62. Sam
Chapter sixty-two
Sam
The first one came at me low, aiming for my legs.
Bad move.
I let him come. Shifted my weight at the last second, felt the air move as he committed to the tackle, and brought my elbow down where his skull met his spine.
The wet crack of his face meeting stone was louder than it should have been.
Or maybe the bridge just had good acoustics.
He slid two inches in the blood-slick and didn’t get up.
My wolf wanted to gloat. I was already turning.
Behind me, a rifle cracked and the round hit the ward.
Thank you, Esme.
The next solider was better; came in with a silver-edged knife, fast overhead arc aimed at my throat, the kind of committed strike that said “I’ve opened someone up with this before.
” I stepped inside the swing before it peaked, caught his wrist, and redirected the arm in the direction it already wanted to go.
Physics did the rest. The knife spun free and skipped across the wet stone, silver edge throwing sparks where it kissed the rock.
His eyes went wide—just for a heartbeat, just long enough—and I drove my forehead into the bridge of his nose. He folded.
“Sam, behind you!” Ryan’s shout cut through the noise.
I dropped and rolled without thinking, felt the whistle of a blade pass over my head, then swept my leg out and took the wolf who’d tried to gut me from behind.
He hit the shallows at the bridge’s edge but didn’t go down.
Caught himself on one knee, water churning around his thighs, and came back up with a second blade I hadn’t seen.
Fast. Too fast. The silver edge caught my hip before I could twist clear, a line of cold fire that made my wolf snarl.
I grabbed for his knife hand and my fingers closed around his forearm plate instead.
The silver woven into the armor bit into my palm like I’d grabbed a fistful of wasps.
My skin blistered on contact—I could smell it cooking—but I held on because the alternative was a blade in my gut.
We locked there for a second, his boots sliding on the riverbed, my boots sliding on blood-slick stone. He was strong. But I was a Shifter.
I wrenched sideways, dragged him off the ledge he’d braced against, and the current caught his legs. He went under, fighting, clawing for the bridge, for me, for anything solid. The river pulled him into the deep channel and I watched long enough to make sure he wasn’t coming back.
The main bridge had become exactly what Derek predicted: a chokepoint, a kill zone, a place where Kane’s numbers meant nothing. They could only come at us three or four abreast, and we’d fortified our position with everything short of a neon sign that said, “Welcome to Three Rivers, Now Fuck Off.”
Esme’s wards shimmered at the bridge’s edge, invisible until something hit them, then flickering like heat haze.
I’d watched the first volley of silver-tipped rounds flatten against that barrier like they’d hit plate glass.
Grenades detonated harmlessly three meters short of the line, shrapnel raining into the river.
Kane’s soldiers had figured it out fast: if they wanted to take the bridge, they had to cross it on foot.
And on foot, three abreast, against wolves with enhanced strength and reflexes?
Good luck with that.
Ilona, a twenty-year-old Three Rivers Shifter who was all nervous energy and too-big ears, had taken position on my left. Her technique was raw, more instinct than training, but she fought with a desperate determination that only comes from having something worth protecting.
“Good,” I called to her between strikes. “Keep your guard up. Don’t overextend.”
She nodded once, teeth bared, and drove back another attacker.
Another solider filled the gap in front of me.
He came in swinging, and I ducked it instead of blocking—don’t touch the armor, don’t grab the armor, find the gaps—and when his arm was still high from the follow-through, I drove my fist up into the soft space under his arm where the chest plate separated from the shoulder piece.
Armpit. No armor in the world protects the armpit when you’re mid-swing.
He grunted. Didn’t go down. Barely even shifted his weight. Just absorbed the hit and came at me again, tighter this time, elbows in, not giving me the same opening twice.
Shit.
He backed me up three steps with a combination of jabs.
I dodged the first two strikes, ate the third on my shoulder, and had to throw myself sideways to avoid the fourth.
My hip hit the bridge railing. Stone crumbled under the impact.
He closed the distance. I had nowhere to go but the river or through him.
So through him it was.
I feinted low, and when he dropped to cover, I snapped a kick into the side of his knee.
The joint wasn’t armored, and I felt something give under my boot.
He listed sideways, caught himself, kept coming on the bad leg because these bastards didn’t know how to quit.
I hit the knee again. Same spot. He went down to one knee, and I drove my elbow into the base of his skull with everything my wolf could put behind it.
He hit the stone. Stayed there.
I used the half-second it bought me to scan the line.
Kane’s wolves kept coming. Tactical gear pouring out of the tree-line in disciplined waves, each one replacing the man before him like rounds feeding into a magazine. They hit the bridge’s edge and went down, or they died there.
But the numbers weren’t slowing down.
Through the bond, I felt Annabella, a distant hum of focus and controlled aggression.
She was fighting too, somewhere west of here, doing her thing with Esme.
My wolf wanted me to run to her, to stand between her and anything that might hurt her, but I shoved that instinct down.
She didn’t need protecting. She needed me to hold this line so they couldn’t flank her from the east.
Besides, she’d kick my ass if I abandoned my position to play white knight.
That thought almost made me smile.
“Northern crossing is holding,” Derek’s voice came through my earpiece, calm and measured despite the war happening around us. “Southern ford secure. Sam, status?”
