Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 378

ARIA

The message came at half past seven, slipped under my office door while I was still working through the afternoon's administrative backlog.

It was written in Ivory's compressed handwriting on a plain piece of paper — no preamble, no greeting, just:

*Meet me at the pack gates, on the outskirts side. Eight o'clock. Bring nothing you're afraid to damage.*

I read it twice. Read it a third time. I looked at the last line with the specific attention of someone trying to determine whether it was a warning or a threat and concluding it was probably both.

I told my guard where I was going. She fell into step beside me when I left the office at ten to eight, and we walked through the pack grounds in the early evening, through the light that was going golden and long the way it did in the hour before full dark. The outskirts gate was the one that opened onto the hillside territory rather than the main approach — less trafficked, used primarily for perimeter patrols and pack members who wanted access to the training runs that wound through the lower slopes.

Ivory was already there when I arrived. She was standing just outside the gate with her healer's bag over one shoulder and wearing clothes that were not her clinic clothes — practical, fitted, the kind that didn't restrict movement. She looked at me when I arrived with the assessing quality she brought to things she was about to do something with.

"You came," she said.

"You said bring nothing I'm afraid to damage," I said. "Now I'm concerned about my guard."

"She can wait at the gate," Ivory said, which was not a request.

My guard looked at me. I nodded. She took up a position at the gate with the professional composure of someone who was going to document this entire situation and produce a report that Nina would find very thorough.

Ivory turned and started walking down the hillside path without indicating whether I was supposed to follow. I followed, because the alternative was standing at the gate watching her walk away, which didn't seem like a useful position.

The path went down the slope through the scrubby growth that lined the lower pack territory — not the manicured grounds of the main complex but the rougher land between the boundary markers and the forest proper. The light was still adequate for navigating but had the amber quality of evening, everything going warm and slightly soft at the edges.

I walked beside her and tried to figure out how to start the conversation I'd been planning since the meeting room with Kael.

The apology needed to come first. That was clear. The poly comment, the public implications, the way it had traveled through the pack like a stone through still water — Ivory had handled it with impossible composure in the central grounds, but handling something and being fine with it were different categories, and I'd learned enough about Ivory to understand that the difference mattered.

I opened my mouth.

Something flew at my face from the left.

Not large — a small dense object, moving fast, coming from behind a cluster of rocks at my two o'clock that I hadn't registered as anything except rocks. Pure reflex took over before the conscious part of my mind had processed what was happening. The lunar power surged up from wherever it lived, that warm pressurized thing in my chest, and came out through my hands in a directional blast that hit the projectile mid-flight and shattered it into fragments that rained down across the path.

I stood with my hands still raised, breathing harder than I'd been a second ago, looking at the scattered pieces of what had been — I squinted — a clay disc. The kind used in training exercises.

I looked at Ivory.

She was watching me with the expression she'd worn in the training ground when she'd been observing my practice sessions. Focused. Assessing. Not alarmed by the near-miss of a clay disc hitting me in the face, which meant she'd known it was coming.

"What," I said, "is going on."

"You have questions," Ivory said. Her voice had the matter-of-fact quality she used for clinical statements. "I have answers." She tilted her head toward the path ahead. "There are more questions between here and the bottom of the slope. Ask one, walk through a trap, I'll answer." She paused. "That technique you've been looking for in the books."

"The kinetic anchoring one," I said. "I couldn't find—"

"It's not in the books," she said. "It was never written down because the only people who knew it were children of the moon, and there haven't been enough of those in recent memory to produce documentation." She turned to the path. "You're going to learn it tonight. Or you're going to try to learn it tonight. Whether you learn it depends on how well you move."

I looked at the path ahead. At the rocks and the uneven terrain and the growing dark at the edges of the amber light and the several other clusters of rocks and scrub growth that now looked significantly less innocent than they had thirty seconds ago.

"Walk and talk," Ivory said, and started moving.

I moved with her, because standing still was apparently not an option.

The path curved to the left and descended more steeply. My awareness had shifted — the training had been doing something to it for weeks, gradually expanding the range of what I registered without looking directly at it. I could feel the shape of the next twenty feet of path in a way that was hard to describe precisely. Not vision. Something older.

"The letter," I said, because the question needed to be asked and I'd decided on honesty as the operating mode. "What Ivory arranged before I came to Shadowmere."

"What about it," Ivory said. Her voice was even.

"I overheard," I said. "In the corridor outside your clinic. I hadn't meant to — I was going to knock and I heard Kael's voice and I should have knocked anyway and I didn't, and I heard enough." I kept my eyes on the path ahead. "I know what you did. I know why you did it. I know what it cost."