Chapter 643

KILLIAN

:

97

Finished

Approximately. The wolves I could count. The nightwalkers I could hear – the specific sound of something moving at speeds that made vision unreliable, the particular frequency of supernatural velocity that registered as sound before it registered as anything else. They’d hit the car. They were still there. I couldn’t see them and I didn’t need to.

Fifty was a conservative estimate.

“You’re surrounded,” the man holding Ivory said. “Seven of you. Fifty of us. The math is simple. We take her, you go home.”

Ivory looked at Kael.

Kael looked at Ivory.

Something passed between them in the specific way things passed between them – the twelve years, the shorthand, the specific communication of two people who’d been in situations and had developed a language for them.

“Let her go,” Nina said.

She had the bag.

The weapons bag. The one with the wolfsbane rounds and the moon bullets that had been in the boot of the car that was now upside down, and Nina had somehow – Nina had the bag, which was Nina, which was the specific quality of Nina in a crisis, which was that she identified what mattered and she had it.

“Let her go,” Nina said again. “Or I will make you regret the specific decision not to.”

“You’re seven,” Derek said. “We’re fifty. What exactly is the plan here?”

He said it like someone who’d done the math and was confident in the result.

Nina said: “I go first.”

She threw the dagger before the sentence was fully out.

The wolfsbane dagger.

The wolf it hit dropped.

1/6

10:09 Fri, Oct 16

Chapter 643

87

Finished

Not staggered – dropped. The concentration that Ivory had developed, the fourteen-point- three that nobody was to confuse with fourteen or fifteen, doing what it was designed to do in the time it was designed to do it.

The field opened up.

Everything at once.

Nina moved like she’d been waiting for this her entire life.

She had been waiting for this her entire life.

The pump-action was out and she was racking it with the specific efficiency of someone for whom the motion had been practiced until it was below conscious control, and the sound of it – the specific mechanical sound of Nina’s armoury finally being used for its purpose – was something I was going to remember for a long time.

The first shot.

The second.

The third.

Whatever she was hitting was either slowing, flying, or turning to something that was not an active threat, depending on the species. The moon bullets specifically – when she loaded them, the change in the sound of what she was hitting was distinct.

Dust.

That was the specific outcome for the nightwalkers. The moon bullets and the nightwalkers and the result was dust, the specific complete ending of something that had been moving at impossible speed moments before.

The field was not the border battle.

The border battle had been two hundred wolves and six witches and the full power of Vela’s network deployed against a pack that had been at reduced strength. This was fifty-odd mixed species – wolves, werewitches, nightwalkers – deployed against seven people who were two hours from any backup.

The math should not have worked.

The math worked because of what the seven people were.

Nina with the weapon bag was – I had no other word for it – extraordinary. She had the wolf strength back, fully operational, and she had the armoury weapons, the wolfsbane rounds and

2/6

10:09 Fri, Oct 16

Chapter 643

เรีย

Finished

the moon bullets and the specific concentrated tools she’d been maintaining for years, and she was using all of it with the specific efficiency of someone who’d been waiting for this exact opportunity and had prepared for it comprehensively.

She rolled.

Under a nightwalker’s attack, she rolled, and she came up with the pump action and she recocked and she fired and the thing that had been a nightwalker was no longer a nightwalker in any functional sense. She recocked. She fired. She was moving between shots, the body not staying still long enough to be targeted, the specific mobility of someone who’d trained for exactly this — the armoury not as a stationary resource but as something you moved with.

–

Jordan was fighting with his claws.

The wolf strength restored, the intelligence operative’s tactical assessment running in real time, he was doing what Jordan did in physical conflict which was not the front-line approach but the effective one – finding the gaps, moving through them, using the pack link to know where everyone else was and therefore where the enemies weren’t. He was not the most powerful fighter in the field. He was the most efficient.

Elite was ripping things apart.

I don’t mean this as a metaphor. Elite, in a fight where the tactical assessment had concluded that maximum force was appropriate, was doing the thing that Elite’s specific training and physical capacity and the complete absence of what most people would call squeamishness produced. They were indiscriminate in the specific way of someone who’d decided that every enemy in the field was the same enemy and was treating them accordingly.

An arm. A head. Several of the latter.

The enemies who were close to Elite were not close to Elite for long.

Aria was holding a shield.

–

Not the full moon shield of the border battle the targeted version, the precision work she’d been developing, the shield deployed at the specific points where the attack was coming for the people she needed to protect. When a nightwalker came for Kael who was still partially recovered, the shield stopped it. When one came for me from the blind side, the shield stopped it. She was using the lunar power as a defensive resource and managing the output with the care of someone who knew that managing it was the difference between having it for the whole fight and running out.

