Chapter 213: 213 Mrs

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213: Mrs.

Callahan’s Past 213: Mrs.

Callahan’s Past The assault team was regrouping, their tactical training adapting to the unexpected resistance.

They’d come prepared for a disorganized community of panicked supernatural beings, not for coordinated defense led by werewolves who’d regained human consciousness and a Siren with two centuries of accumulated power.

“Fall back to secondary positions,” the team leader ordered.

“This isn’t a capture operation anymore—it’s asset denial.

If we can’t acquire the Resonant, we ensure no one else can either.”

Emma felt the shift in their intention even before they moved.

Through her connection to Dorothy’s song, through her amplification of every supernatural signature in Eldergrove, she could sense the assault team’s preparations to destroy rather than capture.

“They’re going to kill me,” Emma said, her voice surprisingly calm despite the horror of the realization.

“They’ve shifted from acquisition to elimination.”

“Over my dead body,” Patricia said from the greenhouse doorway, having armed herself with a shotgun from Julian’s emergency supplies.

She looked utterly incongruous—an investment banker in business casual holding a tactical weapon—but her expression carried the absolute determination of a mother protecting her child.

Dorothy’s voice shifted, the ancient Siren song taking on new harmonics.

Emma felt the change ripple through her Resonant connection—Dorothy wasn’t just providing an anchor for shapeshifters anymore.

She was creating a defensive network, linking every supernatural being in Eldergrove into a unified awareness that shared sensory information and tactical coordination.

It was what Mishka had done with the binding song during the rogue attack, but refined by two centuries of practice into something far more sophisticated.

Through this network, Emma could feel Julian’s security team taking positions that perfectly countered the assault team’s movements.

She could sense Bruce and the other alphas coordinating wolf packs that moved with human intelligence and animal grace.

She could feel Mrs.

Pemberton and the other witches weaving protective spells that specifically targeted the assault team’s weapons and equipment.

“This is what integration looks like when we have time to prepare,” Dorothy said, her voice still carrying that ancient song.

“Not just supernatural beings living near humans, but all of us—supernatural and human—working as a unified community to protect each other.”

The assault team leader’s tactical radio crackled with a transmission from whoever was coordinating the operation.

Emma couldn’t hear the words, but she felt the leader’s response through the supernatural network: reluctant acceptance of new orders.

“We’re pulling back,” the leader announced to his team.

“Primary operation is compromised.

Secondary objectives take priority.”

They began withdrawing, not in panic but in organized tactical retreat.

But as they pulled back toward Eldergrove’s gates, Emma felt something wrong through her connection to Dorothy’s network.

“They’re not leaving,” Emma said urgently.

“They’re repositioning.

There’s something else—”

The explosion came from the direction of the Henderson house.

Not the house itself, but the street in front of it, where the assault team had planted charges while everyone’s attention was on the greenhouse and Dorothy’s revelation.

The blast carved a barrier between the community center and the Henderson residence, cutting off the two locations from each other.

“Divide and conquer,” Bruce snarled, his wolf senses detecting more charges being placed.

“They’re splitting our defenses, forcing us to choose which location to protect.”

“The house,” Patricia said immediately.

“Thomas and Emma both—”

“Dad’s not there,” Emma interrupted.

“He went with Riley and Naomi to the archive facility.

Remember?”

Patricia’s face went white as she realized her husband was somewhere in Toronto, marked for elimination, heading toward The Collector’s stronghold without any of the supernatural defensive network that Dorothy had created.

“We need to warn them,” Patricia said desperately.

“If Thomas walks into that facility without knowing—”

“The communication blackout from the false moon is affecting conventional electronics,” Gillian reported from her position monitoring communications.

“I can’t reach any of the teams that left Eldergrove.

We’re completely cut off.”

Dorothy’s song faltered for just a moment, her ancient concentration breaking as she processed the tactical situation.

In that moment, Emma felt the false moon’s power surge again, The Collector taking advantage of the legendary Siren’s brief distraction.

