29. Milo
Milo
We were in. Despite what Rowan might think, I knew it couldn’t be an accident, the way we’d happened to crash directly into the entrance of this place. The goddess was guiding us. She was guiding Rowan too. I could feel it.
We were going to win.
Metal creaked as I climbed over the wreckage to get inside.
Fog billowed through the opening we’d left with our boat, seeping in with the cold.
The air here was warm, but it was nothing like the warmth that Rowan’s home held, comfortable and scented with firewood and his cooking.
Instead, it was stale. Wrong. And it smelled of something unnatural and unwelcoming.
Lights flickered, and in the distance some loud and terrible noise sounded at regular intervals like mechanical barking.
This was not a good place. Even without knowing they were poachers, that would have been obvious.
“Milo,” Rowan whisper-scolded as he scrambled after me. “We need a plan.”
“We have one,” I whispered back as I kept moving, following the pull in my gut.
“What plan?”
“Find the coats.”
“That isn’t a plan.”
“It’s gotten us this far, hasn’t it?”
I smiled at him, then laced my fingers with his and yanked him with me as I kept going.
The short, narrow hallway opened up into a huge internal chamber. Metal bars lined the edges, but from here I could see there was at least one level above us, and two below.
Down.
My gaze cast downward, the opening on each level giving us a perfect view of metal-barred cages at the bottom, most of which were occupied. We needed to get to them.
“This way,” I decided as I pulled Rowan with me. Selkies followed us closely as they climbed over the warped boat and into the base.
A door opened to our right, revealing a large, angry-looking human.
“Go get the coats!” someone shouted behind me. “We can handle this.”
Trusting them, I continued onward, leaving the sounds of grunts and snarls behind us. We just needed a way to get down.
There were more doors lining the dark walls, under lights that flickered sporadically. The metal ground was cold beneath my feet.
“A dock,” Rowan exhaled with relief. I followed his line of sight, looking across the hollow expanse to the other side where there was a boat a bit bigger than his bobbing in the low-lit chamber.
Perfect. Now once we saved everyone, we had a way to leave.
I had an extra skip in my step and a thrill in my soul, even as another door opened at the end of the hallway and three humans started running straight for me.
I was ready to bite, and claw, and do whatever I had to do to get past them, but I didn’t have to.
The closest one was large, but my human was larger.
Rowan’s hand landed on my shoulder, and he shoved me behind him.
Then his body slammed into the closest poacher, the force of it sending the man crashing into the wall and then crumpling to the ground.
Rowan’s boot landed before he could get back up again, kicking him unconscious.
The two poachers following him went for Rowan too, but there was no world in which I was letting anyone hurt him.
I snarled as I launched at one of them, another selkie quickly pouncing into action from behind me, and another, until we quickly overpowered them.
More would come. Looking down over the drop, I could see a group of men on the level below us, armed with weapons as they ran. We needed to get to the bottom before they could catch us.
I took Rowan’s hand again and pulled him with me, just a bit further, then I smiled as I spotted the stairs. Metal rattled with the speed and weight of our group as we descended two at a time.
One level down, and the poachers I’d seen before were nearly on us.
“Keep going!” said Raq, and my confidence grew as I realized the selkies who hadn’t arrived on Rowan’s boat were also inside now.
We were halfway down when the sound of fighting rang out from above us. Trust them. Keep going.’
We reached the bottom, and there were a lot of things I had to take in fairly quickly.
Two of the walls were lined with dark tanks made of thick scuffed-up glass.
The center of the open space held a huge metal structure that extended from here up through all the levels in the base, and the cages I’d seen from above, most of which contained prisoners.
There were also poachers waiting for us. Five of them. And they all had weapons, except for the biggest one, an extremely muscled man with light gray hair. He was huge for a human, even bigger than Rowan, and I realized with a shock that was because he wasn’t human.
“You’ve made a mistake, coming here,” he said, tilting his head from side to side as his neck cracked.
Rowan tried once again to pull me behind him, but this time I wouldn’t let him, because I knew what that was, and Rowan didn’t stand a chance. Aarlinuk were our biggest predators, but they weren’t our only ones.
Shit.
The other poachers smiled, knowing exactly what their teammate was, and what he was capable of.
The stitches in the big guy’s clothing popped. Fabric stretched until it tore as his bones cracked and his skin warped.
SHIT.
“Naninuk!” I shouted, warning those above us. We were going to need reinforcements, and we were going to need them now.
