The huntsmen let Alicia run. They just follow.
'Can you see them?' Vanessa asks.
My eyesight pierces through the expanding darkness of the woods, stabbing through the pillars of tree bark that surround us. I see for miles.
I see them. And Vanessa sees them in my head.
Alicia is like an arrow fired from a contraption. She is fast and resolute as she makes her way unerringly towards us. Dust ripples slightly with every tap of her sneakers on the earth. Behind her are the huntsmen, maintaining an average distance from their bait.
I smile cockily.
'Make no mistake,' Vanessa hisses. 'The huntsmen know we are ready for them. If a hunter willfully walks into an ambush, it is because they believe they can turn the trap around. I hope you learn a thing or two from this encounter.'
She is all business and no playfulness. It feels like my imagination at first, but I soon realize that the air is getting colder around Vanessa White. Her eyes become the palest I would ever see them. They, as with her skin, have the look of fishy deadness about them, but only missing the rankness.
'Dean,' Vanessa breathes.
A split second later, an avalanche of dust and debris blows into a corner of the clearing, Dean at its head. He must have already discarded his shirt, because his torso is bare and shiny with perspiration. When his eyes turn to us, they are alpha red. I unconsciously snap to attention under that gaze.
We meet in the middle of the clearing.
'Do you see them, Claire?' He promptly asks me.
I look once again towards the town. 'Yeah.' I swallow nervously. The lycan huntsmen are so stealthy in their dash after Alicia that the air barely seems to be touched by their passing; but they still move at insane speed.
There are four of them, Rufus included. It would count as a disadvantage against us even if there was only one. Thankfully, lycans are not overpoweringly oppressive mentally as they are in physical prowess.
I feel it when Vanessa expands the shelly bubble that is her mind. Predatorily, it unfolds; and withdraws from itself a pair of eely appendages sporting werewolf claws at their tips. They are cruel razors like Alicia's, but would leave no visible scar.
Frost instantly begins to gather like winter, coating the detritus of the forest floor, leaving tiny icicles like homodont fangs to hang from branches. The air becomes oppressive with a cold that goes beyond the actual to the conceptual, chilling body and mind: the unshrouded powers of a White; specifically a once-upon-a-time alpha.
At what price?
More than ever before, our minds are connected—Vanessa's and mine, one White to another. Her lifeline this present is burning away like a bonfire. I have a feeling it will only blaze like an inferno when we begin the fight with the huntsmen.
Mason already knew this. 'Farewell, White,' He had said, face assured of her imminent exeunt.
Vanessa isn't a weak werewolf. She may seem weaker compared to Dean, Mason and certainly the lycans; for which she grossly overcompensates in telepathy. Her gift is her curse. She is why we stand a farthing chance this moment.
And the price we have to pay is none other than her.
The next wave of lycans to come for us will not have to extend themselves. The power margin will be wider than a chasm, and we won't have Vanessa.
'Vanessa? Dean? Can we not do this?' I choke back on a sniffle and tears of salts of bile. 'Can we just surrender so we won't lose anyone?'
Dean and Vanessa softly regard me. Vanessa's eyes become foggy with tears, but Dean looks deeply untouched.
'We have made up our minds, Claire,' Vanessa says first.
'This is the only way,' Dean responds.
'What about me? And the pack? Your love for each other?' I whine.
Pain pulses in their glowing pupils at those words. Nonetheless, they are resolved, adamant, inflexible. 'This is the one way we buy you time. Claire, you and the pack are so much more.' Vanessa steps closer as I make to protest, eyes like ice; but her heart is warm. She gazes into my eyes. I imagine she would have put her hands on my shoulders if she could.
I am starting to sound like a child—their child; thinking up every impracticable plan aloud to keep the pack together.
Dean swallows my body with a phagocytic embrace, which I do my best to reciprocate. If his hug is long, it is because he is giving me Vanessa's share. My eyes soon fly open. I can smell the pain that is about to colour the air.
Alicia is staring at us.
Dean lets me go.
'Show yourselves!' He barks. His words bounce behind every tree and through every shadow in the woods.
Alicia whips around, alert. Dean appears at her side. They have their claws extended: Dean's claws are yellow as primeval bone but Alicia's glint like silver.
On the issue of Vanessa's claws, I can only say that not all that glitters is gold. Some are diamonds, like Vanessa's.
The lycan huntsmen appear as though reforming out of shadows. The four of them already have us surrounded. Where the others are in the trees, only Rufus has his centuries-old boots flat on the ground. He is directly facing Dean, eyes brightening the air a few inches before him, his every step causing a brief conflagration: dry leaves bursting alight into cinders at every footfall.
I can feel his incendiary temperature despite the expanse separating us, but maybe that's just my Olligrander senses. This still isn't to mean bacon won't cook in his mouth. The other huntsmen aren't very much less scary. Having figured our plan, in the short hour before moonrise, they won't be holding back.
