Chapter 3 #2
I don’t fall apart. I squeeze her hands once, hard, the closest I can get to everything I don’t have time to say, and she squeezes back like she heard it anyway.
Simone last. On my own. However I want it.
She’s in the small room off the garden where she’s been staying, and she opens the door before I knock. She’s felt me coming her whole life, two kids learning to read a floorboard’s creak to know which parent was home. She takes one look at my face.
“Okay,” she says. “Whatever it is, just say it. You’ve got your bad-news face.”
So I say it. The chair is buried under folded clothes she hasn’t put away, because Simone folds everything and stores nothing.
So I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, the belly making the position less comfortable than it used to be, and I give her the real version, not the tactical one I gave the conference room.
“I’m pregnant,” I tell her. “Twins.”
Her face does about four things at once.
“There’s more,” I say, before any of the four can pick a direction.
“They’re strong, Simone. They’re already doing telekinesis, through me, without asking.
And I’m walking into a fight tonight with them inside me, and you’re hearing it from me now because you were never going to hear it from someone else. Or from a debrief. If it went bad.”
Then she crosses the room and grabs me, both arms, hard, like she grabbed me the night I got her out, and she holds on for a long time.
“You’re an idiot,” she says into my shoulder, muffled and thick, her arms still locked.
“I know.”
“You’re pregnant with twins and you’re going to a war.”
“I know.”
“And the twins can apparently do telekinesis. Through you. Without permission.”
“That’s the part where I need you to focus.”
She pulls back. She looks at me. Her eyes do the Simone version of processing. Fast, all of it at once, and I recognize all of it, inherited from the same childhood of learning to read a room before anyone in it reads you.
“You’re pregnant with twins,” she says again, and the second time it comes out scared instead of furious, “and you’re going to a war.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have led with the part where I’m going to be an aunt? You had to do the whole tactical briefing first?”
“I didn’t do the tactical briefing on you.”
“You did a little.” Her eyes are wet and furious and shining all at once, which is the most Simone expression there is. “So I’m getting two at once.”
“Apparently I don’t do anything halfway.”
She makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a sob, and her hand comes up to her mouth.
“And you told me.” Her voice cracks on it, and I understand exactly what she means. Every year of the distance I put between us and called protection. And what it’s costing me now to stop. “You’re really not doing it the old way anymore.”
“No.” My voice shakes, and I let it. This is my sister and she’s earned the version that shakes. “I’m not doing it the old way anymore.”
She holds my face as our mother never did for either of us and presses her forehead to mine. “Then go win,” she says. “Come back. Both of you. All four of you.” A breath. “And next time lead with the aunt part.”
There. Every name. Every room. Done.
The circle’s as wide as I can make it and call it safe. Now we go.
The armory’s open when I get there. Boots in the corridors, gear on the tables, the noise of people about to do a thing that can’t be taken back. Maximus is waiting for me, already kitted, motionless in the middle of all of it. He looks at my face, and whatever he finds there, he doesn’t ask.
“All five,” he says.
“All five.” I pull the vest on. The tactical vest fits differently than it used to.
The twins have added a curve that the manufacturer didn’t plan for, and I’ve had to loosen the side straps again, and the body cam sits at an angle on my shoulder that makes Julian’s footage analysis slightly left-of-center, and he hasn’t said a word about it, which from Julian is practically a compliment.
“Marcellus has the contingency. Julian has the route. Mira and Seraphina know what’s inside me. And my sister isn’t going to learn anything from a debrief.”
“Then there’s nothing left to brief.” He clips the last strap into place, the one I always forget, like he has every time, and his fingers brush my jaw on the return, quick, the only tenderness either of us can afford right now. “We walk in. We find out. We walk out.”
“We end it,” I finish.
Through the bond his certainty meets mine, and for once they match.
We move.
The convoy runs dark. No headlights. Vampire eyes don’t need them, and the wolves in the lead truck navigate by senses that make headlights redundant.
The road narrows as we leave the highway, asphalt to gravel to packed dirt, the compound’s vehicles grinding through a landscape that gets wilder with every mile, the towns thinning out of the hills until there’s nothing left but pines and dark and the emptiness of country that nobody uses for anything except hiding things in it.
