63. Annabella
Chapter sixty-three
Annabella
Ikilled the first drone with my bare hands.
Not literally. I’m not that talented. But when my magic punched through its casing, ripped the speaker free, and blew the thing up, it felt personal enough to count.
The machine dropped out of the sky in a shower of sparks and shattered components, and for three beautiful seconds, the immediate air around me went quiet.
The two Shifters nearest me—a woman who’d been clawing at her own ears and the stocky Shifter whose Packmates had tackled him to the ground—blinked and straightened.
Three seconds. Then the next drone swept in to fill the gap, and Pack howls continued, full of despair and compulsion.
Kane hadn’t just recorded distress calls.
He’d turned Pack bonds into leashes. Every howl yanked at the thing inside a wolf that would rather die than ignore a Packmate in pain, and one by one, it was pulling them out of position and into the open where his soldiers were waiting.
Fuck!
I punched clean through the second drone’s rotors.
It spun sideways, clipped a branch, and smashed into the forest floor with a satisfying crunch.
Another gap in the noise. Another breath of sanity.
I was already turning, hunting the next one, when three more rose above the canopy to replace the one I’d killed.
For every one I brought down, Kane had more waiting.
The comm crackled. Derek: “The drones are the primary threat, not the ground forces. Someone give me a way to neutralize them or we lose this fight in the next fifteen minutes.”
I looked at Esme. She knelt at the base of the ward anchor, eyes closed. The magic pouring off her was immense, layers of counter-enchantment stacking one on top of another, each designed to peel back a different frequency of Kane’s spell.
“Esme. Talk to me.”
“Close-close.” Her voice had the strained quality of someone holding too many threads at once. “The nasty-spell has teeth. Every time I bite one off, it grows two more. But almost…almost —”
“I can shoot them down, but they’re replacing faster than I can kill them.” I told Derek.
“Esme’s trying to unravel the spell underneath. If she cracks it, the drones become expensive noisemakers.”
“Copy.”
I turned and Carlito was by my side.
“Problem.” He kept his voice low. “Civilian convoy got separated during the drone deployment. Coalition arrivals from the Ridgeback Pack. Came in on the western approach this morning. Two families with kids. They were being directed to Bridgetown when the drones went up and the escorts scattered.”
“How far?”
“Quarter mile northwest. Through the worst of the drone coverage.” He tipped his head in that direction. “I need to get them out.”
“I’ll clear a path. Can you move them to the temple? It’s the most fortified position we’ve got.”
He considered it for a moment. “Yeah, that should work.” He glanced at me. “On your signal.”
I closed my eyes. Let my senses unfurl. The drone noise wasn’t just sound.
It was magic. And magic had shape. I could see it.
Not with my eyes but with the part of me that read ward-lines and felt spellwork.
The enchanted sound waves radiating from each drone like ripples in water.
Overlapping circles of influence, each one a zone and where the circles intersected, the effect doubled, tripled.
That was where wolves were breaking hardest.
But between the circles, there were gaps. Thin corridors where one drone’s range ended and the next hadn’t quite reached. Narrow, shifting, unreliable, but there.
I opened my eyes and started killing drones.
Silver-green light punched upward. Each hit shattered a drone and tore a hole in the sound-web. I could sense the gap widening, a corridor of relative quiet carving itself through the noise.
“Go!”
Carlito moved, sprinting across the open ground.
A drone slid in from the south to fill the gap I’d made. I killed it before its speaker fully engaged. Another came from the west. Killed that too.
Six drones down. Seven. The gap was holding, a ragged channel of reduced sound stretching from the approach road to the temple trail. The spell still bled in from neighboring drones, a low thrum of distress that would make any wolf’s skin crawl. But a werewolf could hear it and hold.
After five minutes, I saw movement on the approach road; Carlito, returning.
He had the families with him: two women, one with a small child clinging to her, a teenage boy, and an older Shifter, gray-haired and slower than the rest, but still moving at speed.
Carlito was on point as they reached the ward line, and crossed behind my position.
I kept my hands up, kept killing drones—eight, nine—keeping the corridor open as they angled northwest toward the trail to the temple. That’s when I saw the soldiers.
They came from the west. Out of the tree-line to Carlito’s left flank, six soldiers in matte-black tactical gear, silver-laced armor, rifles up.
Two fire teams moving in staggered formation, covering each other’s advance.
Kane’s men, who’d pushed through the gaps the drones had ripped in our western perimeter, and they’d spotted exactly what soldiers are trained to spot: a soft target moving through open ground.
Carlito’s group was eighty meters ahead of me.
Fuck!
Carlito saw them a half-second before they opened fire. He shoved the older Shifter sideways, threw his arm out toward the others as the first shot cracked the air.
It missed. Chewed bark off a birch trunk where the teenage boy’s head had been a heartbeat earlier. The boy hit the ground, and both women pulled the young child flat, covering the small body with their own.
The second shot didn’t miss.
It caught Carlito in the shoulder. Left side, spinning him half-around, and I could see the burn from where I was, smoke rising from the wound where the silver round seared through muscle.