Kael was ripping hearts.

This was literal and it was the specific quality of Kael in a fight where the root had been activated and the deranged aura was operational and he was furious in the specific way that made twenty werewitches seem like a manageable obstacle. He was targeted. He was moving

3/6

10:09 Fri, Oct 16

Chapter 643

Fitushed

toward Ivory through the field with the absolute single-minded focus of someone who had one objective and was eliminating everything between himself and it.

I was fighting.

The rogue wolf’s relationship with combat was different from the pack wolf’s. I didn’t have the coordination of years of working with these people. What I had was twelve years of operating alone in situations where operating alone was the only option and you learned to do it at full capacity or you didn’t.

Kain was fully present.

The rogue wolf’s specific quality – the absence of the pack habits that made pack wolves predictable, the patterns that enemies who fought wolves often knew – was working for me. I didn’t move the way a pack wolf moved. The enemies who’d calibrated their approach for the pack were not calibrated for what I was doing.

A werewitch came at me.

I remembered what Ivory had said about werewitches.

The emotional state of genuine fury.

I thought about twelve years.

About my mother and my father and the gate wall and the exile and the network and everything that had been taken and everything I’d been trying to build back, and the specific fury of someone who’d spent twelve years paying for something they hadn’t chosen and was not going to lose what they’d found because of someone who’d sent fifty people at a car on a road.

The werewitch went down.

I noted this with the specific quality of someone who’d received information and was filing it the anger worked exactly as Ivory had described, the calibration of the werewitches’ defenses not accounting for someone at that specific level of genuine fury.

Filed.

Useful.

Then Hale appeared.

He came from the tree line with the specific quality of someone who’d been watching rather than participating and had decided the participation was now required. He was not what I’d expected — not the imposing physical presence that a name like his suggested. Medium height, controlled, the specific quality of someone who operated through resources rather than

4/6

10:09 Fri, Oct 16

Chapter 43

through personal force.

But the force was there.

He directed it at Kael.

07

Finished

“Where do you think you’re going,” he said, and he started the root activation in the specific way that was different from the casters – direct, personal, the specific capacity of someone who understood the curse’s architecture because he’d commissioned it.

Kael went to his knees.

The sound he made.

I’d heard Kael in the training yard. I’d heard him in the pack meeting and the council session and the garden and the corridor conversations. I’d heard the Alpha voice and the managed voice and the voice he used when he was saying something he meant fully.

I hadn’t heard this.

The sound of someone whose wolf was being turned against them while the person inside was trying to fight it, and the fighting and the being-turned-against were happening in the same body simultaneously.

“KAEL,” Ivory yelled.

She was still being held. The blade at her neck.

She was pulling against the grip with everything she had and the grip was better than everything she had, and she was furious in the specific way of Ivory furious which was white and cold and total.

“You fucker,” she said, to Hale. “Let him go. Let him go, leave him alone-”

Aria tried to get to Hale.

He blood-ended her.

I’d seen Aria use blood-bending in the border battle – the instinctive version, the one that arrived in moments of acute threat. I’d never seen blood-bending used against her. The specific telekinetic version, the physical power leveraged as a weapon rather than a skill, and she went into the road hard enough to produce a sound that made the rune marks on her hands flare.

“Stay down,” Hale said. “You’ve been a wolf for less than a year. I’ve been doing this for thirty.”

Aria got up.

5/6

10:09 Fri, Oct 16

Chapter 641

160

Finished

She got up with the specific quality that I was learning was her specific quality – not fast, not easy, but up. The shield reformed around Kael, attenuating the root activation at the edges.

Ivory snapped.

The person holding her from the front had a neck.

The neck was not attached to the person for long.

Aria was trying to get up.

The shield was still holding – partially, the specific version of a shield held by someone who was running on will – and she was trying to get back up.

Hale let go of Kael.

Or rather, Hale redirected his attention, and without Hale’s full focus on the root activation, Kael’s integration had enough space to push back. The root activation was still running – I could feel it in the link – but Kael was pushing against it with the integration that had been building for months and the integration was holding.

Barely.

“You can only suppress it for so long,” Hale said. His voice was conversational. The specific tone of someone delivering information they were confident about, “Without removal, the suppression stops working eventually. You know this. Tonight has demonstrated it quite thoroughly.”

Ivory had gotten partially free.

The dagger was still close. She’d moved the angle of it – not away from her neck, but the angle, the specific positioning that meant if it was used it would be less effective than intended. Small adjustments. The ones that were available.

The next person in front of her was a werewitch.

She killed the werewitch.