The northern hub sits in a fold of dark hills, a low industrial sprawl built to pass for a decommissioned switching station, which is what Konstantin’s places are always built to pass for.
We come in from the tree line. Erik’s wolves are already laid out along the south perimeter, low to the ground, ears flat, and I feel the strike settle into the part of me that did this for a living long before my mind could move anything heavier than a grudge.
Seraphina and Mira kneel at the edge of the wards. The ward line is invisible to the naked eye but I can feel it, a pressure against my teeth, a frequency my body recognizes even if my eyes don’t. Seraphina’s hands are flat on the ground, her fingers spread, her silver eyes closed, her focus total.
Mira kneels beside her mother. Their magic runs in parallel, two frequencies harmonizing as their bloodlines do, Fae and witch woven into a partnership that predates any alliance this coalition has built.
Seraphina breaks. Mira sustains. The breaking and the sustaining are the same work done from different angles, and the wards between them don’t stand a chance.
Seraphina lifts her head and wipes a thin line of blood from under her nose.
“Down,” she says. “All of them.”
“All teams, go,” Maximus says into the comms, and we move.
The north entrance is reinforced steel. I reach for it like Mira taught me, push past the surface, and my power maps it from the inside, welds and bolts and hinges, the fault lines where the frame will fail first. I find them and I pull, and the door comes off its housing and folds inward with a shriek, and I’m already through it, Maximus at my left shoulder, his shadows pouring off him and spreading black and low across the floor ahead of us.
Then the night turns to noise.
Alarms hit first. A klaxon buried somewhere in the facility’s infrastructure, a shrieking wail that bounces off concrete and makes the teeth in my skull vibrate. Fluorescents snap on in the corridor ahead, harsh and white over the industrial gray.
The first guard comes from the right. Fast. Loyalist gray, short blade, the compact efficiency of someone who trains in these corridors and knows every angle.
Maximus’s shadows catch him before I see the blade move, black tendrils wrapping his wrist and slamming him sideways into a server rack.
The rack topples. Sparks scatter across the floor.
Two more from the left. I reach for the gift and it answers, and I catch the first one mid-stride and throw him into the second. They go down in a tangle. One tries to rise. I pin him flat. The other stays down.
More from deeper in the facility. The hub is larger than the schematics suggested, corridors branching off the central access, and the guards are coming from multiple directions now, the organized response of a garrison that’s been running drills for exactly this scenario.
Maximus is ahead of me, shadows spread, the war in his body running on training worn into the bone, and he is precise and fast and terrifying and I would watch him work if I had time, but I don’t, because the guards on my side are mine.
Three of them at the east junction. I put one through a wall.
The second one’s blade gets within a foot of my vest before the power catches it and folds the blade back into his own guard.
The third runs for a comms panel and I pull him off it and hold him at ceiling height while the wolves clear the corridor behind me.
Guards come out of two corridors at once. Four from the east, three from the west, and the formation tells me they’ve been drilled for this, a two-axis response designed to catch intruders in a crossfire. The east team carries close-range blades. The west team carries modified crossbows.
The alarm is still screaming. The fluorescents are at full power, and in the harsh white light the guards’ faces are visible and young and committed, the faces of people who look like they believe in what they’re defending, and believers are dangerous in a way mercenaries aren’t.
I don’t reach for them with my fists. I reach the other way, the reach that maps a thing from the inside, and this is what I’ve been afraid of since the surge.
The reach is mine. What answers it isn’t.
Their telekinesis wakes below my navel, from where the two of them live, and pours into the channel, too much and too fast, and the grab completes before I’ve finished choosing him, the automatic grab I trained myself to yank back.
There’s no yanking theirs back. It maps him.
I’ve mapped men before, joints and fault lines, the pieces that end a fight, and I’ve pulled.
This map doesn’t stop at the joints. It’s all of him, every point that’s holding him together, and for one sick half second I have the whole of it while their power holds it steady and asks, simple as anything, whether to pull.
I pull.