I grunted, ducking under a wild swing. “Making friends. You know how I am at parties.”
A sharp exhale from Derek that might have been a laugh.
The attacks came in waves, shock troops first, expendable and desperate, then more disciplined fighters behind them.
Kane’s strategy was obvious: overwhelm with numbers, probe for weakness, break through wherever the line cracked.
Standard military thinking. Effective, if you had unlimited bodies to throw at the problem.
And Kane had plenty of bodies.
But we had the river, the bridges, and four Shaw brothers who refused to yield.
Mason appeared at my flank like a ghost, moving through the battle. He dropped an attacker with two strikes—one to the throat, another to the knee—and moved on without breaking stride.
“Show off,” I muttered.
“Efficient,” he corrected, already gone.
The copper tang of blood hung thick in the air.
Every impact jolted up my arms, shoulders aching from the constant block-strike-move.
My wolf pushed against my skin, wanting to Shift, wanting to tear into our enemies with teeth and claws instead of fists.
I held him back. Shifting now would cost precious seconds, leave me vulnerable in that moment between forms.
Ryan didn’t have that problem.
When three soldiers rushed him at once, he let the Shift take him mid-motion, a blur of bone and muscle reshaping, exploding into his True Wolf form with a roar that had my ears ringing.
He tore into the attackers before they could adjust, powerful jaws snapping shut on one while clawed hands shredded another. The third tried to run.
He didn’t get far.
Then the first wave broke.
Kane’s forces pulled back from the bridges, dragging their wounded, leaving their dead in the shallows. The river carried bodies downstream, and I made myself not look at them.
I stood at the center of the main bridge, chest heaving, blood on my knuckles, some of it mine, most of it not. Around me, the Three Rivers Pack caught their breath, tended wounds, watched the tree-line with wary eyes.
“We held,” Ryan growled, his voice deeper, rougher in this form. “First wave repelled. Kane’s lost two dozen, maybe more.”
“And us?” Mason asked through comms.
“Nobody. First blood to Three Rivers.”
Mason started to respond. I never heard what he said.
The sound came from everywhere at once; from above, from behind, from inside my own skull. My wolf recognized it before I did, and every instinct I had went white-hot.
Pack distress calls. Pouring from dozens of drones that hung above us like black wasps, already inside our perimeter, already behind our lines.
Howls of wolves in agony, broadcasting from the drones in a wall of sound that hit our lines.
Wrong. The calls were wrong, too perfect, too sustained, the kind of sound a wolf makes when they’re being torn apart, when their Pack is dying around them.
But underneath that wrongness…familiar voices. Ryan’s, twisted into something agonized. Mai’s cry, broken and desperate. Sofia screaming Derek’s name.
Kane had cloned our voices and layered a spell underneath them—something that bypassed thought and spoke straight to wolf instinct.
The effect on our line was immediate and devastating.
Shifters who’d been solid as stone seconds ago wavered, heads snapping around, trying to search out those that needed help.
Defensive formations fractured as instinct overrode training—Pack in danger, Pack dying, have to help, have to run.
Wolves broke and sprinted toward the enemy lines, following the lie in the air.
The young wolf beside me dropped to her knees, hands over her ears, shaking.
“It’s not real!” I grabbed her shoulders, trying to cut through the noise. “Listen to me. It’s not real! It’s a recording!”
But even as I said it, my own wolf was fighting my control. Every fiber of his being wanted to answer that call, wanted to find the wolves who sounded like they were being slaughtered. I pushed against him with everything I had, knowing that giving in meant death.
I pushed calming pheromones outward with everything I had.
I could feel it working on the wolves closest to me, their panic easing slightly, their eyes clearing.
But I couldn’t reach everyone. The wolves at the edges of our formation were already scattering, running blind into the open ground where Kane’s forces waited.
“All units, hold position!” Derek’s voice cut through comms. “The distress calls are false! I repeat, the calls are fake! Hold your positions!”
Too late for some.
Through the breaking formation, I saw movement in the eastern tree-line. Kane’s forces rushing forward toward the gaps our wolves had torn in our own line.
“Derek,” I said, still pushing calm toward every wolf I could reach. “Tell me you’re seeing this.”
“I see it.” Steady voice, though I felt his alarm. “Breaches at multiple points. Western sectors taking coordinated hits. Market district under attack.”
I reached for my thread of connection with Annabella. Found her tangled in determination and desperate focus. She was fighting hard—trying to dampen the effect of whatever spell was woven into those calls—but I could feel her straining against something too big for one person to hold.
“She’s trying to counter it,” I said. “It’s not enough.”
Ryan opened his mouth and howled. Everyone froze; It was the true call of an Alpha, reaching down into our DNA and trying to call his wolves back to formation, but even his territorial power couldn’t compete with the artificial agony pouring from the sky.
Mai was at his side, adding her voice to his, two Alphas trying to anchor their Pack against a storm of manufactured terror.
“Orders?” Mason asked through my earpiece.
“Hold what we can,” I replied. “Fall back to secondary positions if necessary. And Mason, Derek, Ryan—”
I looked around the battlefield, at the incoming soldiers, at our lines with Shifters breaking formation and running toward the danger and being cut down one by one.
“Stay alive. Whatever it takes.”