shifted with it. “Copy that. I’ll position them anyway.”
Reinforcing wards wasn’t like casting spells. It was more like…weaving. Taking existing magic and strengthening it, layering new threads into old patterns. Some witches did it with precise gestures and spoken incantations, everything measured and deliberate.
I did it differently.
I pressed my palm against the ward anchor—a stone pillar Esme had marked with symbols I only half-recognized—and let my magic flow outward.
Silver-green light bloomed around my fingers, and I felt my wolf rise to meet it.
The two sides of me reaching toward each other.
My wolf’s instincts layered into the spellwork: the territorial awareness that knew exactly where the boundaries should be, the protective fury that would tear apart anything that threatened what was mine.
The ward shuddered, then strengthened. I felt it lock into place with a sound that vibrated through my bones.
“Oh,” Esme breathed. She was watching me, her head tilted at a bird-like angle. “Oh, that’s lovely. Like two songs becoming one song. Harmony where there was just melody.”
“Is that…good?”
“Good-good.” She nodded vigorously. “My wards are clever, but they think like witches. Your wards think like—” She made a motion with her hands that might have been a running wolf or might have been abstract nonsense.
“Like territory. Like mine. The bad men will feel that. Will know they’re not welcome.
The bullets will go splat.” She mimed something hitting a wall with her palm.
“Boom-things go boom on the wrong side; the wards eat them up. Makes the bad men come close.” Her smile turned sharp. “And close is where the wolves live.”
The brilliance of it clicked into place. Derek hadn’t just chosen the bridges because they were narrow. He’d chosen them because with Esme’s wards neutralizing ranged weapons and the bridges neutralizing numbers, Kane’s soldiers would have to fight wolves hand-to-hand.
They would be walking into a meat grinder. Nice.
I moved to the next anchor point. Then the next.
The mate bond pulsed.
I paused at the fourth anchor point, my hand still pressed against the stone, as Sam’s emotions washed through me. It was the controlled aggression of battle, the sharp focus of a predator locked onto prey; adrenaline spiking in quick bursts, then settling back to that deadly calm.
He was fighting. The eastern line had engaged.
I wanted to run to him. Wanted to tear through the forest until I reached his side, until I could put myself between him and whatever threatened him. The pull was a hook behind my ribs, tugging east.
I stayed where I was.
I’ve got this, the bond seemed to say. Not in words. Just feeling. Just certainty.
So do I, I sent back and turned my attention to the next ward.
“Movement west!”
The call came from one of Esme’s coven—a young witch built like a distance runner, dark hair buzzed at the sides.
She was pointing toward the tree-line, where figures were materializing out of the forest. Humans.
At least a few dozen, moving in tight formation: two fire teams spread wide, covering each other’s advance.
Military-trained and armed. Kane’s feint. We’d expected this.
What I hadn’t expected was the gear.
They wore matte-black armor—helmets with reinforced face shields, throat guards, forearm plates.
The kind of kit designed for one purpose: surviving close contact with something that had claws and teeth.
I caught the dull glint of metal mesh beneath their outer layers, and my wolf recoiled before my brain caught up.
Silver. Woven into the fabric. Any Shifter who tried to grapple one of them would burn on contact.
Howling hell.
“Ward team, hold position.” My voice shifted automatically into command mode. “Combat team, with me.”
Five wolves materialized at my side. Three Rivers defenders assigned to our sector. Behind them, three of Esme’s witches moved into casting positions.
“Esme, can you—?”
“I’ll confuse,” she agreed. “Make them see wrong things. Trip on shadows that aren’t there.”
“Do it. But they’ll have flash-bangs. If they work out where you’re casting from, they’ll try to break your concentration. Stay mobile.”
She nodded once, already moving.
Carlito was repositioning his fighters along the secondary line. I heard him giving orders that were short and specific.
“Silver-laced gear,” I called to him. “Tell your wolves not to grapple. Don’t go for the bite. Hit and move.”
“Copy.” No hesitation. He relayed it down the line in three seconds flat.
The platoon hit our perimeter in a staggered advance, rifles up.
Ten of them dropped to a knee and laid down suppressive fire, silver-tipped rounds chewing into the trees above our heads and the earth at our feet, forcing the witches to break off mid-cast and the rest of us to scatter back.
The ward anchors here weren’t like the bridge shields; those were Esme’s masterwork, dense enough to stop bullets cold.
These were perimeter wards that would do detection, deterrent, confusion.
They’d slow an assault. They wouldn’t stop one.
The rest of the unit pushed forward through the gap.
They weren’t expecting me.
I stepped forward to meet them, and my magic rose with my wolf.
The first soldier aimed at me fast, rifle up, center mass, smooth trigger pull.
I let my wolf read the shot before it left the barrel—the micro-adjustment of his shoulder, the steadying breath—and my magic responded.
The bullet hit a barrier that hadn’t existed a heartbeat before and ricocheted into the dirt.
His second and third shots did the same.
He hesitated before firing the fourth. I didn’t waste it.
A blast of force caught him square in the chest plate and threw him backward into the man behind him.
Both went down in a tangle of limbs and gear.
Two more flanked left, moving to get an angle around my shield.
One pulled something from his belt—a canister, dark metal—and lobbed it toward Esme’s position.
The thing burst mid-air, and a cloud of fine particulate bloomed outward.
One of the witches caught the edge of it and staggered, her half-formed spell shattering like glass.
A Three Rivers wolf beside her yelped and recoiled, a mix of silver and nullstone dust searing across the exposed fur of his forearms.
The particulate hung in the air like a dirty fog, and I could feel it. A wrongness against my magic, like static eating into a signal. Wherever that cloud drifted, nothing worked right. Spells fizzled. Wolves flinched away.
Kane had done his homework.
Esme’s confusion spell was working; some of the soldiers were shooting at shadows, spinning to face threats that weren’t there.
Others stumbled on ground that seemed to shift beneath their feet.
But they were disciplined. Even confused, they fell back to training, dropped to a knee, established a base of fire, tried to regroup.
A three-man team broke through the line, heading straight for the ward team.
The lead soldier was already pulling the pin on a flash-bang.
I extended my hand, and the magic leaped from my fingers like a living thing.
It caught the grenade in the air, wrapped around it, and flung it back the way it came.
The detonation caught all three of them, the concussive blast and blinding light sending them sprawling.
Before they could recover, the young witch with the buzzcut hit them with a binding spell that rooted them to the forest floor, vines and earth crawling up over silver-laced armor like it was nothing, pinning arms to sides, locking legs in place.
I was grinning. My blood was up, and my magic was singing and both sides of me were running in the same direction.
“Fur and flames,” I said, and I was laughing when I said it. “I want to do that again.”
The engagement lasted maybe ten minutes. Felt like hours.
When the last of Kane’s platoon either retreated or went down under binding spells, Carlito appeared out of the tree-line with a split lip he didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Five prisoners,” he reported. “Minimal casualties on our side. One of the Bridgetown wolves took a hit; silver-tip graze, non-critical. Medics are already on it.”
He glanced back at the tree-line. “They’re Marines,” he said quietly. “Or ex-Marines. The way they moved, the signals, that’s MARSOC training.” He worked his jaw. “Kane’s recruiting from the special operations pipeline.”
I studied Carlito for a moment. “You were a Marine?” I guessed.
He nodded. “Any one of them could have been in my unit. In the Marines, we’re all brothers. Now fucking look at us.”