Chapter 49: Hunt.

Chapter 49

Lucian stood in the center of the scorched circle, his boots sinking into the unnaturally dry earth.

To his eyes, the cabin was gone—wiped from the physical plane by a blast of high-level concealment so total it felt like a bruise on reality.

But the silence began to grate against his senses. He closed his eyes, forcing his breath to slow, letting the cold mist of the forest cling to his skin and settle in his long hair.

He could taste the residue of magic on the air. This wasn’t the frantic magic of a cornered witch clinging to survival.

This was deliberate. Controlled. Enjoyed. Clara’s magic had been failing for hours; he had felt it thinning ever since that ritual had gone south.

She could barely maintain a privacy charm anymore. She certainly could not erase a structure from the land and leave nothing but scorched absence behind.

And even if she could… Lucian’s jaw tightened.

Clara would never betray him. Not out of loyalty or affection, but out of a fear sharp enough to keep her spine straight.

She knew exactly what he was capable of; she had seen what happened to witches who broke his trust.

If Clara had moved Isabella, she would have left signs—a trail meant to be followed once permission was granted.

This? This was an abduction wrapped in mockery. A pressure coiled in his chest. The absence of Isabella’s heartbeat in the clearing was a silence so loud it made his ears ring.

He moved his hand through the space where the front door should have been. The air was cold—unnaturally so. It felt like a barrier.

“Clara didn’t do this,” he murmured, his mind analyzing the sheer density of the weave. She couldn’t even perform a reversal ritual without it failing, so how would she be able to make his bond go so utterly silent?

He knelt, pressing his palm flat against the scorched earth. The ground was warm, vibrating with a low-frequency hum.

He closed his eyes again. Every high-level concealment had a weight. To hide something as large as a house required a hook in the physical world—a lie told so convincingly that the land itself believed the space was empty.

His fingers brushed against a patch of dirt that didn’t feel like dirt. It felt like glass.

There. Lucian’s eyes snapped open, his hand plunging into the sub-layer of reality and dragging out a shimmering, invisible thread.

As soon as his fingers hooked the strand, Lucian pulled with the intent to unmake the illusion.

But an invisible door snapped open in the empty space before him. The silence of the clearing was shattered by a familiar, bone-chilling roar.

The Sentinel lunged from the mouth of the hole with terrifying speed. Lucian’s instincts, honed by a millennium of near-misses, took over before his mind could process the attack.

He twisted his torso mid-air, the sound of the Sentinel’s claws whistling past his throat like a serrated blade.

He skidded back, his boots tilling the dry earth as he regained his footing. The jagged hole in the air remained open, a bleeding wound of dark energy that pulsed behind the beast, refusing to close.

Clara’s hound. The image hit him. This Sentinel was hers—bonded to her like a child, fed by her will.

It shouldn’t have been able to exist in this pocket of space without her command. It certainly shouldn’t be hunting him.

Was she playing me all along? The calculation ran through his mind. Had the failed ritual been a ruse?

Had the “thinning” of her power been nothing more than a mask to draw him into a false sense of security while she prepared this ambush?

He looked at the beast, which was already coiled, preparing for another brutal attack. Its one good eye glowed with a mindless, violet light that wasn’t quite Clara’s, yet the creature was undeniably the one he had seen her “mothering” just hours ago.

The same one he had plunged a wood stake into. If she had turned—if she had hidden Isabella behind this wall of scorched lies just to deliver her to the Covens—his mercy was at an end.

Fury rose in his throat. He had trusted her to be afraid. He had relied on her cowardice to keep Isabella safe.

“Clara,” he hissed just as the hound lunged.

Lucian became a blur of lethal grace. His gray eyes bled into a deep crimson.

His fangs tore through his gums, lengthening with a sharp ache as he dropped low just inches before the beast’s massive, fur-matted chest passed above his head.

If she has done this, the world will forget there was ever a witch named Clara. The thought was a hard stone in his mind. He spun on his heel, his claws digging into the dry earth as the Sentinel landed with a bone-shaking thud, instantly shifting its twelve-foot frame.

The creature was even more disgusting up close—the wood stake he had driven into its eye hours ago was gone, replaced by a weeping, black crater of rot that pulsed in time with a magic he didn’t recognize.

It wasn’t Clara’s. It was darker. Older. The hound roared and lunged again. It was faster than before, its movements fueled by a fresh infusion of dark power.

Lucian met the attack head-on, his hands catching the creature’s massive, skeletal forearms.

The impact sent a shockwave through his shoulders, the earth beneath his boots cracking as he fought to keep the beast from crushing him into the dirt.

The Sentinel’s hot, decaying breath washed over him. He couldn’t kill it. He knew that. To kill the hound, he would have to kill the witch, and right now, the witch was hiding behind a veil of lies.

Last time, he had been dying—drained by holy water and poison. Last time, it had taken everything he had to whisper it to sleep.

This time, he was whole. And he was furious.

The Sentinel snapped its jaws, and Lucian let go of the creature’s arms, ducking beneath a sweeping claw that would have decapitated a lesser man.

He drove his elbow into the beast’s sensitive, protruding ribs. The sound of bone snapping echoed in the clearing, but the Sentinel didn’t flinch. It didn’t feel pain.

The hound swung its massive head, slamming its skull into Lucian’s chest. He was thrown back, his body skipping across the scorched earth like a stone.

He slammed into a tree, the impact breaking the trunk in half. The hound didn’t wait for him to recover, rushing forward with incredible speed to end the hunt.

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