'You can still surrender, Elderwood,' Rufus announces in a rich, deep, sluggish voice. It is deceitfully pleasant. I suspect it is merely a huntsman courtesy to ask enemies to surrender, because Rufus' eyes seem to be hoping we don't. 'White, you don't have to meet your end this day as snow underneath our lycan sun. And Elderwood, you can still enjoy together what little life the White may yet have; and White, what little freedom the Elderwood can yet hope for, given his crimes.
'Your wolf cubs will live; as rejects and rogues in the world because no pack will endure the shame of receiving them, all their lives they will live in the torment of being without a pack or being able to form one; but they will live.'
'No,' Vanessa and Dean immediately echo. They echo their choice together. Not one of them says it but I know they want the rest of the pack to live together as one: one family of shapeshifters.
'So be it,' Rufus says gravely. 'Today, on the behest of the seven Imperial kings and queens, we judge your guilt.' His rocky gaze touches the stare of everyone of us. 'We ask that you do not forgive us.'
'We don't,' Vanessa says.
'Then let the judgement begin.'
As if on cue, the sun vanishes like a drop of fire over the lip of the sky.
***
The lycans attack as one. One moment, they are crouched in the upper branches of the elms, maples and rosebuds. And the next, they are not. They simply just vanish.
Exactly that instant, the world fractures; not unlike a mirror struck by a pebble. The four of us in the centre of the clearing fracture alongside into eight, then sixteen people. The lycan attack lands on the extra images of us.
'White!' Rufus howls in rage. A miniature storm of debris is kicked up by his mere roar.
The lycans are seeing distortions in space and illusions of us. For a moment, one apish lycan watches an illusionary me as I mockingly step to the side. He is trying to track my scent but Vanessa is tinkering with all their senses, even the olfactory. A second later, his vision preys on me.
Rufus' roar wasn't for nothing, we belatedly realize. The sharp gust of debris, which has left a lot of dust floating in the air, passes easily through the extra images to reveal the real us.
Vanessa doesn't have full control over the minds and senses of the lycans. She can only try to make alterations in their superhuman perceptions. And that may slip just as often as it works.
And yes, her lifeline is burning away like meteors burn.
I brace for impact with arms crossed. The lycan's punch connects with earthmoving force. Launched away, I snap three trees, possibly four, before I come to a stop.
The lycan has already crossed the distance. His claws shred a fallen tree beside me into bits of bits. Before he can realize it is just a log he is tearing, I crawl up the nearest tree as swiftly as I can, considering that I feel like I just broke everything in my back.
The fight is going badly. What did we expect?
Only Dean seems to be holding his own against Rufus. By relying on ages of skill and experience than on brute power. He is an Elderwood though. His strength isn't too far away from lycan levels.
Rufus spears Dean with his hand. The arm goes all the way through and blood splatters everywhere. Dean's face is just assuming a contortion of pure agony when it dissolves into Vanessa's mocking smirk. Dean, to the right, flips Rufus sideways with a claw strike that sends the latter crashing into a tree.
I scan the fight quickly. My attacker is sniffing the air for my scent, and heading the opposite direction. Alicia needs my help. The lycan chasing her is shredding everything on her path in a downpour of leaves, berries and tree limbs.
I leap at the lycan. She swipes at me with brutal claws that would put furrows in steel. Except that the claws gut my flashforward self and I land a microsecond later. The female lycan takes us on easily: Alicia, me and our two reflections.
Vanessa comes up with a novel idea. A third reflection stabs the lycan with Alicia's razor claws in a spring of pain. The image and the pain are only fleeting illusions in the lycan's mind. With her distracted, Alicia dives for her neck. I back her up.
Many things happen together. The female lycan twists Alicia's hand to a nasty popping-out-of-joint. I duck a blow to the neck from behind that shorns my hair close to their roots. I find I am suddenly caught between two lycans, with Alicia plummeting to the ground below.
My apish lycan stands like a wall to prevent my escape. Last I had seen him, he was following my scent the other way. And now I have Alicia's female lycan to also worry about.
A human bomb strikes the female lycan, throwing her clean off the face of my game, falling with her. And the two of them fall after Alicia.
Troy.
Members of the pack are arriving now. They can't help us win a victory anyhow, but they can give us a temporary stalemate. And a little time is all we need.
Before my apish lycan, who had been the one to attack me from behind—an offense I barely evaded owing to a concert between Vanessa's telepathy and my Olligrander senses—can pierce the void darkness from Vanessa that has suddenly besieged his vision, I hasten to cut off his outlying end of the branch.
No sooner have my claws sliced through the thick bark like adamantium through paper than he dashes for me. But he is without a solid footing and already plunging downwards. He claws my arm to the bone as he falls.
But I deliver a lucky head strike.
To a lycan, that is no damage at all. But he falls limply—all the metres to the forest floor—with a comet tail of blood.
Vanessa doesn't try to mask the sound of his great bulk smashing to the earth. Every lycan hears it. A ring of dust even spreads outwards from the impact.
Rufus looks from wrestling a battered Dean to the fallen lycan. His eyes track the path of broken tree limbs upwards to me on a pine giant.
His eye glow becomes horribly murderous.