He staggered. Didn’t fall. Planted his feet and put himself between the six soldiers and the civilians huddled in the scrub behind him.
I was already running.
“Go!” Carlito shouted. “Head to the trail. Don’t stop for anything.”
Then he charged. A third round hit his forearm, raised to shield his face as he ran.
The silver sizzled on contact, and I heard the bone crack, the wet snap of a fracture that would have dropped anyone who wasn’t running on adrenaline and wolf-healing.
He tucked the arm against his ribs and kept running.
The fourth round took him in the thigh. His leg buckled, and he hit one knee. Silver spreading from three wounds now, gray lines tracking through his skin, his wolf trying to heal tissue that the silver kept burning open.
He got up.
I don’t know how. Three silver rounds in his body, a broken arm, a leg that shouldn’t have held his weight. But Carlito Mendez got to his feet on the dirt of Three Rivers territory, and he kept closing.
I cleared the first line of birch and threw everything I had at the nearest soldier.
The blast caught him square in the chest plate and launched him off his feet into a tree trunk.
Down. I pivoted as a bullet whizzed past my ear and threw magic at the second.
It caught him in the hip, spun him, sent his rifle skittering across the ground. He hit the dirt hard.
Four left. Two dropped to a knee and opened up on me, forcing me sideways behind a trunk. Disciplined. They were splitting their attention—two keeping me pinned, two on Carlito—and I couldn’t get around the covering fire without getting hit.
I heard the fifth shot. Heard Carlito’s response, the first real sound of pain he’d made, low and guttural and angry. My wolf caught the fresh wave of silver-burn on the air, sharper than before, closer to blood and organs than muscle.
No. No, no, no—
I dropped flat and rolled to the base of the trunk, cheek against the dirt, and found an angle through the gap between the roots.
A sliver of a view, enough to see Carlito’s boots, one leg dragging, and the blood trail he was leaving in the scrub.
His stride had broken. He was listing sideways, but he wasn’t going down.
Fuck this.
I couldn’t stay pinned. Every second behind this trunk was a second Carlito was fighting alone with four silver rounds in his body.
I waited for the half-second gap between bursts and threw myself out of cover.
Straight at the two soldiers pinning me, magic already leaving my hands.
The first blast hit the ground between them, and the concussion wave knocked them both off their firing line.
The second blast caught the nearest soldier in the chest before he could re-aim and put him on his back.
The other scrambled for cover; I didn’t give him time.
A third blast, tighter, harder, cracked his helmet against a rock, and he went still.
I was sprinting before he hit the ground. Forty meters between me and Carlito. Thirty-five. Thirty.
I saw all of it.
Carlito hit the third soldier at a run. Two hundred and twenty pounds of wolf-strong muscle slamming into a man in body armor.
He couldn’t grapple the silver-laced armor, so he used the man’s own gear against him.
Grabbed the chin strap of the helmet, wrenched sideways, and drove his knee into the exposed throat beneath. The soldier folded.
The fourth soldier swung his rifle like a club.
The stock connected with Carlito’s broken forearm, and he shouted in pain.
He went sideways, nearly fell, caught himself on the downed soldier’s body.
The fourth soldier stepped in close—too close, confident now, seeing a wounded wolf on his knees—and pressed his sidearm against Carlito’s stomach.
I threw magic. Everything I had, from twenty meters, running full sprint. The blast tore through the air between us—
The shot was point-blank. Muffled by the contact. That was five.
My magic hit the soldier a half-second later.
It caught him in the shoulder, wrenched him backwards.
Carlito folded around the shot. His knees hit the ground.
Blood was coming from his mouth now, silver toxin shredding faster than his body could compensate.
He was gray from the neck down, veins standing out black under his skin.
The soldier was on the ground where my blast had thrown him, reaching for the sidearm that had skittered into the scrub.
Carlito lunged forward on ruined knees, and his hand found the sidearm first. His fingers were gray, the tendons in his wrist visible through skin that had gone translucent with silver poisoning.
He grabbed the weapon, put the muzzle under the soldier’s chin guard and pulled the trigger.
The man collapsed.
I was ten meters away. Close enough now to see the black veins in Carlito’s neck, the wet rattle of each breath, the way his body was shaking with the effort of staying upright on his knees.
He looked down at his wounds. Then up at me.
And the expression on his face wasn’t pain or fear.
It was apology. Like he was sorry he couldn’t give us more.
He slumped to the ground. I skidded to my knees next to him.
“They clear?” he asked, blood in his mouth.
I looked down the trail. One of the women had the small child on her hip, the other was being pulled along by the teenage boy, and the older Shifter was using one hand to brace against the trees lining the path as he went past. They were fifty meters down the trail and still going.
“They’re clear.”
He exhaled. A long, rattling breath that took something essential with it. His hand pressed flat against the earth, fingers digging into the soil of Three Rivers, the territory he’d chosen and that had chosen him.
“Good,” he said.
Then the light left his eyes, and his hand went still in the dirt.
No!
I pressed my palm to his chest. Held it there for a count of three because it was all I could give him and more than I could afford.