61. Annabella #2
“We’ll get them to the holding area. They’ll be treated properly.”
“Yeah.” He wiped blood from his chin with the back of his hand. “Stay on the secondary line?”
“If they feinted once—”
“They’ll try again. I’ve got it.” He turned back toward his fighters, whatever he’d been feeling about the prisoners already locked away.
The radio crackled.
Derek’s voice: “All sectors, report.”
I grabbed my comm. “Western perimeter secure. Feinting force repelled. Five prisoners, minimal casualties.”
“Copy.” A pause. Then: “Eastern line holding. Northern bridge collapsed on schedule, took out a dozen of them. Main bridge is a chokepoint. They can’t push through without walking into a kill zone.”
“Wards?”
“All good so far.”
I let myself breathe. Let myself feel, for just a moment, that dangerous flutter of hope.
The plan was working. The eastern defense was holding. The western wards had repelled their flanking attempt. Kane’s forces were dying on bridges they couldn’t cross, breaking themselves against walls they couldn’t breach.
We might actually pull this off.
The bond spiked.
Sam’s alarm slammed through the connection. A humming sound made me look up. Black shapes rose over the tree-line. Dozens of them, moving in perfect formation against the sky. Drones.
I frowned at their unusual shape.
What the hell was that?
Then it clicked: there were fucking speakers mounted beneath their rotors.
Why—?
A howl came from the drones. Long, anguished, unmistakably wolf. The kind of sound that meant Pack member down, Pack member dying. Come help, come help, come NOW.
My wolf rose before I could stop her. Every muscle in my body tensed toward the sound, ready to run.
It wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real. The rational part of my brain understood that no one was actually dying, that this was a recording, a trick, a weapon designed to do exactly what it was doing to me right now.
My wolf didn’t care.
Another howl joined the first. Then another.
A chorus of agony pouring from those hovering machines, amplified until it filled the forest, until it was everywhere, inescapable.
I recognized voices in the noise. Ryan’s territorial snarl twisted into something desperate.
Mai’s sharp command breaking into a cry of pain.
The high, thin keen of Victoria in danger.
Victoria, who was safe in Bridgetown. My brain knew that.
My wolf didn’t care. Sam, in pain, howling for help.
My knees buckled. My instincts screamed at me to run east, to find him…but underneath the sound, underneath the howl pouring from that machine, the actual bond was still there. Steady. Focused. Furious, but fighting. Sam was fighting. Sam was alive. The drone was lying.
I locked that knowledge behind my teeth and held it there. The bond is real. The sound is not.
They must have recorded them somehow and used AI to morph the sounds into this.
Not real. Not real.
But the wolves around me were reacting like it was.
A stocky Shifter next to me dropped to his knees. “Sandra,” he gasped. “That’s Sandra, she’s hurt, I have to—”
He sprinted toward the tree-line, where I had no doubt soldiers would be waiting to put him down. Two Packmates ran after him, tackling him and holding him down, but they were shaking too. One of them had tears streaming down her face.
“It’s not real,” she kept saying, over and over, a desperate mantra. “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not—”
Another drone swept overhead, lower this time. The distress call it carried was different. Younger, more terrified. A child’s voice, crying for help.
Three wolves broke formation at once. They didn’t run toward the sound so much as explode toward it, all human thought obliterated by the imperative to protect. Shots rang out, and all three went down in a shower of blood.
“Hold the line!” I shouted, but my voice was lost in it.
More drones were spreading across the territory.
Each one carried different voices, different frequencies of terror.
The overlapping calls created a wall of sound that made it impossible to think, impossible to focus on anything except the screaming need to help them, save them, they’re dying, YOUR PACK IS DYING —
I pressed my hands over my ears. It didn’t help. The sound wasn’t just auditory; it was magic. I could feel the spell layered beneath the recordings, something old and vicious designed to bypass rational thought and speak directly to wolf instinct.
Esme had gone rigid beside me. Her wild hair was whipping around her face despite the absence of wind.
“Esme.” I grabbed her arm. Her skin was ice cold. “Can you counter that? The spell on the recordings?”
“It’s layered. Magic on technology on emotion.” Her hands were trembling. “Like a trap made of sounds. Each layer feeds the others. The spell makes the recordings feel real, and believing they’re real makes the spell stronger. It’s…It’s eating itself. Growing.”
“Can you stop it?”
She was already raising her hands. “But to counter, Esme has to let it in. And if Esme lets it in…”
Around us, the western line was collapsing.
Shifters in both human and wolf forms were scattering in every direction, chasing phantom distress calls, attacking shadows they thought were threats to their Packmates.
Two defenders had turned on each other, both convinced the other was responsible for the screaming.
I watched a young wolf—couldn’t have been more than nineteen—standing frozen in the middle of it.
She wasn’t running or fighting. She was just…
gone. Staring at nothing, her whole body shaking, tears and snot running down her face as the sound of her Pack dying poured over her again and again and again.
I felt Sam fighting to stay focused. Felt the iron control he was exerting over his own wolf, the desperate effort to keep his people together. But even he couldn’t completely block it out. Even he couldn’t hear his Pack screaming and feel nothing.
Nobody could.
A drone swept directly overhead. The voice it carried was Sofia’s, Derek’s mate. Begging for help. Sobbing. Saying Derek’s name over and over like a prayer that wasn’t being answered.
Something ripped out of me, a sound from my wolf that was rage and anguish braided together. I wanted to Shift. Wanted to become something with teeth and claws that could tear those machines out of the sky and silence them forever.
I grabbed a fistful of my braid and yanked. Used the sharp pain to anchor myself. Human. Stay human. Think.
Carlito was shouting somewhere to my left, trying to hold his fighters together, his voice hoarse and steady even as the distress calls battered him.
I could hear the strain in it, the effort it cost him to keep giving orders when every wolf instinct he had was screaming at him to run. He was holding. Barely. But holding.
The drones were spreading further now. More distress calls joining the chorus, a symphony of terror designed to shatter Pack bonds and turn organized defense into blind panic.
Somewhere to the east, I heard a real howl answer the false ones.
Then another. The genuine sounds of wolves losing control, breaking formation, running toward the enemy.
Shots were ringing out now. A staccato of death.
I looked at Esme, trying to build a counter-spell with shaking hands.
At the wards we’d just reinforced, useless against an attack that came from inside our own heads.
At the western line that had seemed so secure moments ago, now scattered across the forest. Kane wasn’t trying to break through our defenses.
He was trying to make us break ourselves.
And it was working.