64. Annabella
Chapter sixty-four
Annabella
Carlito was dead and I didn’t have time to grieve him.
Through the mate bond, Sam’s alarm hit me like a flare going off behind my ribs. He’d felt the grief slam through. Wouldn’t know the cause yet, just the shape of it, the sudden hollowing. I pulled my hand away from Carlito’s shoulder.
“Annika.” One of Carlito’s enforcers appeared at my side. Young, dark-haired, her face crumbling. “Take his body to cover. Don’t leave him in the open.”
She nodded, and Esme’s counter-spell collapsed.
I felt it before I heard it: a flare of magic that built and built and then detonated inward, like a balloon stretched past what it could hold. The shockwave was invisible to most, but to my witch-sense it lit up the western sector.
I ran.
I found her at the ward anchor, on her knees. Jem was already there, crouched beside her with one hand braced against her back, his body angled between Esme and the tree-line. He didn’t look up when I skidded to a stop.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Bad enough.”
Esme’s hands were shaking. Her wild auburn hair had gone white at the roots like bone, like everything living had been scorched right out of it.
“Esme.”
She looked up, and her eyes were wrong. The dreamy quality stripped away, replaced by something bitter and afraid. “Carlito’s dead. My Packmate is dead.”
I kneeled down next to her and said quietly, “Yes. I’m so sorry.”
Jem’s eyes tracked across the western tree-line, and I could feel the cold fury rolling off him in waves.
Esme nodded as tears flooded from her eyes.
“I’m trapped. The spell…clever-clever Kane.
He hid a hex inside the hex, a trick from Webster’s coven.
It’s a snake in a basket. Any witch who reaches in to unweave it…
” She held up her hands. They were trembling, the fingertips blackened as if she’d plunged them into fire.
“The unwinding bites back. Turns your own magic rotten.”
“Hex it all!” I grabbed her wrists. Turned them over. The veins from wrist to elbow had gone dark beneath her pale skin, black rivers visible through flesh, corrupted magic tracking through her bloodstream like ink through water. “How much?”
“Not death-much. But enough-much.” She tried to smile and it looked borrowed from someone else’s face. “Magic is all sour now. Won’t cast clean for days. Maybe weeks. The wards…I couldn’t—”
“You did enough.” Jem’s voice cut through, quiet but certain. “You did more than enough.”
The ground shuddered.
Both of us felt it: the ward network convulsing like a living thing with its spine cut. Esme’s magic was the scaffolding. Without her feeding the structure, the wards I’d reinforced hours ago were losing their foundation.
“Annabella.” Esme’s voice dropped. “I felt them. The big army. Kane’s real teeth. They haven’t bitten yet. Everything so far is just the tongue tasting.”
My stomach dropped. “How many?”
“Thousands. Moving, getting into position. Coming from the north and the west. When they bite…” She shook her head. “The bridges won’t hold. Nothing will hold. Not against that many. I’ve seen it.”
I looked at Jem. He gave a tight shake of his head.
Okay, so no help there.
“Did you see when?”
“Soon. They’ll attack in minutes. Maybe less.” Esme’s blackened fingers tightened on mine. “The Dark Goddess temple. There is old power there, but it needs both hearts to open.”
I frowned, not understanding, needing to understand if we had any hope of stopping the main force of Kane’s army. “Both hearts?”
Jem shook his head. “Both hearts. She means both kinds of power. Wolf and witch.”
She meant me. Fuck!
“I have to get her to the medics.” Jem was already lifting her into his arms as she whimpered. “Get to the temple. I’ve got her.”
Forest blurred past. My wolf lent speed to human legs, her instincts reading the terrain faster than my eyes could: root here, drop there, branch at head height, duck.
The distress calls from the drones had become just noise.
Terrible, battering noise, but noise I could push to the edge of my awareness because I had something to focus on.
Sam’s emotions washed through the mate bond in waves.
He was fighting. I could feel the sharp rhythm of combat that kept his mind locked in, but he was alive.
The Dark Goddess temple rose out of the forest like something the earth had grown instead of built.
I’d seen it marked on the maps, noted it as a strategic position.
But I hadn’t felt it until now. The structure was ancient, stone walls draped in moss and ivy where the forest still claimed the edges, but the center had been tended.
Cleared. Someone had swept the steps. The crumbling archway had been reinforced with new stone that didn’t quite match the old, and the entrance carvings—one lupine, one human, joining where the arch met—had been scraped clean of lichen.
The temple was halfway between ruin and revival, and the magic here was alive because of it.
I felt it the moment my boots hit the swept steps.
A hum deep in the stone, deeper in the earth under the stone.
Old power that was stirring. Aware. Fed by worship and hands pressed against ancient rock.
The drones hadn’t followed me here, and the sudden quiet was disorienting after the relentless noise of battle.
Inside the entrance, someone had hung a string of wooden beads carved with pup milk teeth and crescent moons.
A child’s offering. It swung gently in the air.
I pressed my palms against the entrance stone and let my magic rise.
Light bloomed from my fingers. The temple responded. The magic here ancient and warm. “Come on,” I whispered, expecting something to happen. “Come on.”
Nothing. The power sat in the stone like water in a sealed jar. Present, enormous, and absolutely useless to me.
I pushed harder. Poured magic into the stone until my arms ached and the silver-green glow crawled up past my wrists, my elbows, lighting the chamber in shifting color. Faded murals on the walls flickered in and out of visibility. The altar hummed. The air thickened.
