"Come on out, Elara, I know you can hear me," Thornwood called, his voice unnervingly calm.
Damon moved, positioning himself between Elara and the stairwell. His amber eyes had darkened - a sign of his wolf stirring just beneath the surface.
"There is another exit," he said in a low voice. "A tunnel that leads to the safe room. Marlowe, take her."
"No!" Elara said firmly. "I am done running."
Before Damon could argue, footsteps sounded on the stairs. Methodical. Unhurried. Confident. The hunter knew he had them cornered.
"We fight," Damon decided, sharing a quick glance with Cora. Some silent communication passed between the siblings, and Cora nodded, moving to flank the entrance.
Elara felt the pendant warming against her throat, responding to her heightened emotions. The recovered memories of her mother's warnings echoed in her mind. The hunters would never stop. They had pursued her bloodline for generations. And now one stood at their door.
The footsteps stopped. A moment of silence stretched, taut with anticipation.
Then the ritual room door exploded inward in a shower of wooden splinters and stone fragments. A concussive blast knocked Elara backward. Her ears rang from the explosion. Through the smoke and dust, armed figures poured into the room. Five men in tactical gear, weapons raised. Their movements were precise and coordinated, betraying professional training.
At their center stood a man who could only be Jonah Thornwood. Tall and lean, with immaculate silver hair despite his relative youth. He carried himself with aristocratic confidence. His pale eyes surveyed the room with clinical detachment, finally coming to rest on Elara.
"At long last," he said softly, his cultured voice at odds with the violence of their entrance. "The last Siren."
He raised a hand, and his men leveled their weapons. Not traditional firearms, Elara realized, but something more specialized. The barrels emitted a faint blue glow, and the air around them seemed to warp slightly.
"Silver nitrate rounds," Thornwood explained, noticing Damon's focused attention on the weapons. "Disperses on impact. One shot anywhere on a werewolf's body would cause system-wide paralysis within seconds. Quite humane, really. You will not even feel it."
"How did you find this place?" Damon demanded, his body tensed for combat. "How did you breach our security?"
Thornwood's smile was thin and cold. "Let us just say you should be more careful who you trust, "Alpha". Wolves can be just as susceptible to persuasion as humans. Especially when the right incentives are applied."
The implication hung in the air. A traitor among the pack?
"Enough talk," Thornwood continued. "Elara Matthews, you are coming with me. The others need not be harmed if they cooperate."
"She stays!" Damon growled, his voice deepening as his partial shift began. His nails lengthened into claws, and his features sharpened, becoming more predatory.
"Such loyalty," Thornwood remarked. "Touching, but ultimately futile."
He nodded to his men, who took aim at Damon and Cora.
What happened next unfolded with such speed that later, Elara would struggle to piece together the sequence of events.
Damon moved first, unexpectedly launching himself not at Thornwood but at the ceiling light fixture. With a single swipe of his clawed hand, he severed the power. Plunging the ritual room into darkness, save for the eerie blue glow of the hunters' weapons.
In the same instant, Cora dropped to the floor and rolled, a gun appearing in her hand as she fired three rapid shots. The muzzle flash briefly illuminated the chaos. Two of Thornwood's men fell, clutching wounded legs.
Marlowe, despite her age, moved with surprising agility. Her hands danced through the air, flinging something from her pockets that shattered against the stone floor. Instantly, a thick, acrid smoke billowed upward, further obscuring vision.
The hunters' weapons discharged, blue streaks cutting through the darkness. But finding no targets as the werewolves moved with supernatural speed and precision.
Amid the chaos, Elara felt strong arms encircle her waist. Pulling her behind a stone column. Damon's scent enveloped her: pine and earth, with something uniquely his.
"Stay down," he ordered, his voice roughened by the partial shift. Then he was gone. A shadow moving among shadows.
More gunfire. Grunts of pain. The sound of bodies hitting stone. Through gaps in the smoke, Elara caught glimpses of the battle. Cora moved with lethal grace, disarming one hunter before driving her knee into his solar plexus. Marlowe, her silver hair like a beacon in the darkness, touched one attacker's forehead with her palm, causing him to collapse instantly as if his strings had been cut.
And Damon, half shifted now, a blur of motion and controlled violence. His claws slashed through tactical gear as if it were paper, his movements too fast for the hunters to track.
Thornwood himself stood apart from the melee, oddly calm despite the rapid disintegration of his assault team. From his jacket, he withdrew a small device, pressing its single button.
A high-pitched whine filled the room, so piercing that Elara instinctively covered her ears. Damon and Cora, however, had a much more severe reaction. Both werewolves dropped to their knees, hands clutching their heads in obvious agony. Their enhanced hearing made the sonic attack unbearable.
"Sonic disruptor," Thornwood explained conversationally, his voice somehow audible above the whine. "Calibrated specifically to werewolf hearing range. Quite effective, would you not say?"
He approached Elara, seemingly confident that the incapacitated werewolves posed no further threat. "Now, Miss Matthews, shall we depart? I have questions about your particular abilities that will be more comfortably discussed in my own facilities."
When he was within arm's reach, Elara acted on pure instinct. Drawing in a deep breath, she released a single, focused note. Not the full force of her Siren voice, but a concentrated burst aimed directly at Thornwood.
The effect was immediate. The hunter staggered backward. The sonic device fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers. His eyes widened in shock, a thin trickle of blood appearing in his right nostril.
"Remarkable," he managed to say, despite his obvious disorientation. "The legends hardly do justice to,"
Whatever he intended to say was cut short as the ritual room door burst open again. This time, it was pack reinforcements, wolves returning from patrols, alerted by the sounds of combat. They poured into the room, half-shifted and battle-ready.
Thornwood assessed the changed situation with quick calculation. He reached into his pocket again, but Damon, recovering from the sonic attack, moved with blinding speed. Before Thornwood could retrieve whatever weapon he sought, the Alpha's hand locked around his wrist with bone-crushing pressure.
"Enough!" Damon snarled, his face still partially transformed, canines elongated, and eyes blazing gold.
With his free hand, Thornwood made a desperate attempt to reach something strapped to his ankle. Cora anticipated the move, sweeping his legs out from under him. The hunter landed hard on the stone floor, the impact driving the air from his lungs.
In seconds, the remaining members of his team were subdued, disarmed, and restrained by the pack reinforcements. The skirmish had ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
Damon hauled Thornwood to his feet. His clawed hand was still locked around the hunter's wrist. "Take the others to the holding cells," he ordered the pack members. "This one comes with me."
Marlowe approached Elara. Her sharp eyes examined her for injury. "Are you hurt?"
"No," Elara managed, though her voice shook slightly. "The note I used against him, I controlled it. It did not overwhelm me this time."
Something like pride flickered in the elder's eyes. "Perhaps you are beginning to understand your power after all."
Damon's attention remained fixed on their captive. "You breached pack territory. Attacked my people. And attempted to abduct someone under my protection." His voice was deceptively calm. But Elara could sense the rage simmering beneath. "Give me one reason why I should not tear out your throat right now."
Thornwood, despite his precarious position, maintained a cool composure. Blood still trickled from his nose, but he regarded Damon with something close to academic interest.
"Because I have information you need," he replied evenly. "About Viktor Stone. About the Blood Moon ritual. And about what he intends to do with your Siren."