53. Sam
Chapter fifty-three
Sam
Webster had ash in his hair.
That was the detail I couldn’t stop looking at.
Gray-white powder dusting his perfectly styled silver waves, making him look like he’d aged thirty years in the last ten minutes.
His suit was torn at the shoulder and smeared with something dark.
Blood, maybe. Or dirt. Hard to tell with all the debris.
I was staring at the back of his head while Gideon zip-tied his wrists, watching the great Simon Webster breathe dust and try not to choke on it.
Satisfying didn’t quite cover it.
My wolf wanted to lift a leg and piss on him, which—fair, I was evolved enough to resist the urge, but only barely.
“You’re smiling.”
I turned. Annabella stood a few feet away, and for a second I forgot about Webster entirely.
She was still glowing. Actually glowing—light spreading up her forearms and licking at the edges of her hair like she’d stuck her finger in a magical socket and hadn’t figured out how to pull it out yet.
Her shirt was more hole than fabric at this point, her left boot was missing entirely, and there was a cut on her forehead that was going to need stitches or a Shift.
She looked like a goddess who’d gotten in a bar fight and won.
“I’m smiling,” I agreed, “because your father is eating dirt and you’re standing there looking like the universe’s most terrifying nightlight. It’s a good day.”
“Nightlight?”
“Glowy. Ethereal. Probably visible from space.”
She looked down at her hands, seemed genuinely surprised to find light leaking from her skin. “Oh.”
“You didn’t notice?”
“I was distracted by the not-dying.”
“Valid priority.”
She made a face—the one where she scrunched her nose and looked about twelve years old—and I watched her concentrate. The glow stuttered, dimmed, and finally sank back under her skin. It left her looking more human, but also more worn. The light had been hiding the shadows under her eyes.
“Better?” she asked.
“Worse, actually. Now I can see how exhausted you are.”
“You need to work on your flattery.”
She closed the distance between us, and I met her halfway because my wolf wouldn’t have let me do anything else. When she pressed her forehead against my collarbone, I wrapped my arms around her and felt the bond settle into something warm and slow, like sunlight through old glass.
Through it, I caught pieces of what she was feeling. Relief, bright and sharp. Exhaustion. And underneath both, something tentative and wondering. Like she couldn’t quite believe Webster was done. That it was actually over.
“I can’t believe we did it,” she mumbled into my shirt.
“I was mostly decorative.”
“You took care of Duke, so I could deal with my father.”
“Decorative and occasionally useful.”
She snorted, actually snorted, which was not a dignified sound at all, and I loved it. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Part of my charm.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“I’m open to alternative descriptions. Roguish? Rakish? Devastatingly handsome?”
“Annoying. I was going to say annoying.”
“That’s just ‘charming’ in a grumpy accent.”
She pulled back enough to look at me, and there it was, the smile I’d been working for. Small, tired, but real.
“You’re making jokes again,” she said.
“I figured it was time.”
“Good.” She touched my face; just her fingertips against my jaw, light and careful, like she was checking I was solid. “I missed it. I missed feeling like you’re glad I’m here so I can listen to all your awful jokes.”
Something rolled over in my chest, heavy and warm. “Annabella. I’m always glad you’re here. Even when everything between us was a disaster, when you were my target, I still…I wanted to be near you. Every time. That was sort of the problem.”
“A disaster?”
“The wanting. Very distracting. Would not recommend falling for someone during an undercover op. Total nightmare for productivity.”
She laughed, soft and surprised, and I caught the sound and put it somewhere I could keep it. I was building a collection…all the times I’d made Annabella McGrath laugh. It wasn’t a long list yet, but I planned to make it extensive.
“For the record,” I added, “this is me giving you fair warning. This Sam comes with a lot of baggage. Movie references you won’t get, an opinion about the correct way to load a dishwasher, and a deeply held belief that Han shot first.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Star Wars. We’re fixing that gap in your education immediately. Well—” I glanced at Webster. “After we deal with your family. Priorities.”
“I’ve seen Star Wars.”
“You’ve seen a Star Wars. There are many. Some of them are even good.”
“Are you going to make me watch all of them?”
“Absolutely. It’s a bonding exercise. Very important for mate relationships. I read it in a book.”
“You did not.”
“I might have. You don’t know my reading habits.”
She was smiling again, bigger now, involuntary. I felt her exhaustion giving ground to something lighter. Not erased—Annabella’s exhaustion wasn’t going anywhere without about forty hours of sleep and more food than Wally or Sylvie could produce—but pushed to the edges.
This. This was what I’d missed. Not the fighting or the strategy or the desperate scramble to keep her alive. Just this. Being with her. Making her smile. Feeling like myself instead of a Council weapon.
My wolf stretched out, lazy and content, for the first time in weeks.
Which made it all the more jarring when something nagged at the edges of my awareness, and my wolf was suddenly pacing inside of me.
There was nothing here. Not the battlefield, not Webster, not any immediate threat. Something further away. A wrongness I couldn’t name, like catching a bad scent on the wind and not being able to trace it.
Paranoia. Post-combat adrenaline looking for a new target. My instincts running hot with nowhere to spend them.
“Hey.” Annabella was watching me. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere. Just—” I shook my head. “Jumping at shadows.”
She didn’t buy it. I could tell by the way her eyes stayed on my face a beat too long, her wolf reading mine.
