67. Sam
Chapter sixty-seven
Sam
“All eastern positions, fall back to secondary cover. Now. Do not hold the parapets.” Derek’s voice was iron. “Sam, get everyone the fuck off that bridge.”
Around me, the wolves who’d been holding the line broke for the earthworks and rubble lines twenty meters back from the bridge approach that we’d prepared as a fallback. Not as strong as the bridge chokepoints. Not even close. But at least they’d have cover from direct fire.
The first volley hit the parapets where we’d been standing three seconds later. Stone exploded. Chips of rock and fragments of sandbag sprayed across the bridge.
I threw the young Shifter behind the earthwork and jumped down next to her. “Stay low. Do not stick your head up for any reason.”
She nodded, wide-eyed, and I pressed my back against the earthwork and tried to breathe.
Talia’s blood was drying on my fingers. It would crack and flake soon.
My heart was doing something it shouldn’t have been doing—skipping, because through the thread, through that bare whisper of mate bond, something was happening.
It started in the soles of my boots. A vibration in the bedrock, in the roots, in the deep substrate of earth that had been Pack territory for centuries.
My wolf went flat inside me, ears back, hearing a frequency that had no name.
I’d grown up on this land. Learned to Shift here, learned to fight here, had my first kiss behind the woodshed at the compound when I was fourteen, and lied about it to Mason for approximately six hours before Derek ratted me out.
I knew the lines of Three Rivers the way I knew the veins in my own arms.
This territory was responding to something. To someone.
Through the thread, something ignited. Silver-green fire. I couldn’t see it but I could feel it racing along pathways in the earth I recognized. Annabella was somehow activating them.
The power spread. East along the Coldbrook.
South past the ford. West through the ruined sectors.
North to the boundary stones. I felt it tracing the territory’s ancient borders; felt it the way any wolf would, deep in the instinct that connects any Shifter to their land, but more.
Brighter. The silver-green of her magic and the gold of Pack territory braided into something that shouldn’t exist. Something that had no precedent in any text I’d ever read, any record I’d ever reviewed, any lecture Talia had ever—
Talia.
I shut that door. Slammed it. Locked it. Filed it under later with everything else I couldn’t afford to feel right now.
I tried to work out what the hell she was doing. Then I saw it. A dome. She was building a dome.
My training kicked in, and I hated every calculation it made.
A territorial barrier of this scope, channeled through a single conduit.
The energy requirements. The physiological toll.
In three hundred years of Council records, there wasn’t a documented working of this scale.
The closest approximations all ended with—
Don’t. Don’t think about how they ended.
The dome climbed. I could feel it, a membrane forming at the territory’s edges, sealing shut, enclosing everything within Three Rivers’ borders.
The thread of the mate bond was vibrating now, humming with the resonance of power being pulled through it, through her, through the impossible bridge between witch and wolf that only Annabella could be.
It was killing her. I could feel it through the thread. Not pain—she’d blocked that—but the dimming. The quiet, steady less of a person who was giving more than they had.
Stop. Annabella, stop, it’s enough—
The dome sealed shut.
The change was instant. Drones died, every one, simultaneously, their rotors cutting out mid-spin, plunging to the earth, speakers going silent mid-howl.
On the bridge, everything had gone still.
Kane’s soldiers at our end stood frozen, weapons half-raised, heads turning toward the sky, where a shimmering membrane of silver-green and gold now arced over the entire territory.
The wolves behind me stared too. For three full seconds, nobody on either side moved.
Then a rifle cracked from the eastern ridge, and we were back in the war, but a different war now. A contained one. The dome flared where the shot hit and stopped dead. No reinforcements coming for their side. The drones were dead. Whatever forces Kane had inside the dome, that was all he got.
And through the thread—through that bare, guttering thread—my mate was dying at the temple.
“Sam.” Derek dropped into the earthwork beside me. Dirt on his face, blood above his eye from a graze that had already started healing, gray eyes tracking the dome’s silver-green shimmer. “That was her.”
“Yes.”
He wiped the blood from his eye with the back of his hand. One breath. Two. I watched his brain shift gears; the brother stepping back, the tactician stepping forward.
“How many got through before it sealed?”
I forced my brain to work. Forced the analyst to override the mate who was already halfway to the tree-line. “Seventy. Maybe eighty on the other side of the bridge.”
Derek scanned the bridge. There were bodies on the stone, in the water, draped over sandbags. “We’ll mop up. These bastards are done.” He looked at me, really looked at me, the way only my twin could.
“How bad is she?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The thread was guttering and every second I stood here was a second I wasn’t running to her.
Derek read it on my face. He’d always been able to read it on my face.
“Go.” No hesitation.
I wanted to say something. Thank you, or I’m sorry, or take care of Talia’s body.
What came out was nothing, because I was already turning from the earthwork, already sprinting, and Derek didn’t need words from me anyway.
He’d felt it through the twin bond the same way he’d felt everything I’d never been able to hide from him.
“Ryan, Mason, on me,” I heard him say behind me. “We consolidate under the dome and push west. Sam’s going for Annabella.”
I didn’t hear what they said back. I was already in the trees.
I ran all out, nothing held back, legs eating ground while my wolf fed me everything he had. Speed. Stamina. Senses cranked to the point where the forest was a three-dimensional map of scent and sound and the fading trace of Annabella’s magic.
The western sectors told the story she hadn’t been able to.
I passed the ward anchor where Esme had fallen. The stone cracked clean in two, the earth around it scorched in a pattern I recognized as magical blowback. The air still tasted of burned ozone. Footprints in the mud: Jem’s, heavy and deep, carrying someone. He’d taken Esme south. Good.
I passed through the sector where Carlito’s team had held the line.
Broken branches. Spent casings. Blood in the dirt.
Werewolf blood, the copper-and-iron scent that’s different from human, richer, wilder.
A handprint in the mud where someone had fallen and been pulled up.
The thread pulled me northwest like a compass needle, and on the other end of it, Annabella’s presence was a whisper.
Still alive. Still there. Fading.
The absurd thing—the thing that would have made me laugh if I had breath for laughing—was that I could map every loss from the ground alone.
Each broken ward stone was a chapter. Each blast mark was a paragraph.
Annabella had run this same gauntlet before me, had seen it all firsthand, had watched Carlito die, and Esme fall and the wards collapse one by one, and instead of breaking, she’d run to the temple and done something impossible.
Something that was killing her.
Something I was going to be very, very angry about when she was alive enough for me to yell at her.
If she was alive enough.
Don’t. Keep running.
The temple finally rose in front of me. Then I smelled them.
Humans. Gun oil. Silver ammunition. Body armor. Dozens of them; forty, fifty, hard to count at a run, but enough to make the math ugly.
My stride didn’t break.
I needed a plan, and I had about fifteen seconds before I cleared the tree-line and they saw me.
Half-circle formation across the temple grounds. And at the center of that half-circle, on the temple steps —
Annabella.
Sitting. Because standing wasn’t an option anymore. I could see it even from here: the locked spine, the braced shoulders, the way she held herself up through will alone. The dome shimmered overhead, silver-green and impossible, and it was bleeding her dry.
Fifty soldiers. One wolf. Silver ammunition. Open ground between the tree-line and my mate.
Bad odds. Terrible odds. The kind of odds where any Council analyst would stamp the file UNRECOVERABLE and move on.
Good thing I’d stopped being part of the Council the moment I saw her.