Chapter 642
KILLIAN
“She said-”
“JORDAN,” Kael said.
Finished
“I WAS LEARNING,” Jordan said, in a recreation of Ivory’s declaration, at approximately the correct volume.
Kael made the sound again.
Ivory hit Jordan.
“OW,” Jordan said, which was somewhat theatrical because Jordan’s pain tolerance was-
“I will put something in your snacks,” Ivory said.
“You wouldn’t-”
“I have access to compounds,” she said. “I have access to compounds and I have access to your snacks and I have the specific motivation of—”
Jordan’s phone buzzed.
Then Ivory’s phone buzzed.
–
Not the pack mobile — I recognized the pack mobile’s specific notification sound, had been learning all the sounds of Shadowmere’s various communication channels over the weeks. This was different. A different phone, a different sound, and Ivory’s response to the sound was immediate and complete.
The laughter context disappeared from her face.
She was reading the screen.
The car’s atmosphere changed.
Not dramatically – it was the specific change that happened when one person in a contained space shifted registers entirely and the other people in the space registered the shift before they understood it.
I watched Ivory read.
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The messages were coming in fast – I could see the screen updating in her hands, multiple messages from what looked like multiple contacts, all arriving in rapid sequence.
Her expression was doing nothing.
That was the specific tell. When Ivory’s expression was doing nothing – completely, entirely, not a microexpression in sight – that was the sign that the information being received was significant enough that all available processing was going to the information rather than to the management of what the information was producing.
“Ivory,” I said, quietly.
She didn’t look up.
More messages.
She read.
She typed back.
Kael had finally recovered enough to breathe normally and was leaning against the window with the specific exhaustion of someone who’d laughed too hard for too long and was now in the recovery phase. He looked at Ivory.
“What,” he said.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Ivory,” he said.
“Drive, Nina,” she said.
“I’m driving,” Nina said.
“Good,” Ivory said.
She was still reading.
Another message came in.
The specific way she read this one — the very slight tightening around her eyes, the specific quality that I’d learned to associate with information she hadn’t wanted to receive – told me something before anything else did.
She looked up.
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Fintened
She looked out the window.
–
At the road and the trees on either side and the specific geography of where we were two hours from Shadowmere, two hours from Cassium’s territory, the specific in-between of a journey that hadn’t arrived anywhere yet.
The phone buzzed again.
She read.
Her jaw did something.
“Ivory,” I said.
She looked at me then back at the screen.
Then one that I could partially read from my angle and which contained the words *ABORT* and *DISCOVERED* and *INCOMING.*
“Ivory,” I said, louder.
“Nina,” Ivory said. “Speed up.”
“What-” Nina started.
“Speed up,” Ivory said. “Now. Don’t slow down.”
Nina sped up without further question because Nina was Nina and when Ivory said *now* in that register, Nina moved.
“What is it,” Kael said, beside her, his voice entirely different from the laughing-Kael of three minutes ago.
“The mission is-” Ivory started.
The car hit something.
No.
Something hit the car.
The impact came from the left side with the force of something moving at a speed that shouldn’t have been possible – not another vehicle, not a collision, something that had appeared from the treeline and hit the car with the specific force of something that wasn’t subject to the usual limitations on how fast a thing could move.
Nightwalker.
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I knew the impact quality because I’d been told about nightwalker strikes and this was what they described.
The car left the road.
Not gradually. Not in the incremental way of a vehicle losing traction. It left the road the way things left roads when something had hit them hard enough to change their relationship with the ground entirely, and then the ground was in a different place than it should have been, and then the ground was above us.
The car was upside down.
The static hit at the same moment.
I didn’t know what static felt like to an ordinary person. Silver told me later that it was designed for wolves – the specific frequency of it calibrated to the wolf’s enhanced senses, the more powerful the wolf, the more devastating the effect. It was a weapon designed to work on its targets’ greatest strength.
It worked.
Kael made a sound that had nothing of the laughter in it.
A sound of pure pain, the specific quality of someone whose internal landscape had just been assaulted at the level where the wolf lived, where the integration lived, where everything that had been being built for nine months was being attacked at its foundation.
We were upside down.
The seatbelts were holding but the orientation was wrong and the pack instinct was pulling in four directions simultaneously because there were four people in this car whose wolves were all reacting to the static with varying degrees of distress.
I could feel Kain raging against it.
–
Not as badly as the others – rogue wolves had a different calibration, the isolation of twelve years outside the pack link had produced a different baseline. The static was bad. It was not as bad for me as it was for the wolves who’d been restored three days ago and were still recalibrating.
“KAEL,” Ivory’s voice, sharp and immediate, from somewhere in the upside-down interior.
He was groaning.
