Chapter 105 The Ridge
The first arrow flew before the echo of the snapped branch faded.
Kane moved on instinct. He turned, grabbed Aria, and pulled her down as the arrow sliced through the space where her head had been a second earlier. It embedded into the tree behind them with a violent thud.
“Shield,” he ordered.
Aria’s hands ignited with silver light. A barrier flared outward just as two more projectiles struck, splintering against the magic instead of flesh.
Marcus dropped to one knee, his tablet discarded, shifting mid-motion. His bones cracked. Fur tore through the fabric. His wolf lunged toward the tree line without waiting for permission.
“They want to push us uphill,” Marcus growled through the link.
Kane saw it instantly.
Movement to the left.
Movement to the right.
Coordinated.
This was not panic fire. This was strategy.
“Devon, stay behind Aria,” Kane commanded.
Devon ignored the pain in his leg and shifted anyway. The transition was slower than usual, strained, but his wolf still emerged. He moved to Aria’s flank without being told, positioning himself between her and the tree line to the east. Limping, but watching. Making himself useful.
The forest erupted.
Three cloaked figures broke from the trees ahead, not wolves, not fully human either. Their movements were too fluid. Magic-users. Witches.
Aria stepped forward, palms raised. The ground trembled beneath her feet.
“You should have stayed hidden,” one of them called, voice distorted beneath the hood.
“Reveal yourself,” Kane demanded.
A laugh answered him.
Then the air tightened.
Aria felt it first. A pulling sensation beneath her skin, similar to the suppression spell Devon had described.
“Down,” she warned.
It was too late.
A pulse of dark energy exploded outward from the ridge above them. It slammed into the trees, splintering bark and forcing even Kane back a step.
Marcus snarled, leaping for one of the cloaked attackers. He tackled the figure to the ground, claws flashing. The hood fell back briefly.
Not Amanda.
Not Jacob.
Someone new.
Cold eyes. Calculating.
The figure twisted, pressing a palm against Marcus’s chest. A flash of violet energy sent him flying backward into a trunk hard enough to crack it.
Devon’s voice cut through the link before anyone else could speak.
“The one on the left is not attacking. It is watching our positions. Counting gaps.”
Aria shifted her barrier left without question, and an instant later a bolt of dark energy struck exactly where the gap had been.
Aria’s silver light flared brighter. She thrust her hands forward and a wave of force tore through the underbrush, knocking two attackers off their feet. The third stayed standing.
Watching.
Always watching.
Kane charged uphill.
An arrow grazed his shoulder. He did not slow.
He reached the ridge in seconds and found her.
Amanda.
She stood between two standing stones etched with runes, Jacob at her side like a sentinel. His gaze locked onto Kane immediately. Something in it had changed.
The Jacob who had once sat across from Kane in council meetings, measured and deliberate, was gone. What remained was rawer. Built entirely around her.
“You came,” Amanda said calmly, as if she was expecting him.
“Did you expect anything else?” Kane replied.
Jacob stepped forward without waiting for instruction.
Kane met him halfway.
Their collision shook the ridge.
Jacob was a strong fighter. He was disciplined and controlled. But this was different. He came in low and fast, driving his shoulder into Kane’s ribs with the kind of force that came from having nothing left to lose. Kane absorbed it and countered, catching Jacob’s arm and redirecting his momentum. Jacob twisted free faster than he should have been able to and drove an elbow back toward Kane’s jaw.
Kane took it across the cheekbone instead.
He felt the split open.
Jacob pressed forward, relentless. Every strike came with no pause between them, no reading of Kane’s response, no adjustment. He was not fighting to win. He was fighting to exhaust, to overwhelm, to keep Kane’s attention fixed uphill while Amanda worked.
“You cannot win,” Jacob snarled. “You are too divided.”
Kane blocked two strikes and landed one clean hit to Jacob’s ribs. Jacob barely registered it.
He is not feeling pain, Kane realized. She is blocking it for him.
Below them, another pulse of magic detonated.
Kane’s head snapped toward the sound.
That was the mistake.
Jacob’s fist connected with his jaw, sending him skidding across stone.
Amanda lifted her hands toward the sky.
The runes ignited.
Aria felt the shift instantly.
“This is not an ambush,” she breathed. “It is a ritual.”
The cloaked figure who had remained standing stepped beside Amanda.
The hood fell back.
Alexander.
Marcus froze mid-lunge.
“You,” Kane growled from the ridge.
Alexander’s expression did not change. “You were always predictable, Alpha.”
The air thickened again, heavier than before.
Aria forced more power into her shield, but she could feel it draining her faster than she liked.
“This ridge is a convergence point,” Alexander continued calmly. “Magic gathers here. You walked directly into it.”
Jacob pressed Kane back again.
Devon tried to reach higher ground but stumbled, catching himself against a boulder. He lifted his head and tracked the three cloaked figures still moving at the tree line.
“Two of them are shifting positions,” he said through the link. “They are not retreating. They are forming a perimeter. They want to keep us contained down here.”
Marcus, still shaking bark dust from his fur, changed direction without a word and cut off the nearest figure before they could complete the arc.
Amanda smiled.
“Yes.”
The ground beneath the standing stones cracked.
Light burst upward from the earth in a blinding column.
Aria felt something tear through the veil between realms.
Not summoned.
Released.
Every wolf present felt it in their bones, a pressure that had no name, older than pack law, older than any bond they had ever known. It moved through marrow and instinct alike and left something cold behind.
Kane regained his footing and lunged for Amanda, but a wall of energy slammed into him mid-stride, throwing him backward down the slope.
Aria screamed his name.
The column of light darkened at its center.
Within it, a shape pressed forward from the other side of the veil. It was vast. It moved the way a storm moves, not walking so much as arriving. Its outline shifted between solid and absence, and where it touched the stone beneath the runes, the rock blackened and cracked.
The sound it made was not a roar. It was closer to the moment before sound, the held breath of something that had been waiting a very long time.
Amanda lowered her hands slowly.
“We did not call you here to destroy them,” she said, and it was not clear whether she was speaking to Kane or to the thing behind her. “We called you here to show them what they are standing against.”
The creature’s outline steadied.
It turned.
And it looked directly at Kane.