65. Annabella
Chapter sixty-five
Annabella
It hurt.
That’s the part nobody tells you about the big workings, the ones that matter, the ones that change things.
They hurt. Not the clean hurt of a wound you can point to, but the deep, grinding pull of something being torn out by the roots, and you can’t scream because you’re the one who put your hands on the altar and said take it.
The temple took it.
Magic poured out of me like blood from a severed vein, hot, then warm, then cold.
The light that had crawled up my arms blew outward in a rush that I felt in my bones, my hair, the thin web of threads that kept my soul tethered to my body.
The temple’s power rose to meet mine and braided with it: my wolf’s instincts, my bond with Sam, and through him, his past bond with the Three Rivers.
My magic fusing into something that had never existed, something that couldn’t exist, because it needed both DNA in one body and there’d never been anyone stupid enough to volunteer.
Congratulations, Annabella. You’re a pioneer.
The power surged through me, and I tried to push it outward, tried to shape it into a barrier, a dome stretching over the whole Three Rivers territory.
I knew what it needed to look like. The temple let me feel the ley lines beneath the earth like veins in a body, sense every boundary marker, every ancient border stone.
The map was there. The raw power was there.
What wasn’t there was any idea how to do it.
I shoved magic into the ley lines and it scattered.
Dispersed like water poured onto dry sand, soaking in, spreading thin, going nowhere.
The gold light from the temple flared and dimmed and the glow on my skin guttered.
I could feel the power bleeding away, wasted, because I was hammering at a lock I didn’t have the key to.
No. No, no, no —
I pushed harder. Fed more of myself into the altar until my arms were shaking and the copper taste in my mouth turned to iron, and something behind my eyes started to spark.
The ley lines hummed. Almost responded. Then the magic hit a junction point—a place where two ancient ward anchors converged—and fractured.
Splintered apart. The backlash snapped through my hands like a whip crack, and I cried out and nearly lost contact with the stone.
The gold light died.
Fuck! I was doing it wrong. Both hearts, Esme had said, not two halves working side by side but both at once. And I was still trying to push the magic, still trying to use my witch-power like a tool, forcing it into channels designed for a different kind of energy.
Magic worked by shaping it, directing it, imposing structure. My wolf side claimed.
I needed to claim a territory.
I closed my eyes. Let the witch in me feed my wolf and let the wolf rise.
My wolf didn’t think in ley lines and boundary markers.
She thought in scent and instinct and the bone-deep knowledge of mine.
She knew the smell of Sam’s bedroom. She knew the sound of the Coldbrook River.
She knew the heartbeat of the Bottley and Ellie’s smile and the feeling of Sofia’s arms around her and the way the Three Rivers forest floor felt under bare feet.
She knew what belonged to her. And she knew what she would die to protect.
I stopped trying to shape the magic and let her claim it instead.
My wolf reached through the bond—through Sam, through the thread that connected him to Three Rivers—and she grabbed hold of the land with both hands and she said mine.
And Three Rivers answered.
I felt it come up through the stone, through the altar, the temple floor, the bedrock underneath.
Not magic. Something older. The territory itself, the living beating heart of land that had been Pack soil for centuries, reaching back through the same bond I’d reached through.
Reading me. Tasting me. My wolf, my witch, my blood, the silver-green light and the gold thread of Pack bond and every fractured, hybridized, impossible thing I was.
For one awful second, I thought it would reject me. The way every Pack had rejected me. The way the witches had rejected me. The way the Ashridge Pack had looked at me with the silver streak and decided I was less than—
The territory pulled.
Not gentle. Not careful. A fierce, claiming force that locked onto the mate bond running through my veins and hauled me in like a wolf dragging a pup into the den by the scruff.
It read my witch-half and didn’t flinch.
It read my wolf-half and didn’t flinch. It found the place where the two tangled together and it wrapped around that place and held on.
Ours.
The word wasn’t mine. It came from the earth.
From the river. From the roots of every tree in Three Rivers territory and the bones of every wolf who’d ever been buried in this soil.
The land knew me. Not because I was wolf enough or witch enough or because Sam’s bond gave me permission. It knew me and claimed me back.
The gold light in the temple ignited. Not a flare this time—a roar. It slammed into my silver-green, and the two fused together.
The dome began to rise.
Slowly. Agonizingly slowly. I felt it at the borders first, a membrane forming at the territory’s eastern edge, silver-green fire tracing the ancient ward lines, trying to connect, trying to close. It crawled south, west, north, each inch of barrier costing me something I might not ever get back.
But it wasn’t going to be fast enough.