I glanced around frantically.
“What’s Naninuk?” Rowan asked, again trying to pull me behind him.
“Bear!”
“Bear?”
“Bear!”
“What do you mean—oh shit.”
The transformation was almost complete. The Naninuk’s human skin was covered in fur, his clothing hanging off his expanding body in strips.
If we were going to have any chance, we had to act right now.
The only time Naninuk were anything close to vulnerable was when they were mid-shift, their bodies breaking before they could reform into something much larger.
A short distance behind him was an open door.
“Get the Naninuk into the room!” I shouted as I rushed forward.
Rowan did the same after only a moment’s hesitation.
After we had the main threat contained, we could worry about the other poachers. Even as two of them raised their weapons, the things making loud noises as something shot out of them, the Naninuk was still the biggest threat.
Rowan and I pushed with everything we had, then more hands were joining us as other selkies gave us their strength. Once the Naninuk was completely transformed it would be almost unstoppable, but it couldn’t fight us properly until then.
We barely made it in time, getting the beast into the room filled with steam and heated metal just as it took its true form and a gigantic polar bear filled the space.
The door closed and Rowan slammed his body against it in an attempt to keep it shut as the bear clawed and thrashed against the other side.
It wouldn’t hold for long. There had to be another way.
“Here, lad,” said a booming voice, sounding very annoyed, like that wasn’t the first time they’d tried to get my attention.
I followed it to one of the bigger cages, where a huge, burly, naked man was shaking the bars.
He was just as large as the Naninuk poacher had been, and I realized quickly that was because he was Naninuk too.
“Get me out of here, and I’ll handle that bastard for you. ”
I swallowed, unsure if I could trust him enough to set him free.
My thoughts were jolted as the entire base shook, a loud rumble coming from the outer wall. What was that?
It happened again.
A familiar cackle caught my attention, and I turned to see my grandmother, with one of the shooting things in her hands.
She’d clearly taken it from one of the poachers and was swinging it around, threatening poachers and selkie alike.
“Our reinforcements have arrived.” She grinned.
“Chop chop, Milo. How long do you think it’ll take sixty orcas to sink an iceberg? ”
The rumbles continued, the entire base shaking as I realized the orcas were ramming it from outside.
“The cages, lad,” the imprisoned Naninuk shouted with new urgency. “The coward who’s locked himself in that room will have the keys. If you want to get anyone out of here, you’ll need them,” he explained, gesturing to a door across from us.
I may have been uncertain about the Naninuk, but the cage next to him contained three selkie, all without their coats. If what he’d said was true, then I needed those keys anyway to free them.
The room the “coward” was locked in had a metal door, and I doubted my abilities to break through it, but a huge part of the wall to the side of it was made from glass, providing a window into the area filled with equipment unlike anything I’d ever seen. I could break that.
I looked around until I spotted a curved metal bar set on top of some open wooden boxes. With a glance back at Rowan, whose body jolted as the trapped Naninuk slammed against the door, I rushed for it.
It took five hits before the thick glass shattered, and I climbed into the room. There were two humans in here, both crouched beneath a table in a poor attempt at hiding themselves.
“Give me the keys for those cages,” I snarled, holding clawed fingers up as I approached in a clear threat.
“Fine,” one of them answered quickly, pulling the keys from his pocket and tossing them at me. “Don’t hurt us!”
I caught them, staring for a moment between the keys and the cowardly poachers as the entire base rumbled from another impact. Well, that was easier than expected.
Leaving the cowards, I climbed back out through the broken window.
“Hurry, lad. They can’t hold him for long. I can,” the caged Naninuk told me.
I still wasn’t sure if I could trust him, but as I glanced over and saw the door Rowan was in front of denting outward from the beast inside, I realized I might not have a choice.
The keys jingled in my hands as I tried each of them in the lock of the cage, sighing in relief on the fourth attempt, when the key turned and the cage door opened.
A large crash snapped my attention to Rowan as he was thrown forward with several selkies, the metal door they’d been forcing closed now warped scrap metal blown off its hinges.
The poacher Naninuk roared, its body too big to get out through the opening, but that wouldn’t stop it for long. It would force the opening wider just as it had forced the door open, already the metal was bent and distorted.
My grandmother used the poacher’s weapon, a smile on her face as she shot unknown projectiles at the beast.
Behind me, the sound of bones cracking informed me we were only moments away from having a second gigantic polar bear in the area.
I just had to hope freeing him wasn’t a mistake.