8 Tommy #2
The maintenance stair came up into the north wing on a level I hadn’t mapped—a service catwalk, steel grating underfoot, running along the back of a wall of glass. And through the glass, below us, the auditorium opened up like a wound.
I’d known it was big. I hadn’t known it was a cathedral.
The new patients—untested dormants, regular humans—pale and quiet, were being herded between Wardens, faces tipped up toward the stage with that drugged, hopeful patience I’d seen on Eli’s face in the chow line.
Two hundred frightened people gathered to be welcomed, and I grabbed the catwalk rail and went still, because the Inner Circle was filing onto the stage.
And they were not people.
They wore the shapes of people. Robes, the soft expensive gray of everything in this place, hoods back, faces showing.
But the air around them was wrong in the way that made the wolf in me lay its ears flat and go silent, the way the woods go silent before something with too many teeth walks through.
The light bent toward them. The lavender died in my nose and left something underneath, something I had smelled exactly once before, in a clearing, only a few weeks ago when the pack had encountered Thalakor.
It wasn’t just the sheer volume of power they radiated.
It was the texture of it. My senses cataloged the differences instantly.
The one on the left smelled of gravity and deep earth, the kind of magic that could crush a man’s bones without touching him.
The one in the center hummed with a kinetic, electrical static that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
The architecture of this building, the different spells layered over the guards and patients—it all clicked into a horrifying picture.
The wolf went deathly quiet, ears flat, tail tucked. Cold. Death.
I held Kaia closer. I know, I told him, my teeth gritted. It’s what they do. They turn us into sheep and feed us to these things. But not her. Never her.
Thalakor. The thing the pack had put down, the thing that had brought Levi, our enforcer, to his knees. I’d stood across from that monster and felt my soul try to crawl out the back of my skull.
These were worse.
There were five of them, and they moved across that stage like gods.
And the two hundred drugged and cuffed people below tipped their faces up to be welcomed.
Beside me, Kaia had gone rigid against the rail.
I felt it travel through her hand into mine—a tremor that wasn’t fear of me, wasn’t humiliation, but something older.
Her body knew. Whatever they’d brainwashed into her, the animal under her ribs took one look at the things on that stage and recoiled.
“What—” Her voice was a thread. “Those aren’t—the Inner Circle is supposed to be the founding elders, they’re—”
“They lied to you about that too.” I peeled her hand off the rail. “Come on. Don’t let them see movement up here. Come on, sweetheart, eyes front, move.”
We went down the catwalk fast and low, and I did not look back at the things on the stage, because some part of me knew that if I looked again I’d never stop running.
The catwalk dumped us into a service corridor, and one of the Stewards stood in our path.
Sloane.
My wolf growled in my chest and I readied myself to slay this Steward in her tracks. I would not let her—
Sloane raised both hands, empty, palms out, the universal sign of I’m not the problem, and her pale eyes went straight to mine and held.
To my eyes. The gold ones.
“There they are,” she said quietly. “Took you long enough, California. I had you for active on day two. You move wrong.” A flick of those eyes to Kaia, taking in the wreck of her.
“And there’s her. Finally.” Something complicated crossed her face—relief, maybe, or grief.
“I was starting to think she’d die in that uniform. ”
“You’re—” Kaia’s voice. “Sloane. You’re—”
“Not one of them. No.” Sloane’s jaw tightened.
“I’ve been in this place for years feeding what I can to the people I trust, which until tonight was a very short list. You want to thank me, you do it later, because right now you’ve got about ninety seconds before they finish the welcome and run the roll and find two empty cuffs. ”
She dug into her uniform and tossed something—
I snatched it out of the air, a flat black card.
“Master credential. Gets you through the service doors, but the Harvest Floor elevator is blood-locked. I assume that’s what you came for.”
“It is.” But my hand tightened on Kaia’s.
Her skin was burning, the sweet scent of her Heat getting thicker, more desperate by the second. The fire is coming, the wolf warned, restless, pacing. We need to hide her. We need to breed.
