Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 643

Chapter 643

KILLIAN

Approximately. The wolves I could count. The nightwalkers I could hear — the specific sound of something moving at speeds that made vision unreliable, the particular frequency of supernatural velocity that registered as sound before it registered as anything else. They'd hit the car. They were still there. I couldn't see them and I didn't need to.

Fifty was a conservative estimate.

"You're surrounded," the man holding Ivory said. "Seven of you. Fifty of us. The math is simple. We take her, you go home."

Ivory looked at Kael.

Kael looked at Ivory.

Something passed between them in the specific way things passed between them — the twelve years, the shorthand, the specific communication of two people who'd been in situations and had developed a language for them.

"Let her go," Nina said.

She had the bag.

The weapons bag. The one with the wolfsbane rounds and the moon bullets that had been in the boot of the car that was now upside down, and Nina had somehow — Nina had the bag, which was Nina, which was the specific quality of Nina in a crisis, which was that she identified what mattered and she had it.

"Let her go," Nina said again. "Or I will make you regret the specific decision not to."

"You're seven," Derek said. "We're fifty. What exactly is the plan here?"

He said it like someone who'd done the math and was confident in the result.

Nina said: "I go first."

She threw the dagger before the sentence was fully out.

The wolfsbane dagger.

The wolf it hit dropped.

Not staggered — dropped. The concentration that Ivory had developed, the fourteen-point-three that nobody was to confuse with fourteen or fifteen, doing what it was designed to do in the time it was designed to do it.

The field opened up.

Everything at once.

Nina moved like she'd been waiting for this her entire life.

She had been waiting for this her entire life.

The pump-action was out and she was racking it with the specific efficiency of someone for whom the motion had been practiced until it was below conscious control, and the sound of it — the specific mechanical sound of Nina's armoury finally being used for its purpose — was something I was going to remember for a long time.

The first shot.

The second.

The third.

Whatever she was hitting was either slowing, flying, or turning to something that was not an active threat, depending on the species. The moon bullets specifically — when she loaded them, the change in the sound of what she was hitting was distinct.

Dust.

That was the specific outcome for the nightwalkers. The moon bullets and the nightwalkers and the result was dust, the specific complete ending of something that had been moving at impossible speed moments before.

The field was not the border battle.

The border battle had been two hundred wolves and six witches and the full power of Vela's network deployed against a pack that had been at reduced strength. This was fifty-odd mixed species — wolves, werewitches, nightwalkers — deployed against seven people who were two hours from any backup.

The math should not have worked.

The math worked because of what the seven people were.

Nina with the weapon bag was — I had no other word for it — extraordinary. She had the wolf strength back, fully operational, and she had the armoury weapons, the wolfsbane rounds and the moon bullets and the specific concentrated tools she'd been maintaining for years, and she was using all of it with the specific efficiency of someone who'd been waiting for this exact opportunity and had prepared for it comprehensively.

She rolled.

Under a nightwalker's attack, she rolled, and she came up with the pump action and she recocked and she fired and the thing that had been a nightwalker was no longer a nightwalker in any functional sense. She recocked. She fired. She was moving between shots, the body not staying still long enough to be targeted, the specific mobility of someone who'd trained for exactly this — the armoury not as a stationary resource but as something you moved with.

Jordan was fighting with his claws.

The wolf strength restored, the intelligence operative's tactical assessment running in real time, he was doing what Jordan did in physical conflict which was not the front-line approach but the effective one — finding the gaps, moving through them, using the pack link to know where everyone else was and therefore where the enemies weren't. He was not the most powerful fighter in the field. He was the most efficient.

Elite was ripping things apart.

I don't mean this as a metaphor. Elite, in a fight where the tactical assessment had concluded that maximum force was appropriate, was doing the thing that Elite's specific training and physical capacity and the complete absence of what most people would call squeamishness produced. They were indiscriminate in the specific way of someone who'd decided that every enemy in the field was the same enemy and was treating them accordingly.

An arm. A head. Several of the latter.

The enemies who were close to Elite were not close to Elite for long.

Aria was holding a shield.

Not the full moon shield of the border battle — the targeted version, the precision work she'd been developing, the shield deployed at the specific points where the attack was coming for the people she needed to protect. When a nightwalker came for Kael who was still partially recovered, the shield stopped it. When one came for me from the blind side, the shield stopped it. She was using the lunar power as a defensive resource and managing the output with the care of someone who knew that managing it was the difference between having it for the whole fight and running out.

Kael was ripping hearts.

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