“Ma—”
“Get to the lodge. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
“I’m not leaving—”
“Cameron. Go. NOW!”
He goes. I turn to face the eastern breach, and the white fire comes to my hands. Not the controlled, measured burn I used at the parley. The raw, desperate flood of a mother standing between her child and the beasts who’ve come for him.
The first purist wolf hits my fire line and yelps, veering sideways, fur smoking. The second tries to flank left. I catch him with a whip of flame that sends him rolling. The third and fourth come together, and I meet them with a wall of white heat that turns the predawn air to shimmering glass.
But there are too many. Twelve wolves, fanning out, and I can’t hold a perimeter this wide. I’m burning too hot, too fast, spending magic at a rate I can’t sustain. The rational part of my brain knows this, knows they’re running me down, making me spend everything I have so that when the real strike comes, I’m empty.
The real strike.
I spin. Two Syndicate operatives have materialized from behind the equipment shed—not dragons, humans, body armor, dart rifles at their shoulders. They were already inside. Pre-positioned. Waiting while the three-pronged assault drew every wolf to the breaches.
I throw fire at the nearest one. He dodges—fast, trained, expecting it—and the second one raises his rifle.
The dart takes me in the neck.
Small. Precise. Sinking into the muscle between my throat and shoulder with a cold sting that spreads outward like ice water in my veins. The effect is immediate and absolute. My magic stutters. Not fading; severed. The white fire dies in my hands as if someone closed a valve. My knees buckle. The compound spins, and the ground comes up to meet me.
Anti-magic suppression compound. Syndicate biotech, designed specifically for wolf-witch physiology. I’ve heard about this. Months of intelligence work, and I know exactly what’sin my bloodstream: a chemical cocktail that blocks the neural pathways between the magical core and the motor systems. Paralysis for the magic. Sedation for the body. Tailored. Targeted.
They came for me. Specifically. Personally. This isn’t a raid. It’s a kidnapping.
I hit the ground face down. The gravel bites my palms. I try to push up, and my arms fold. I try to shift, and my wolf slams against a wall inside me, howling, trapped. The connection to my magic—the thing that’s been woven through me since birth, as natural as breath—is gone. Not dormant. Gone. The absence is worse than pain.
Through blurring vision, I see Cameron. He’s twenty feet from the lodge door. Running. Almost there. Then two more operatives step from behind the building’s corner; they were inside too, a second pre-positioned team, and understanding crashes through me: the lodge was never safe. They knew we’d run for it. They put men at both ends of our path.
Cameron’s fire erupts. Even drugged and terrified, his instinct is to fight. Corvus blood, Rourke stubbornness, the raw survival reflex of a boy who spent six months in Syndicate captivity. He takes down the first operative with a blast that lifts the man off his feet and throws him into the lodge wall. The second operative ducks, rolls, comes up with a dart rifle.
The dart hits Cameron in the thigh. He staggers. The fire flickers—gold, copper, gold—and dies. He drops to one knee. The operative catches him before he falls.
“No!” My voice comes out as a croak. The drug is flooding my system, and the world is going dark at the edges. I feel hands on me. Lifting. Two operatives, professional, efficient, carrying me like a piece of equipment. My head lolls, and I see the compound upside down. Fire at the south gate, wolves fighting, Petra inhalf-shift taking down a purist, Jonas coordinating the north defense.
Nobody sees us.
The diversion worked. Every Frostbourne wolf is engaged, fighting the visible assault, and behind their turned backs, a four-man extraction team is carrying the alpha’s mate and son toward the eastern border.
Merric!
I reach for him. The bond is there, but the connection is dimming, the drug smothering it. I can feel him—the fury of a wolf in combat, the heat of his fight at the south gate—and I try to scream through the link. Try to push everything I have into it:East side, extraction team, Cameron, find us, find us. FIND US!
I don’t know if it reaches him. Something inside me flickers. Fades. His presence goes from a roar to a murmur to a whisper, and the whisper is the worst thing I’ve ever felt. Worse than the dart, worse than the paralysis. The man I love, disappearing from inside my chest. The connection that survived through so many years of separation going dark because someone designed a chemical specifically to take it from me.
The last thing I see clearly is Cameron. Limp in the arms of two operatives, his head hanging, his fire extinguished. My boy. The boy I hid and lied for and died for and came back from the dead for. Being carried into the trees like cargo.
I try to move. My body doesn’t answer.
The darkness takes me in stages. First the edges, then the center, then everything. And the very last thing I feel, in the final second before the drug pulls me under, is Merric.
A sudden flare through the dying bond. His awareness hitting like a freight train, the realization that something is wrong, that I’m not where I should be. His fear. His rage. The sound of a wolf howling, somewhere far behind me, and the howl isn’t a battle cry.
It’s my name.
Then nothing.