I know, I replied, fighting the rising panic. I’d watched three of the guys on my crew find their mates and go through this. The terror that filled my chest threatened to darken my vision.
Kaia was my mate.
I had to get her out of here before she lost full control to her Heat.
Except—five days had already passed. With my pack mates, the Heat had come on far sooner than this. I didn’t know what the difference meant yet.
“And once we’re down?” I asked, keeping my voice under control.
“An old drainage spillway runs under the harvest cells, straight out to the eastern ravine,” Sloane said.
“I’ve spent the last six months clearing the debris on the ravine side.
The path is open, but you have to trip the release from the harvest floor console.
Get them out through there.” Sloane’s mouth went flat.
“Miller is at the north junction prepping it for the visitors’ descent right now. Alone. His hand is your key down.”
The name landed in my chest like a coal. His hand opens that door. Kaia had given me that in the booth, scraped raw, the last thing she had, and I’d taken it like a tool, and here it was again, the whole map collapsing down to one man and one hand.
“His hand,” I said. “Blood-locked. So I need—”
“You need his hand,” Sloane said. “However you have to get it.” She stepped back into the shadow of a doorway. “I’ll hold the roll as long as I can. Sixty seconds, maybe. Go. Go.”
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The north junction was empty stone and a wall of brushed steel, and Miller stood in front of it with his back half-turned, talking low into a wrist comm, and the elevator behind him was a seam of light in the metal.
“No, I secured the perimeter,” Miller was saying, his voice tight.
Not the fatherly baritone he used upstairs, and not the sneering condescension he usually aimed at me.
This was something else. This was fear. “If you’re telling me a Saint has been dispatched...
you understand what that means for the lower wing.
They don’t leave witnesses. If a Saint is walking the floor tonight, we are all expendable. ”
The silence on the other end of the comm seemed to answer him, because Miller’s shoulders hunched, his hand dropping to his side. Whoever these Saints were, they terrified the monsters who ran this place. That was a bad sign. A very bad sign.
But I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had a plan. The plan was to play the lost, drugged dormant one last time, get close, and get my hands on him before he understood what was happening. It was a good plan. It lasted exactly as long as it took Miller to turn around and look at my eyes.
Fuck. I’d forgotten.
“Well,” he said. And smiled. “There it is.”
He moved faster than a man his size had any right to. His hand came up out of his coat with something flat and gray pinched between two fingers—a silver hex-patch—and before the wolf could get my body out of the way he had it pressed flat against the side of my neck.
The world went white.
The patch reached into me and grabbed the wolf by the spine and pulled, and every muscle I owned locked at once, my legs folding, my back arching, and I went down onto the stone with my jaw clamped and my hands curled into useless claws and a sound coming out of me I’d never made before, a high thin wire of a sound, because the thing in my chest, the bond, my mate—it was being crushed flat, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t shift, couldn’t fight, could only lie there feeling my own body turn against me.
The wolf shrieked, a high-pitched cry of agony in my mind. The bond! He is tearing us from her! I cannot reach her! I gritted my teeth until they cracked. Fight it! I screamed back. Don’t let him lock us down. If we go out, she’s alone.
Miller crouched over me, unhurried. “The masking was good. I’ll give you that.
” He pressed the patch harder, and the light went red at the edges.
“But the body always tells. The pond—that’s when I knew.
Stay down now. There’s a panel downstairs that’s been waiting for a strong one.
You may not be as valuable as a dormant, but we never waste an opportunity. We’ll get everything out of you.”
My vision was tunneling. Kaia was somewhere behind me—I’d lost her in the white—and I tried to say her name, tried to say run, and what came out was a wet broken nothing.
And then I smelled it.
Storm and stone and the sharp animal thread, but rising, building, and under my cheek the stone floor carried a sound up into my skull—a low sound, a growl, coming from a throat that had spent a lifetime being trained never to make it.
Miller’s head came up.
I got my eyes to track, just barely, and I will carry what I saw for the rest of my life.
Kaia stood in the middle of the corridor with her arms out from her sides and her head down, and she was coming apart.