Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 449

ARIA

Through the link, the updated picture — the main force had committed to the approach now, the traps having taken their toll but not stopping the advance, the full engagement on both flanks active. Andrew was coordinating the eastern line with the specific precision of someone who'd been waiting three years for this infrastructure and was using it with every ounce of capability he had. Louis's western wolves were executing movements that required the kind of coordination that individual fighters couldn't produce without communication.

A witch emerged from the main force's left side.

I saw the light signature before the blast formed — the specific warmup quality of a targeted attack building, the visible shimmer of something about to be directed at Andrew's eastern flank from an angle they weren't covering.

I shot first.

The lunar blast went out with the focused quality that had been developing over weeks of training — not the maximum, not the scatter-pattern of the full release. Targeted. The blast hit the witch's prepared attack and disrupted it before it fully formed, the two energies canceling each other in a way that produced a sharp crack and a flash that lit the tree line briefly.

The witch looked toward me.

Through the link: thirty wolves noting my position relative to the new threat and adjusting their awareness accordingly.

"Witches," Santos said.

"I see them," I said.

"Screaming," he said.

I found the anchor's depth, found the specific channel that the scream came from — deeper than the blast, more personal, requiring a different kind of access. The first time I'd produced it had been training, on the lower slope, aimed at Ivory who'd been prepared for it and had still stopped for six seconds.

I screamed.

The sound that came out wasn't my voice. It had my voice in it — the same way the blast had my power in it — but it was more than that, it was the anchor expressing itself in the sound register rather than the light register, and it went through the night air and hit the witch and the two fighters near her with a force that wasn't physical but was entirely real.

The witch stopped.

Five seconds. Six. Seven.

"Different from Ivory's," Andrew said through the link, with the observational quality of someone noting data.

"Still works," Priya said.

The witch shook it off. Faster than Ivory had — this one had exposure to power interactions and knew what she was dealing with or was doing it from pure will. She found me again with her eyes and the anger in her expression was the specific anger of someone who'd expected a softer target.

They coordinated. That was the thing about witches in an organized operation — they didn't fight individually, they formed patterns, the same way the link worked for the wolves. Two of them taking up flanking positions while the third pressed the center. It was good tactics.

It would have worked against someone without expanded awareness and a shield.

The shield came up.

The triple-witch blast hit it simultaneously — all three of them, timed to hit the same point to overwhelm the absorption capacity. The shield shook. I felt it shake in a way it hadn't shaken before — not failing, but working very hard, the absorption mechanism straining against triple-timed concentrated impact.

I braced.

"We have her," Andrew said through the link, and I felt the eastern flank reorienting.

"No," I said. "Hold your position. They're trying to pull you off the line."

"Luna—"

"Hold," I said.

The shield held.

The three witches were recalibrating when I hit back.

Not the scream and not the blast — I divided the output, the way I'd split the blast in the lower slope training, and sent the scream at the center witch while the blast went for the left flank's witch. The right flank I dimmed — pulled the visibility around her position into deep shadow so she couldn't see what she was targeting.

The center witch stopped. The left flank witch's counterattack went sideways, deflected by the blast disruption. The right flank witch, operating blind, pulled her targeting rather than risk hitting her own people.

Four seconds of window.

Santos moved through the window faster than I'd seen him move in any training context. He wasn't a shifter — he was a human fighter with twenty years of pack combat experience and the specific capability of someone who'd spent three years developing alternatives to wolf-form fighting because that was what Shadowmere had needed.

He had two of them down before the window closed.

The third witch had recovered her targeting.

She was looking at me with the expression I'd been seeing more of in the past thirty seconds — the specific expression of someone who'd adjusted their understanding of the threat level and was now deploying resources accordingly.

"You chose the wrong side," she said, and her voice was the carrying kind, the kind designed to be heard above the noise of an engagement. "You chose Ivory over your own history. Over your own kind."

"My own kind is standing in a pack I've been building toward for months," I said. "You have the wrong definition."

"She was never going to accept you," the witch said. "You know that. You feel it. The pack tolerates you because Kael chose you. The moment Kael stops—"

"With all your powers," I said, "and all your planning and all your people—" I held her gaze across the space between us, "—a broken wolf-deprived human survived sixty-nine attempts on her life. Against your people. Against organizations with more resources than you brought tonight." I tilted my head. "How does that feel?"

The witch's expression did something.

"Ivory is still in a cell," she said.

"Ivory," I said, "has been in worse. She'll be fine." I raised my hand. "You're not going to be."

The blast I sent wasn't minimum necessary.

The shield came down at the same time, releasing the absorbed energy into the directed output, adding the buffer's accumulated force to the fresh discharge. The witch's own protective magic engaged but she hadn't expected the scale of it — the combination of my output and the shield's release produced something significantly beyond what she'd calibrated for.

She went backward. Fast and far. Past the tree line into the dark.

She didn't come back out.