Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 385

ARIA

"Reach Kael," she said. "Through the bond. Not the mindlink — Shadowmere doesn't have a pack mindlink. Use the bond. You're his mate. He can sense you through it if you reach for him directly."

"I've never done that," I said.

"You can," she said. "Find him in the bond the way you found the light — not from the outside, from the inside. From the anchor."

"What do I say?"

"Show him where we are," she said. "Send a picture. The hillside, the flat ground, the tree line." She gripped my arm with her working hand. "And Aria — call for Kael. Not his wolf. Kael. They are not the same. The wolf will come running and might make the situation worse before it makes it better. Kael will think first."

"They're not the same person?" I said.

"They're the same being," she said. "But when there's threat, the wolf takes the lead. You need the man. Call the man by name. Make it specific."

I looked at her. "How do you know this?"

"Three years," she said simply. "I know how they work."

The figure was moving again.

I closed my eyes for one second. Found the anchor — warm, present, settled. Found the bond alongside it, which I'd felt but never reached into, a thread that ran from somewhere in my chest outward and kept running, further than I could follow, in the direction of the pack.

I reached into it.

*Kael,* I thought. Not the wolf. The man. *Kael. I need you.*

I pushed the picture with it — the hillside, the flat ground, the tree line. The figure moving toward us. Ivory's bad shoulder. The dark of the lower slope.

I felt the bond carry it. Like dropping something into a current and watching it move.

Whether it reached him I couldn't tell.

"I tried," I said, opening my eyes.

"Good," Ivory said. She'd pulled her dagger with her working hand. The left arm was still wrong. "Now — the darkness. Do you still have the light dimming?"

"Yes," I said.

"There are traps on the slope," she said. "The ones from the training exercise. The crossbows are still loaded."

I looked at her. "You want me to—"

"Darken our path," she said. "All of it. From here to the tree line on the right side — not the side she came from, the opposite side. And then we run."

"The traps are on that path," I said.

"Exactly," she said.

I understood.

I pulled the darkness. Gathered the moonlight from the path ahead, drew it back, thinned it, concentrated it somewhere else. The right side path went dim and then dimmer and then deeply, convincingly dark.

"Now," Ivory said, and grabbed my hand with her working one, and we ran.

The flat ground passed under my feet fast. I could feel the path without seeing it — the anchor and the expanded awareness working together, the ground's shape present in my perception even without light to reveal it. Ivory ran beside me and I kept her hand because her shoulder was bad and the terrain was uneven and one stumble would put her down.

The figure behind us registered what we were doing and moved.

Fast. She was faster than she'd seemed at rest, crossing the flat ground with the specific speed of someone whose power enhanced their movement.

We hit the dimmed path and the first trap mechanism activated immediately — the spring system that had been launching clay discs for the past hour. Not discs now. Ivory had said the crossbows were loaded.

I heard the sound of release. Two bolts, crossing the path at angles designed to hit something moving through it.

The figure was moving through it.

The sound she made when the bolts hit wasn't the sound of someone killed. She had power and it had protected her somewhat — but silver tipped bolts at close range through an active trap mechanism were different from a targeted attack, and she went down with the sound of someone in significant pain.

Ivory pulled me behind a rock formation on the right side and we went down together, breathing hard, my back against the stone and the darkness wrapped around our position.

The figure was screaming. Not dying. Injured and furious and very much still present.

Ivory's breathing was ragged in ways that weren't just from running. The shoulder was serious. More serious than she was showing.

"The bond," she said, between breaths. "Did it work?"

"I don't know," I said. "I felt it move but I don't know if it reached him."

"It worked or it didn't," she said. "Either way—"

The howl came from above.

From the slope. From somewhere up in the pack territory, moving down fast. Not one howl — several. The sound of wolves who'd been sent rather than who'd come casually, who were moving at speed toward a specific location.

Ivory let out a breath that was longer than the others. The kind of breath that had been held for a while.

"They're coming," she said.

I sat behind the rock in the dark with my back against the stone and my scratched forearm and the warmth of the pearl in my pocket and the specific feeling of someone who'd just discovered what the bond was actually for.

Not just the magic. Not just the curse-breaking.

The line between us that could carry an image of a hillside and a tree line and a damaged shoulder to a man who was somewhere in a building going through coalition correspondence, and bring him running.

I'd called for Kael.

Not his wolf.

Kael had come.

And he'd brought the wolves with him.

I held Ivory's working hand in the dark and waited for the sound to get closer, and the figure on the path was not moving quickly anymore, and help was coming down the slope at speed.

It was enough.

For now, it was enough.