I could feel Kane’s forward force through the territory’s awareness; the land was tracking him, boots on the earth, fifty bodies moving in formation, getting closer.
Close enough that I could count heartbeats.
And beyond them, beyond the territory’s edges, the main army was on the move.
Thousands of soldiers getting the go signal, beginning their advance.
If the dome wasn’t sealed before they reached the border—
I gave more. Dug deeper. Past the magic, past the reserves, into the place where life connects to body.
The threads that keep a person here. The dome drank it and asked for more and I gave it because there wasn’t a choice, there had never been a choice.
My fire raced along the lines faster now, tracing the territory’s ancient boundaries, east to the Coldbrook bridges where Sam was fighting, west to the sectors where Esme had fallen—
Something tore inside me. A thread I couldn’t name snapped loose and the pain was so vast and so wrong that I couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe, could only hold on to the altar and keep feeding the working because if I stopped now, the dome would collapse half-formed and everything—Sam, the Pack, Ellie, all of it—would be lost.
The southern boundary sealed. The western boundary sealed. The northern ward line connected to the eastern edge, and the dome closed.
A complete barrier. Every inch of Three Rivers territory enclosed in a membrane of protection. Only those the land recognized would be able to pass through. Which meant Kane and any of his soldiers who were on our land were sealed inside with us.
The thought drifted through me, thin and far away, because there was almost nothing left of me to think it.
My hands slid off the altar. My knees hit the stone floor, and the impact jarred through my bones, and I tasted copper, and my heartbeat was doing something wrong: skipping, stuttering, an engine rattling itself to pieces.
The glow around my fingers had died completely.
I was scraped clean. A body with the lights going out.
At the territory’s eastern boundary, the first line of Kane’s main army reached the dome.
I felt the impact through the working, felt the lead soldiers slam into something they couldn’t see, momentum carrying the rank behind them into the barrier’s surface.
Confusion first, then shouting, then the sharp crack of rifle fire as they opened up on the dome.
Bullets struck the barrier and flattened, the impacts rippling across the dome’s surface like rain hitting a window.
I felt each one, a dull, distant pressure, like being poked through a layer of blankets.
They tried incendiaries next. I felt the heat bloom against the dome’s outer edge, flamethrowers roaring, the stink of accelerant hitting the barrier and sliding off like water off stone.
Then the grenades, lobbed in arcs, striking the dome and splitting open, their contents pooling uselessly against a surface that had no gaps, no seams, no weakness they could exploit.
On the western approach, another column hit the dome and stopped. Officers screamed orders. Soldiers brought up breaching charges. I felt the detonations as deep, percussive thuds that made the dome shudder but hold. Hold. Hold.
Every weapon of genocide they’d dragged to Three Rivers’ doorstep, and the barrier swallowed it all.
It worked.
But the Three Rivers would only be protected if my heart didn’t stop right here on this floor. Which, based on the gray creeping in at the edges of my vision and the deep wrongness spreading through my chest, was looking increasingly possible.
Get up.
I just wanted to lie here for a few more minutes and rest, but the voice wouldn’t let me be.
Get up, get up, get up!
It took two tries and a grip on the altar’s edge that left my nails scraping stone, but I got my feet under me.
My legs shook. My hands shook. The muscles along my spine were doing something that felt like vibrating, and I couldn’t tell whether it was exhaustion or my body trying to decide if it was going to keep functioning.
I made it to the temple entrance. Leaned against the crumbling archway because standing unsupported wasn’t an option and looked out at the forest.
The drones had gone silent. Something about the dome had knocked them dead.
Or their operators were on the wrong side of the barrier now.
The quiet after that battering noise was disorienting, like surfacing from deep water.
I could hear my own breathing, harsh and wrong, and the distant sounds of fighting that might have been the bridges or might have been my blood moving too fast through damaged places.
Through the thin thread of the mate bond, I felt Sam. Alive. Fighting. Inside the dome, safe from the army of thousands. His alarm crashed through the thread, and I knew he’d felt the working. Felt the cost. Knew he was already trying to reach me.
Too far, Shaw. You’re too far away.
I pushed off the archway. Took three steps to the top of the temple stairs and stopped because three steps was approximately my limit, and my leg buckled. So I sat there and listened.
Forest sounds. Wind in the canopy. The quiet of a territory wrapped in magic so dense the air tasted different: ozone and pine sap and something sweet and dark like night-blooming flowers.
Then…boots.
The sound cut through the quiet. Soldiers moving in formation through the undergrowth.
And a voice. “Fan out. We need to secure this position.”
Victor Kane stepped out of the tree-line.