But she let it go. Behind us, the cleanup was happening without our input.
Gideon ordering people around with the enthusiasm of a man who’d discovered his true calling in post-battle logistics, Jem and Esme moving between the wounded, Mina doing something complicated on her tablet while Zeke hovered at her shoulder.
The Quebec facility smoldered in the background, and the air smelled like burned insulation.
“What happens now?” Annabella asked. “With him?”
She didn’t look at Webster when she said it. Didn’t need to.
“He’s got information about Kane’s network that we need.”
“He won’t talk.”
“He will,” I said. “Men like Webster always think they can deal their way out. He’ll try to trade intelligence for leniency. We just have to make sure he gives us everything before he works out there’s no deal coming.”
Annabella was quiet for a moment.
“I want to be there,” she said finally. “When he’s questioned. I think he made my mom sick and I need to know what he did so Thomas can work out how to reverse it.”
“Done.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, Moonbeam. You get a front-row seat. That’s not even a question.”
She leaned into me again, and I held her. Simple as that. The most natural thing in the world, after everything complicated we’d survived to get here.
“We should get moving,” she said after a while.
“We will. I promise. Soon as we secure transport and figure out logistics, we’re heading back. Going home.”
“Home.” She tested the word like she was checking it for traps. “I don’t know if I know what that feels like.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
She pulled back to look at me, and whatever she saw in my face made something in her expression ease. “You mean that.”
“I mean it.”
“Even though I come with a traumatized mother and a four-year-old sister who can apparently turn her dresses different colors?”
“Especially because of that. The color-changing thing sounds incredible. Think she could do my shirts? I’ve been told my wardrobe lacks pizzazz.”
“Nobody has ever said that to you.”
“Gideon says it all the time.”
“Gideon thinks camo is formal wear.”
“That’s a surprisingly accurate observation.”
She laughed again—less startled this time, more like she was getting used to me—and I filed it away. Three. Three laughs. Working on four.
Then Mina’s voice cut across the clearing: “Sam? We’ve got a problem.”
The nagging feeling in my gut sharpened.
I crossed to where Mina stood, Annabella two steps behind. Mina’s fingers were still moving across her tablet, but her jaw was tight and her eyes had that intensity she got when technology was not doing what she told it to do, which Mina considered a personal affront.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been trying to raise Three Rivers for five minutes. Nothing but static.”
Esme appeared at my elbow. “Something’s building. I’ve felt it since the fight ended. Pressure, like a storm coming. But it’s not here. It’s somewhere else. Somewhere—” She broke off, shook her head.
My wolf had stopped pacing. He was frozen now, head up, ears forward, every sense straining toward a threat I couldn’t see or smell or name.
Something was wrong.
Something was very, very wrong.
I pulled out my phone. Started to dial Ryan, then stopped. If comms were being jammed—
The phone buzzed in my hand.
Unknown number.
I looked at it.
Around us, the sounds of the team regrouping, Gideon’s voice, the scrape of Jem shifting rubble, footsteps on concrete. Normal sounds.
The phone kept buzzing.
I answered.
“Congratulations.” The voice was unhurried. Clipped consonants, flat vowels, no wasted air. “That was well executed. Defeating the great Simon Webster, particularly. I would not have anticipated that.”
Every other sound dropped away.
“Kane.”
“You sound surprised. I told you I was patient, Sam. I did not say I was inattentive.”
Annabella had gone completely still beside me.
“The partial Shift,” Kane continued. “She maintained it for nearly four minutes without degradation. Every hybrid I have observed attempting similar integration loses cohesion within thirty seconds. One side overwhelms the other. The wolf collapses the magic, or the magic destabilizes the Shift. It is, by all available data, unsustainable.” A pause.
Considered. “She did not even appear strained.”
My grip tightened on the phone. “You were watching.”
“I am always watching. It is what I do.” There was no defensiveness in his tone, just fact.
“The silver-green luminescence is also unusual. Witch magic typically manifests as blue or white. Wolf aura runs gold or amber. Hers is neither. A novel synthesis.” Another pause.
“I find myself genuinely curious about the mechanism. The cellular structure. Whether it can be replicated, or whether she is simply an accident of genetics.”
“She’s not a specimen.”
“No. She is a data point I do not yet understand. That is considerably more interesting.” His tone changed. Not warmer, because nothing about Kane ran warm. But more engaged. “When the current unpleasantness concludes, I would very much like the opportunity to study her properly.”
“That’s never going to happen,” I growled.
“You sound certain.” He didn’t sound bothered by my certainty. “Time has a way of adjusting so-called certainties. You will find that out.”
I needed to get his attention off Annabella. Every second he spent talking about her was another second he was thinking about her, cataloguing her, adding her to whatever spreadsheet of threats and opportunities lived inside that skull.
“Why are you calling, Kane? Just to gloat?”
“I do not gloat. Gloating is inefficient.” A beat. Then: “Your brother is trying to reach you. You really should take that call.”
Click.
Dead air.
My phone screen lit up again almost instantly. Derek’s name.
I answered before the first vibration finished. “Hey, what’s—?”
“Sam.” One word. My name in my twin’s voice, and everything I needed to know was in the way he said it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Kane moved. He—” Static swallowed the rest.
“Derek, you’re breaking up.”
More static. Through it, I heard something that might have been gunfire.
Then his voice again, clear and strong: “Three Rivers is under attack.”