Not responding. The groaning of someone whose higher functions were being disrupted by something operating below the verbal layer.
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“Status,” Jordan said. His voice was strained but present. “Everyone give me status.”
“Here,” Nina said, from the front. The word was controlled in the way that Nina was controlled when things were bad.
“Here, Elite said.
“Here,” I said.
“Here,” Ivory said.
“Kael,” Jordan said.
The groaning.
“He can’t-the static is-” Ivory started.
“I know,” Jordan said.
Voices outside.
Multiple voices, organized in the specific way of people who were executing a plan rather than responding to one, the language of a coordinated attack. I heard *coordinates* and *passenger seat* and the specific phrasing of people who’d been told exactly where their target was supposed to be and were checking.
“Boss. She’s not in the passenger seat.”
A pause.
Another voice, further away, with the specific quality of authority: “Check the back. We have coordinates. She’s in the car.”
I reached for Ivory.
She was already moving.
The specific thing about Ivory in a crisis was that she moved toward the problem rather than away from it, and the problem in this case was Kael, who was the most affected by the static and who was making sounds that were communicating that the integration was under assault in a way it couldn’t hold against indefinitely.
“Hold on,” she said, to him, and the words were aimed precisely, not the general communication of someone trying to reach anyone, the words of someone who knew exactly which person needed to hear them.
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She had a pill.
Small, from somewhere in the specific inventory she kept on her person, the particular compound she’d developed for static attacks.
“Open,” she said.
He couldn’t respond properly.
Finished
She opened his mouth and put the pill in with the clinical efficiency of someone who’d done this for someone who couldn’t cooperate before and knew exactly how.
Then she put one in her own mouth.
The back door opened.
Hands reached in.
They got Ivory.
I moved toward her – the instinct was faster than the thought, Kain moving before I’d decided to move, the specific wolf response to someone reaching for someone you’re protecting but there were two of them and the static was still playing and my movement was slower than it should have been and they had her out of the car before I reached her.
“She’s here. We have her.”
A voice that had authority in it. The kind of authority that came from planning and resources and the specific confidence of someone who’d been executing operations for years.
“The rest can go,” the voice said. “We have what we came for.”
I got out of the car.
The scene outside was-
Fifty.
Approximately. The treeline had produced people in the specific organized way of a force that had been waiting and was now deployed, and the variety of what had come out of the treeline was not reassuring. Wolves I could identify by the specific quality of their presence in the surrounding space. Things I could hear but not see, which were the nightwalkers – the ones who’d hit the car, who moved at speeds that shouldn’t be possible and existed in the space between visible and not. Things that were neither, the specific compound presence of the werewitches who Ivory had briefed us on.
Fifty wasn’t an optimistic estimate.
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Ivory was being held by a werewitch.
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The dagger was at her throat – not Ivory’s dagger, a different one, the kind that someone who’d planned this specific operation would have prepared specifically for someone with Ivory’s specific capacity for making a dagger relevant.
The man who’d spoken – Derek, someone said his name and the name landed in my awareness as significant in a way I couldn’t immediately locate – looked at Nina with the expression of someone assessing a threat level.
“Let her go,” I said.
The person holding the blade looked at me.
“You’re free to go,” he said. “All of you. We’re only here for her.”
The sound of the rest of them getting out came from around the car.
–
Nina was first — she’d gotten the driver door open and was outside with the weapon bag, which told me that the weapon bag had not become a projectile in the flip, which told me that Nina had secured it before the impact or during it or in the specific half-second between impact and flip with the instinct of someone who’d been thinking about the weapon bag since she’d put it in the car.
–
Jordan was out. The static had hit him and he was showing it – a slight unevenness in his
movement, the wolf’s usual precision slightly compromised – but he was upright and he was assessing and his eyes had the specific quality they got when he was building a tactical picture fast.
Elite was out. Elite did not appear to be significantly affected by the static in the specific way that Elite was not significantly affected by most things, the composure operating at the level of something that had been trained down below what normal circumstances could reach.
Aria was out.
She had one of Ivory’s pills – the ones that had scattered when the car flipped, rolling to different sections of the inverted interior, the specific small objects that had distributed themselves across the upended geometry. She’d found one. She’d taken it. The rune marks on her hands were active in the way they got when Silver was fully present and alert.
Kael was out.
–
The pill was working. The static had been worst for him – the Alpha’s power was the static’s primary target, the specific design of the weapon – and the recovery was visible as a process rather than a conclusion, the specific stages of someone coming back from something that had gotten in deep. His aura was out. The deranged quality that neighboring packs feared and small
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pups fled from was visible in the air around him the way it was visible when something had genuinely made him dangerous rather than simply present.
Fifty people surrounded us.