Shapeshifters throughout Eldergrove stumbled as the lunar energy reasserted itself, not fully transforming them but disrupting their regained control.

Dorothy’s voice strengthened immediately, but the damage was done—they’d lost their unified coordination for crucial seconds.

The assault team used those seconds to complete their withdrawal, disappearing into Toronto’s streets with military efficiency.

But they left behind not just explosive charges, but something worse.

Emma felt it through her Resonant connection—small devices scattered throughout Eldergrove, all synchronized, all designed to emit specific frequencies targeted at different supernatural signatures.

Not weapons designed to kill, but to disrupt, to cause pain, to make supernatural abilities unreliable and uncontrollable.

“They’ve seeded the entire community with disruption devices,” Sasha said, her Resonant expertise recognizing what she was sensing.

“Emma, if those activate—”

“We’ll lose all coordination,” Emma finished.

“Every supernatural being will be fighting their own abilities instead of working together.

And without Dorothy’s network, we’ll be easy targets.”

Dorothy’s face had aged visibly from the strain of maintaining her song while countering the false moon and preventing complete shapeshifter loss of control.

Two hundred years of accumulated power couldn’t change the fact that she was still one Siren trying to counter an artificial moon, coordinate a community’s defenses, and now deal with distributed disruption devices.

“I can’t counter all of this,” Dorothy admitted, her voice showing exhaustion for the first time.

“The false moon alone requires everything I have.

If they activate those disruption devices while I’m maintaining the defensive network—”

“You’ll burn out,” Mrs.

Pemberton finished grimly.

“Dorothy, even you have limits.

Two centuries of power don’t make you infinite.”

Through the greenhouse windows, Emma could see the first hints of sunrise beginning to lighten the eastern sky.

The false moon had been active for hours, and Dorothy had been singing almost as long.

How much more could either of them endure?

“We need to make a choice,” Julian said, his tactical mind cutting through the emotional complexity.

“We can defend Eldergrove against the disruption devices, or we can maintain the defensive network against conventional attacks, or we can counter the false moon.

We can’t do all three.”

“And The Collector knows it,” Bruce added.

“This whole assault was designed to force exactly this impossible choice.

Stretch our defenses until something breaks.”

Emma felt her consciousness fragmenting again under the combined strain of amplifying Dorothy’s network and maintaining partial control over the false moon’s effects.

Blood ran from her nose, and her vision was starting to blur.

She was approaching the same breaking point that had shattered her control before, except now there was no rescue coming.

Thomas was at the archive facility trying to shut down the false moon generator.

Riley and Naomi were with him, trying to destroy the source of the astronomical manipulation.

But they’d been gone for over an hour with no communication, no way to know if they’d succeeded or been captured or been killed.

Mishka appeared in the greenhouse doorway, her Siren voice carrying harmonics of grim determination.

“Dorothy, I need to know—can you teach me what you’re doing?

Can you show me how to maintain the defensive network while you focus on countering the false moon?”

Dorothy looked at the younger Siren with something between hope and despair.

“What I’m doing took me a hundred and fifty years to learn.

Mishka, you’re powerful, but—”

“But we don’t have a hundred and fifty years,” Mishka interrupted.

“We have maybe thirty minutes before Emma or you collapse from exhaustion.

Can you teach me enough in thirty minutes to buy us more time?”

Emma felt Dorothy’s calculation through their connection—weighing the impossibility of teaching century-level techniques in minutes against the certainty of failure if they didn’t try.

The math was brutal, and the conclusion was unavoidable.

“I can show you,” Dorothy decided.

“Whether you can learn fast enough is beyond my control.

But Mishka, if you try this and fail, the feedback could destroy your voice permanently.

You could lose your Siren abilities completely.”

“And if I don’t try, everyone here dies or gets captured,” Mishka replied.

“That’s not really a choice, Dorothy.

Show me how to hold the network.”

