Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 452

ARIA

She fired.

I fired.

The blasts met in the space between us and the collision was something I'd never experienced in training — two significant power outputs hitting each other head-on, the pressure of it pushing back against both of us simultaneously. I felt the shield take part of it. Felt the anchor take the rest. Felt myself go back a step and hold.

She went back two steps and didn't hold.

One of the pack wolves was there when she went back. Not attacking — just there, between her and me, its enormous presence ending the calculation of whether she was going to push for a second blast.

She looked at the wolf. At me. At the field behind me where the hostile force was fragmenting, the organized military movement becoming individual panic, Jason's archers keeping the retreat from becoming a rally.

She looked at the thirty wolves that were looking back at her.

"You'll regret this," she said.

"Probably," I said. "I regret quite a few things. This isn't one of them yet."

She teleported.

The specific light of it, the signature I knew from the clinic and the lower slope and the prison break intelligence, and then she was simply gone.

"Jason," I said into the walkie-talkie.

"She left the field," Jason said. "Tracking exit vector — northwest. Moving fast."

"Track as long as you can," I said. "I want everything we can get about the direction."

"Copy," Jason said. "Luna — they're running. The main force is running."

Through the link:

*Confirmed. Eastern retreat.*

*Western disengagement.*

*Center breaking.*

"Let them run," I said, to Santos and through the link simultaneously. "Don't pursue past the boundary markers. Let them run and hold the line."

*Hold the line,* thirty wolves confirmed.

One of them had something.

Not a blast, not a scream-adjacent attack. Something Ivory had mentioned.

Telekinesis. Blood-bending. The specific moon-adjacent power that operated only in full moon conditions and appeared only in selective lineages — a child of the moon could theoretically produce it but Ivory had no documentation of anyone in living memory who had.

I didn't know what it looked like when it was being deployed against someone.

I found out.

The feeling was wrong in the way of things that were working on you before you'd registered them beginning — a pull that was physical but not contact, like gravity had developed a specific opinion about me and was acting on it. My feet lost the ground. Not my feet specifically — my whole body losing the relationship with gravity that it was supposed to have, rising in a way I hadn't chosen.

My concentration on the barrier slipped.

The barrier flickered.

"Luna." Andrew's voice, through the link, with an edge I'd never heard from him.

The two witches were focused entirely on me — the blood-bending one sustaining the pull, the other preparing something targeted.

And then I thought about what Ivory had said, not the specific techniques but the principle underneath all of them. The anchor is the foundation. The anchor is what makes everything else possible. When you're uncertain about the technique, go back to the foundation.

I found the anchor.

The anchor was there. Warm, present, settled. It had been there through everything tonight — through the link and the barrier and the blasts and the screaming and all of it. It was there now.

I was a child of the moon. Ivory had spent four years searching for what that meant and finding me specifically. The bloodline was real, its properties were real, and one of those properties was documented somewhere in Ivory's research as the ability to produce this exact effect.

If I could produce it, I could counter it.

The logic was imperfect. The training was nonexistent. The anchor was warm.

I reached.

Not outward — inward. Deeper than the blast register, deeper than the scream, past even the place where the link originated. The place where the bloodline was its oldest and most fundamental.

The pull stopped.

Not because the witch stopped — she didn't. Because I found the thing she was using and matched it, and when two forces of the same type act on the same object from opposite directions, the object goes nowhere.

I was standing on the ground again.

The witch who'd been sustaining the pull looked at me with the expression of someone for whom this had just become a different problem.

I lashed out.

The move was instinct — the same way the blast in the corridor had been instinct, faster than decision, the anchor responding to threat and intent simultaneously. What came out wasn't a blast and wasn't a scream. It was the thing I'd just accessed from the bloodline's deepest register, redirected — the pull turned outward rather than inward, aimed at the witch who'd been using it against me.

She went backward.

Very fast.

Very far.

The second witch, who'd been preparing the targeted attack, had a fraction of a second to reconsider her involvement before Santos arrived in her peripheral vision and made the reconsideration academic.

Through the link: thirty wolves receiving the image of what had just happened and processing it with the specific quality of a pack updating its assessment.

"She blood-bended a witch," Priya said.

"She blood-bended a witch," Andrew confirmed.

"Is that—" Sam started.

"Ivory is going to lose her mind when she finds out," Louis said.

The engagement had reached the point where the mathematics had become clear to the attacking force. The reserve wave was pinned against the barrier. The main force was caught between Andrew's eastern coordination and Louis's western pressure and Jason's archers from above. The witches had been disrupted — one unconscious, one significantly impaired by Santos, one very far away and not returning.

The attacking force began to fracture.

Not the orderly retreat of a force that had decided to withdraw — the specific fracturing of a coordinated operation that had lost its coordination, individual units making individual decisions about their individual survival. The formation broke. The pack formation held.

"Drive them," I said, through the link.

"With pleasure," Andrew said.

The wolves moved and I released the barrier and the reserve wave, freed from the wall of moon energy, found itself being driven backward by Andrew's redirected eastern flank and Priya's western wolves and Jason's archers from the elevated positions all simultaneously.

It wasn't clean. Combat was never clean. Two of Priya's wolves were injured — not fatally, but significantly — and I felt it through the link as a specific pain that was also mine, the connection working in both directions. Three of Santos's human fighters were down, two still moving and one who wasn't.

The one who wasn't was a young man named Terrence who was twenty-three and had been in Shadowmere's combat rotation for eight months and had positioned himself between a witch's redirected blast and two of the younger wolves.

The link was connected to wolves, not to Terrence.

But Santos was beside me and I was beside him and when the news came from Andrew's flank about what had happened, Santos's breathing changed in the way that people who knew a person changed when that person was gone.

"Terrence," Santos said. Just his name. The specific devastation of a commander losing someone they were responsible for.

"I know," I said.

"He was—"

"I know," I said. And I did. And the knowing was going to stay.

"We are going to win this," Santos said, and it came out steadier than I expected.

"We are," I said.

"Then it matters," Santos said. "What he did. It matters that we win."

"It matters," I said.