Chapter 140 I'm Right Here
ADRIANA
I had never felt anything like this in my entire life.
Every sense I possessed was amplified beyond what I could have described to someone who hadn’t experienced it. The smell of the trees was distinct and layered, I could separate individual scents within it the way you separate instruments in a piece of music, each one clear.
My vision extended into the dark without effort, picking up movement at distances that should have been invisible. The adrenaline running through my body wasn’t the shaky, destabilizing kind I had felt in moments of fear before this. It was clean and focused, a current that sharpened everything rather than scattering it.
And my hearing.
That was what caught it.
A sound from the tree line at the border. Subtle. A disturbance in the undergrowth that didn’t belong to wind or animal. It had more intent than that.
“Positions. Now. The moment you detect anything, you call for support immediately, don’t wait, don’t try to manage it alone.”
The soldiers fanned out across the grounds with the practiced efficiency of people who had been preparing for exactly this. Elijah stayed close beside me, both of us facing the darkness beyond the pack boundary.
Hazel was at the border with her unit. She should have signaled by now.
“Have you heard anything from Hazel?” I asked Elijah quietly.
“Nothing yet. She says it’s clear on her end.”
I kept my focus directed toward the woods and listened harder.
They were there. I could feel them even through the silence. The Cult’s fighters had an energy to them that registered differently from ordinary wolves, something beneath the surface that Yara had been trying to describe to me for days and that I now understood through direct sensation rather than description.
“They’ve already passed Hazel’s position,” I said. “They came through without triggering anything. They’re inside the boundary.”
“How—”
“Their powers. Don’t move from your positions yet.” I raised my voice just enough to carry without carrying too far. “Hold—”
Something landed heavily behind us.
I spun.
A figure had one hand locked around Elijah’s throat and had lifted him partially off the ground with an ease, showing exactly how much of their strength was natural and how much had been given to them by something else. Elijah’s hands were at the grip immediately, working to break it, but the hold was extraordinary.
From the tree line, more of them came. A wave of figures moving at speed, covering ground faster than anything untouched by that dark enhancement should have been able to move.
I looked at Elijah.
“Go!” he managed, rough and certain. “I’m fine. Go!”
I did as he asked. I hit the first one I reached at full speed and felt the collision in every bone. They were dense in a way that ordinary bodies weren’t, as though their mass had been increased along with everything else. But I had been trained and I had my own power now, and the combination of the two meant I could work with it rather than against it. I found their balance points, used their momentum, redirected instead of opposing directly.
It came back to me like breathing. The hand-to-hand training, the sparring sessions in the field, the hours of repetition that had rebuilt in my body something that Lisa and my father and years of diminishment had tried to take out of me.
It was all there, available and immediate, and I moved through the fight without thinking in the way you move through something you have practiced until it stopped being thought and became instinct.
“Alpha.” One of my soldiers appeared at my left, breathing hard, taking down the opponent I had just destabilized. “Inside. Some of them got into the house. We don’t know when or how but they’re in there.”
That was wrong. That was deliberately wrong. The house should have been the last position they reached, not one of the first.
They had split their approach intentionally. Some to engage us outside, some to get past us and establish a position inside before we were aware of it.
I dispatched the fighter I was engaged with and ran.
The house was dark inside. From out here the battle sounded like something that had been released from a very long confinement, chaotic and consuming, filling the air in every direction. Inside, the contrast was extreme. It was quiet. Dark. Still in a way that was not peaceful but waiting.
My vision adjusted immediately. No shapes I couldn’t account for in the entrance hallway. I moved further in.
“I knew you would come inside.” The voice came from multiple directions simultaneously, or seemed to — it was designed to disorient, distributed through the space in a way that made locating its source impossible by sound alone.
I stopped moving and used the other senses instead.
“You’ve been running for a long time, haven’t you?” The voice continued, smooth and unhurried, absolutely certain of itself. “Hiding. Moving. Trying to stay one step ahead. All of that effort and here you are anyway, exactly where we wanted you.”
I turned slowly, tracking the energy in the room rather than the sound.
“Here I am,” I said. “And I’ve been waiting for this considerably longer than you have.”
The room shifted. Light appeared — not from any fixture, from nothing, from everywhere at once — and suddenly I was standing in the center of the house facing four figures in white, the darkness behind them made irrelevant by the impossible illumination.
The one at the front was elderly. Round in the middle, white beard, dark eyes that carried powerf for so long they had stopped noticing what it cost the people around them. He looked at me with something that was almost curiosity.
This was the Grandmaster.
I looked back at him and felt Yara surge forward in me.
“You’ve been looking for me for a long time,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. “Here I am. Come and get me.”