As Dorothy began teaching Mishka techniques that should take decades to master, Emma felt something shift in the distance.

Not in Eldergrove, but miles away—at the archive facility where Thomas, Riley, and Naomi were trying to shut down the false moon generator.

She felt a surge of power that wasn’t lunar, wasn’t Siren, wasn’t anything she recognized.

It felt like reality itself was bending, like someone had found the fundamental frequency that determined how supernatural power operated and was rewriting it.

“Something’s happening at the archive,” Emma said.

“I think—I think they found something.

Something The Collector wasn’t expecting.”

But before anyone could respond to this news, the disruption devices throughout Eldergrove activated simultaneously.

Emma’s Resonant abilities spasmed as contradictory frequencies assaulted her from dozens of directions at once.

Dorothy’s ancient song wavered as the disruption targeted Siren-specific frequencies.

Shapeshifters throughout the community collapsed as the devices sent conflicting signals that made transformation impossible to control.

And in that moment of total chaos, Emma felt it through her fragmenting connection to the defensive network:

The Collector himself had just entered Eldergrove.

Not through the gates that the assault team had used.

Through underground tunnels that predated the community’s founding, passages that only someone with two centuries of accumulated intelligence would know existed.

“He’s here,” Emma gasped, fighting to maintain consciousness through the disruption assault.

“The Collector is inside Eldergrove.

And he’s not alone.”

Through her failing connection, she counted the signatures accompanying him.

Twenty heavily armed personnel.

Six captured supernatural beings radiating the terror of mind control collars.

And Jean Rousseau, carrying something that made Emma’s Resonant nature scream warnings—a portable version of the voice control device, refined and ready for field deployment.

The Collector had brought his weapon directly to them.

And they were too exhausted, too disrupted, too fragmented to stop him.

The Eldergrove community potluck had been Patricia Henderson’s idea, proposed in a moment of desperate optimism after learning that her daughter was a Resonant witch and her community was ground zero for a centuries-old supernatural war.

“If we’re going to defend this place,” she’d said at the emergency planning meeting, “we need the human residents to understand what they’re defending.

No more secrets.

No more pretending.

We normalize the supernatural before The Collector makes it terrifying.”

Now, watching her neighbors set up folding tables on the community’s central lawn while trying not to stare at the werewolf security team patrolling the perimeter, Patricia wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake.

Tom Richardson stood at his massive custom grill, the one he’d had shipped from Texas when he moved to Eldergrove three years ago.

He was a large man with an even larger personality, known throughout the community for his weekend barbecues that could feed fifty people and his insistence that Toronto didn’t understand proper smoking techniques.

“Patricia!” Tom called out, waving a pair of tongs.

“I’ve got brisket, ribs, pulled pork—you name it, I’ve smoked it!

Though I gotta say, this is the strangest potluck I’ve ever catered.

Usually don’t have armed security at neighborhood gatherings.”

“Unusual times,” Patricia replied with a smile that felt brittle.

“But the food smells amazing as always.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” Tom said, lowering his voice.

“Amazing food, nice neighbors, beautiful community.

Just ignore the fact that half of them can apparently turn into wolves.” He laughed, but it had a nervous edge.

Tom had been one of the human residents who’d requested the truth after the false moon incident three nights ago.

Along with about fifteen other families, he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement and attended the briefing where Julian had explained, in careful diplomatic terms, that Eldergrove was an “integrated supernatural community” and recent events were related to “external threats against supernatural citizens.”

The briefing had lasted four hours.

Three families had immediately put their houses up for sale.

Two more were “thinking about it.” The rest, like Tom, were trying to process and adjust.

“So,” Tom continued, flipping ribs with practiced efficiency, “when you say some of the kids are ‘specially gifted,’ you mean they can do actual magic?

Like, Harry Potter magic?”

“More like X-Men,” Patricia corrected.

“Abilities that are genetic, that manifest during adolescence, that require training to control safely.”