Page 78 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

“Interesting,” Kenza said. “Care to explain why touching him makes you both look like you’ve been plugged into a power grid?”

Shit.

I dropped my hands, but the damage was done. Rhys looked better—healthier, stronger, more like the formidable beta he was supposed to be. I could feel my own abilities humming with renewed energy. The connection between us was obvious to anyone with functioning eyes.

“It’s complicated,” I said lamely.

“Uncomplicate it,” Logan demanded with enough alpha authority in his voice that my spine straightened in automatic submission.

One of the vampire presences in my head spiked so violently that I gasped and staggered.

Close. Too close. Moving fast.

“Someone’s here,” I breathed.

“What?” Logan’s body shifted into combat readiness.

“One of them is—” I spun toward the window, my enhanced senses screaming warnings. “Northwest. Maybe a quarter mile and closing fast.”

“How do you know that?” Kenza demanded.

There was no time to explain. Through the window and among the trees, I caught a flicker of movement that was too fluid, too purposeful to be anything natural. A shadow that moved independently of wind or light, flowing through the forest with a predatory intent that made my hybrid nature recoil.

“Everyone take cover,” I snapped, vampire instincts taking over. “Now.”

To their credit, they didn’t argue. Behind furniture, under windows, in the kitchen—years of pack training kicked in, and within seconds the room was clear of obvious targets. I sent out a pulse from my fingertips to sense how close he was and to temporarily cloak our position. I could still feel the presence approaching.

Not just hunger. Recognition. He knows I’m here.

“Sable,” Rhys said, from where he’d crouched behind the couch, “what’s happening?”

“A scout,” I whispered, peering around the edge of the curtain. “Testing our defenses.”

The shadow crept closer, its attention brushing down my spine like cold fingers. Probing. Looking for weaknesses in whatever magical defenses the pack had erected around this place.

He didn’t know I could feel him, didn’t realize my hybrid nature made me a living radar for his kind. That arrogance would be his undoing.

I let my own power unfurl—not the silver magic everyone expected from me, but the darker heritage I’d spent years suppressing. Vampire calling to vampire in the spaces between trees, using frequencies that bypassed normal supernatural senses entirely.

His presence stuttered in surprise, then surged forward.

Found you, his mental voice whispered across the supernatural frequencies only we could access.

Did you?I whispered back and struck.

My power slammed into his consciousness like a sledgehammer wrapped in razor wire, disrupting whatever scanning abilities he was using to map our defenses. I felt him stumble and looked out the window in time to see his supernatural grace faltering. Psychic feedback sent him crashing into a tree trunk with enough force to splinter bark and shake the ground.

The connection between us blazed brighter—his shock, his pain, his growing realization that he’d found something far more dangerous than expected. Then I severed it completely—left him blind and disoriented in the forest.

For now.

“What just happened?” Logan asked as he emerged from the kitchen with Killian and Kenza right behind him.

“I’ve temporarily neutralized the scout,” I said, watching through the curtain as the vampire picked himself up from the forest floor. Even from this distance, I could see his confusion, the way he turned in circles trying to relocate the presence that had just handed him his ass. The glamour over the safe house would only hold out against his senses for so long. “He’ll recover soon. We can run, or we can face him.”

“Wait, neutralized how?” Kenza demanded.

Before I could answer, the vampire stepped into the clearing in front of the safe house. He moved with the fluid grace of his kind, but there was wariness, respect for whatever had just given him a taste of his own mortality.