Her.
I use her as my focal point in the chaos warring within me.
And then Noa’s voice cuts through everything.
Ren, they’re here. Cathal and the coven. It’s starting.
Fear sinks its claws in deep, raking through me with lethal and rehearsed ease. Fear for what this means. For how long we’ve been bracing for this moment and still feeling unprepared. Fear for my pack. For the people who trusted me to keep them safe. Fear for my mate.
Noa. Stay there. Stay in the house. Gather whoever’s with you and get to the apartment above the garage. The closet—the one we talked about. Lock it from the inside and stay quiet. I’m on my way back to you.I don’t soften my tone. I don’t try to hide the command in it like I usually do for her. Now isn’t the time.I’m on my way back to you, baby.
The connection goes quiet after that, not gone but muted. I just hope it means she’s doing exactly what I told her to do. I push harder, lungs burning, muscles screaming as I force my wolf to give me everything he has. And then I still demand more. When this attack truly begins, I won’t be standing anywhere that isn’t directly in front of my mate.
My responsibility. Her shield. Always.
I never understood why my father insisted on that panic room when he built the addition years ago. At the time, Ibelieved it was just overkill. Since, I’ve concluded it was just another overlooked paranoia-induced symptom brought on by the Moon Madness he’d been secretly fighting for years.
But Noa and I talked about it. Planned for it. If things ever went wrong, she’d know exactly where to go and what to do.
I don’t question my father’s motives now, if anything I’m thankful for them.
Our minds’ connection dulls to a low hum, still there but distant. The fact that no new spikes of distress have come from her keeps me from going fucking feral with my own fear as I keep pushing my body harder to reach Noa.
I hate that there’s nothing unfamiliar about this feeling—the run to my mate when danger is closing in.
The ridge rises fast beneath my paws as the incline grows steeper, and the green glow intensifies. It saturates the air until everything it touches is stained by its ominous color.
Feet from cresting the top of the ridge, her voice finally cuts back in.
I’m not there anymore, I left with Siggy to go to the healer’s cabin for supplies an hour ago. We were on our way back when we heard the scream and felt it.There’s a pause and another dose of my mate’s fear slithers between my ribs.That was dark magic, Ren.
I don’t know which thought digs in deeper. That Noa’s out in the open, exposed, when she was always meant to be tucked away somewhere fortified or that her voice carries the confirmation I didn’t want. Dark magic. Tanith’s coven has arrived.
Noa’s out there in the woods, trying to get home, and they’re somewhere between her and me.
And I decide that’s the winner, that’s the thought that digs deepest and leaves me cold in a way I’ve never felt before.
You need to run, Noa. Now. Get home and get to the panic room. I’m coming?—
Whatever else I was going to say never makes it out because I reach the top of the ridge and what lies below no longer resembles the territory I know.
The ward Amara once placed, the one that was meant to be an invisible motion detector stretched across miles, has been forced into something else entirely. A wall. The shape it carves across the earth is imperfect, a rough ring around the core of the territory where most of the pack cabins sit, along with the school, the lodge, and out on the outer edge, is my house. Green flame roars straight up from the ground to form it, glaring bright and nearly fifty feet tall.
From this distance, I can feel it pulsing with the same inky power that slammed into us moments ago.
It’s the source of the wrongness. The source of the dark magic polluting the air.
And it stands between me and my girl.
The descent is a blur.Danny and Mercer thunder down the slope with me, snow tearing up beneath our paws as we close the distance.
Up close, the green flames don’t give off heat. They don’t move the way fire should. They hold their shape, locked into the outline the dark magic has chosen, humming with a low, crushing pressure that makes my skin want to recoil from my body.
I don’t touch it.
Ican’t.
This isn’t a barrier that can be prodded or tested for weak spots. Standing this close, I feel how the power threads through it, how it’s in a constant state of reaching. Searching for something to seize. To drag in close. Something to feed on. It would tear me apart, strip muscle from bone, scatter me until there was so little left, not even a gifted healer like my mate could help.