And the temple just…held.
Like it was waiting for something I hadn’t done yet.
I pulled my hands back. Stood in the middle of the chamber, breathing hard, and I wanted to scream. Esme had sent me here. “Both hearts,” she’d said. The temple needs someone with both hearts. Well, here I was, both hearts and all, and absol-fucking-lutely nothing was happening.
I had minutes. Maybe less. Thousands of soliders massing at the borders, the forward force already inside, Carlito dead, Esme poisoned, Sam and his brothers were holding a line that wouldn’t matter once the real army hit—
I kicked a chunk of rubble across the floor. It cracked against the far wall, and I flinched at the sound.
“What do you want?” I said to the empty room. My voice came out ragged. Furious. Dangerously close to breaking. “I’m here. I came. What am I supposed to do?”
The temple didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. temples don’t talk. temples just sit there being old and powerful and completely bloody useless while people die outside.
I pressed my hands over my face and breathed. Four counts in. Seven counts hold. Eight counts out.
Think, Annabella. Think.
The Dark Goddess. What did I know? The Dark Goddess didn’t judge hearts. She judged deeds; what people did.
I looked at the altar. At the crack running through its center, at the concentric rings of symbols, at the faint scratches near the edge where someone had cleaned it recently, where small offerings had been placed and removed.
An offering. Maybe it needed an offering. Not of magic…of self.
I didn’t have a knife. So, I bit down on the heel of my palm until copper flooded my mouth and the skin split. Then I held my hand over the altar and let the blood fall. It dropped in a slow circle. Dark red on gray stone, tracing a path I hadn’t chosen.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the temple woke up.
Not gently. Not the warm hum I’d felt on the steps.
This was a roar, power surging up from the earth beneath the stone, through the altar, through the blood, through me.
Gold light erupted, racing outward ring by ring, and the air turned with the scent of night-blooming flowers and heated stone and something dark and ancient that made every hair on my body stand up.
The vision hit me.
I saw Three Rivers from above, the territory laid out like a map made of light.
The Coldbrook bridge, where Sam and his brothers fought, tiny bright sparks of movement.
The western sectors, scattered and regrouping.
The town. The forest. Every trail, every boundary, every place where this land ended and the world beyond began.
And at those boundaries, pressed against the territory’s edges on three sides, close enough to taste—
Kane’s army.
Thousands of them. Organized into assault columns, positioned at every major approach. Ready and waiting for the go signal. Waiting for the forward force to finish breaking the lines so they could flood through and end it.
The vision pulled tighter and I saw their faces. Human soldiers with weapons designed to kill Shifters. Silver-jacketed rounds. Silver-gas canisters. Incendiary charges. Flamethrowers rigged to vehicles. The clinical machinery of genocide.
The vision shifted—pulled inward, away from the borders, back into the territory’s interior—and my stomach dropped.
Victor Kane.
Already inside, with a command squad of maybe fifty soldiers, moving northeast through the forest in tight formation. He must have come in with the forward force during the initial assault and broken off while his troops engaged our lines.
And I could see where he was heading. The trail he was on wound through the deep forest in a path I recognized, because I’d just run it myself.
He was coming for the temple.
Of course he was. Kane was military to his marrow.
He’d studied Three Rivers, studied the terrain, studied everything.
The Dark Goddess temple sat deep in the forest on elevated ground with natural sightlines and only two viable approaches.
Defensible, concealed, central enough to coordinate movements across the entire territory.
It was the perfect forward command post. Secure it before the main assault, establish communications, and run the takeover from a position his enemies couldn’t easily reach.
The vision released me, and I staggered, catching myself on the altar’s edge. The gold light was still blazing, the temple’s power fully awake now, pouring through the blood-circle, pouring through me. I could feel it mapped against the territory—every border, every edge.
And I knew what I had to do.
A dome. A barrier encompassing all of Three Rivers—territory magic and my magic fused into something that had never existed before, sealing every border, every approach, every inch of Pack land.
The most powerful wall anyone had ever built, and Kane’s army of thousands would hit it and stop.
And the dome would know who belonged. Anyone claimed by Three Rivers could pass through it like walking through smoke.
Which meant our wolves could slip out, hit Kane’s army, and vanish back inside before they knew what happened.
Over and over. A thousand pinpricks until the giant bled out or gave up.
Kane would be stuck besieging a fortress that could bite back.
But when Kane arrived here, he’d find me. And if the dome wasn’t up by then, he’d put a bullet in my head and secure his command post and none of it would matter.
Of course, if I did this, inside the dome, it would still be Kane and fifty armed soldiers against whoever could get to them.
A real fight with real odds and real casualties.
But it would be fifty, not thousands. Fifty soldiers against a territory full of Shifters, witches, and humans who would fight to the death to defend each other.
I could give them that. Even if it killed me, I could give them a fighting chance instead of a slaughter.
Hex it all.
I reached for the bond one final time.
Sam.
He was there. Immediate. I felt him reach for me, felt the fear he was fighting to hold down, the love underneath it solid and stubborn and so like him it made my chest hurt.
I let him feel me, the whole truth of me, unfiltered. I sent him the smell of pine outside the Shaw House kitchen at dawn. I sent him Ellie’s laugh, high and wild and fearless. I sent him the exact way it felt when his forehead rested against mine, and the world went quiet.
Everything I stood to lose. Everything I was choosing to protect.
Then I closed the connection as much as I could, pressed my palms into the stone. And I gave the temple everything I had.