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CHAPTER 133
~Jade's POV~
She was fast. Faster than I expected from someone in Isadora's smaller frame, which meant she was augmenting physically somehow.
The first knife came in low, and I stepped outside it, deflecting her wrist rather than blocking the blade directly, using her momentum to pull her past me.
She recovered immediately, spinning with a speed that wasn't natural, and the second blade came across in a horizontal sweep that I only cleared by throwing myself backwards.
I landed clean and came back up, but she was already closing the gap again.
"Hmph. That was just a warm-up, Princess. Next time I won't be so kind."
The third exchange was harder. She feinted with the left, which I read, but the follow-through from the right was faster than the feint had suggested, and the blade caught the outer edge of my forearm before I fully redirected it.
It wasn't deep. It burned immediately.
Javelin growled within me, instantly pushing to the surface.
"Do not worry. I can handle her, Javelin. Do not bother showing yourself."
"You're wrong, Jade. You need me. She's… I fear she has more power than she is showing. You are in danger, Jade. Signal the flare and let your mates, Dean or Silver, maybe come save you."
"No," I said sharply, cutting Javelin in my mind. "The last thing I need is saving by my mates."
"Then you won't be stubborn to accept it from Dean or Silver?"
"Not if I can help it. Lend me your strength, but we are not transforming."
"That's good enough for me. You'll heal fast, too."
Inhaling, I let the pain sink in. I used the pain to focus.
She came again, both knives working in a rolling pattern that forced me to keep moving laterally rather than engaging directly, and I realised after several seconds that this was the point.
She was herding me toward the slope on the eastern side, where the ground was unreliable.
I stopped moving left.
Instead, I drove forward, inside her guard, too close for the longer blade to be useful, and hit her twice in the ribs with short, hard strikes before she got an elbow into my shoulder and shoved me back.
The impact rattled down my arm, but I kept my footing.
Then she did something that was not a knife at all.
She raised her left hand, and the air around it darkened, a concentrated shadow that gathered at her palm like something being called home.
The cold pulse I had felt earlier returned, sharp and suffocating, and when she released it, the force struck me across the chest like a physical wall before I could dodge it.
Unlike her other attacks, this was more coordinated and faster, with great force.
I flew back three feet and hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb it, but the breath was knocked out of me completely, and for one long second, everything was white at the edges.
She walked toward me without hurrying now, both knives loose at her sides, the dark energy still curling faintly around her left hand.
"Not bad for a girl who didn't know what she was until recently," she said pleasantly. "But you're out of your depth, Princess."
I pushed myself upright. My arms were shaking, and I hated that they were shaking. "I'm still standing."
"For now," she said, and raised her hand again.
She didn't immediately release the dark energy. Instead, her right hand slipped behind her waist, disappearing beneath the hem of Isadora's cardigan.
When she brought it back out, the metal in her grip swallowed the ambient light rather than reflecting it.
It was another dagger—longer than the first, with a wicked, sweeping curve and a blade as black as a starless night.
She now held two blades. One silver. One dark.
Then, she vanished.
She didn't literally disappear, but her speed spiked to a level that completely defied human limitation.
If not for my heightened Lycan senses tracking the sudden blur of motion, I wouldn't have seen her coming at all. I saw the arc of the black blade, but seeing it and stopping it were two entirely different things.
I threw my arm up to parry, but she shifted her weight mid-strike, moving faster than my body could respond.
Slash.
The dark blade bit deep across my back, slicing through the fabric of my sports bra and tearing into flesh.
I gasped, spinning to counter, but she was already under my guard.
Slice.
Fire flared across my arm.
I stumbled backwards. The burning sensation from the cuts didn't last. Almost instantly, the fire was replaced by a creeping, deadening cold.
A heavy numbness began to spread from the wounds, sinking deep into my muscle fibres and freezing my blood.
"Jade!" Javelin's voice ripped through my mind, thick with sudden, unadulterated horror. "The blade—it's laced with something. Poison! It's shutting you… us down!"
My limbs suddenly felt like they were made of lead. The Lycan speed and strength I relied on simply evaporated. My reflexes dragged, a full second too slow.
Drea capitalised on it immediately.
She ducked under my sluggish left hook. The black blade flashed again, carving a brutal line across my ribs.
I screamed as the flesh tore. I tried to pivot, to put distance between us, but my leg completely gave out.
The fourth strike took me right in the thigh, severing muscle and flooding my system with another massive dose of the paralyzing venom.
I collapsed onto one knee.
The damp earth soaked through my leggings as a violent spasm wracked my chest. I doubled over and coughed, the thick, metallic taste of blood filling my mouth before I spat it out into the mud.
Everything was spinning. My vision blurred at the edges, the forest tilting sickeningly around me.
Slow footsteps squelched in the mud. I forced my heavy head up.
The assassin was stalking closer, her face—Isadora's face—twisted into a mask of cold satisfaction.
She smoothly flipped the long, curved black dagger and slid it back into the hidden sheath at her waist. Apparently, she didn't need it anymore.
She raised her left hand. The dark, suffocating power surged into her palm again, crackling with lethal intent.
"Get up!" Javelin roared, her distress echoing frantically in my skull. "Jade, get up now, or we die here!"
My teeth ground together so hard my jaw popped. Every fibre of my being screamed in protest, weighed down by the heavy venom in my blood, but I refused to die on my knees in the mud.
I dragged in a ragged breath, wincing sharply as the cut on my ribs stretched, and forced myself back to my feet.
My legs trembled violently, but I raised my fists, settling back into a broken, desperate fighting stance.
Drea stopped a few feet away. She let out a dark, melodic laugh that chilled me to the bone.
"I have to admit, I admire your witty courage, Princess," she said, the dark energy illuminating her borrowed features with a sickly glow. "But it won't save you. You are about to meet your end."
The shadow gathered faster this time.
I had nothing to deflect it with and no time to move far enough to clear it, and I was already calculating the impact and whether I could roll through it when something moved in my peripheral vision, fast and enormous and completely certain of itself.
A hand closed around the assassin's raised wrist like a vice, shocking both of us. And then from nowhere, Xander stood before us, his eyes blazing red.
Dread filled the assassin's eyes, and in the next second, he threw her.
He didn't push or redirect her attack. He took her by the wrist, and the motion that followed was singular and absolute, a full rotation of his body behind the throw that sent the girl airborne across the clearing.
Her body slammed into the trunk of a thick oak tree with a sound that shook birds from the canopy twenty feet overhead, and she dropped to the base of it and did not get up immediately.
I was still on one knee, breathing, staring at the space where she had been standing.
Then a blur of movement to my left, and Xavier was already crossing the clearing toward where fake Isadora had landed.
His blonde hair caught the filtered light through the canopy as he moved, his eyes turning red and his expression something that had gone past fury into something quieter and far more dangerous.
Xavier reached her before I could blink.
His hand closed around Drea's throat the second she slid down the trunk of the oak, his fingers locking around her neck before she had even fully registered that she was on the ground.
He hauled her upright with one hand like she weighed nothing at all, and the look on his face was the kind that made the air around him feel dangerous to breathe.
"How dare you." His voice came out low and absolutely lethal, stripped of every professional layer he usually wore like armour. "How dare you lay your hands on my mate."
His aura detonated outward.
It didn't roll out gradually the way it usually did when he was containing himself. It exploded, a single violent wave that hit the surrounding trees and bent the grass flat and sent dead leaves scattering in every direction at once.
The pressure of it was physical, like standing at the edge of a drop and feeling the ground give slightly beneath your feet.
Fake Isadora's body responded before her mind could stop it. Blood welled at the corner of her mouth, and a second trail of it ran from her left ear down the curve of her jaw.
Her borrowed features twisted with something she was clearly trying not to show, and her feet dangled a foot off the ground while his grip tightened incrementally around her throat.
"Answer me!"