Chapter 30
Tess
"Thirty-two degrees and dropping," Raze said through my earpiece. "I want it on record that I was promised dinner."
I pressed closer to Thalon's neck, the cold slicing through my leathers everywhere his heat didn't reach.
February in Northern California wasn't supposed to be this bitter, but at altitude, with the wind peeling past us in sheets, my fingers were going numb inside my gloves.
Below us, the landscape was a dark smear of nothing—black fields, darker tree lines, the occasional pinprick of a farmhouse light miles away from its nearest neighbor.
"Noted," Theron's voice cut through the channel. "Focus on your heading."
We were maybe forty minutes out from the Library by dragon.
Theron had given us coordinates—a blank stretch of rural territory where the Guild's monitoring array had flagged a ward disturbance.
He'd framed it as a training opportunity.
A real-world callout. The kind of thing we'd graduate to eventually anyway, so why not see how we handled it now?
Except his voice had that edge it got when he was constructing something careful. And he'd come to my room to deliver the order in person instead of through the comms. And he hadn't told Valen.
"You are tense, little one."
Thalon's voice moved through me like warm stone—solid, unhurried.
"I'm fine."
A rumble through his massive body. Disagreement he didn't bother voicing.
I adjusted my grip on the harness and glanced right.
Draven flew beside me on Amrion, the obsidian dragon nearly invisible against the sky except for the faint sheen of his scales when we banked through a cloud break.
Draven had been talking when we launched—low, steady confirmations through the earpiece about heading and formation.
Then he'd stopped.
Not gradually. Mid-sentence, like someone had pressed a hand over his mouth. I watched his posture change on Amrion's back—shoulders drawing in, head turning, his whole body orienting toward something I couldn't see.
"Draven." Theron's voice. "Report."
Silence for two beats. Then Draven, low and tight, "I'm picking something up ahead. Something wrong with the bonds in the area. Muted, like I'm hearing them through a wall, but the shape of it is—" He stopped. "It's not right."
My stomach clenched.
No. I'd been warm a second ago and now I wasn't. Not this. Not here. Not tonight.
I told myself it could still be something else.
The shape Draven was reaching for could be a dozen things.
Residual energy from an accessed ley line.
A territorial dispute gone bad. Any one of the stranger callouts Theron had described from his years in the field.
The word corrupted hadn't actually come out of Draven's mouth yet.
He hadn't said pattern. He hadn't said any of the things we'd been saying to each other for weeks in the Library with mint tea and the door closed.
He didn't need to. I could hear what he wasn't saying in the way he wasn't saying it.
"Could be interference," Lunessa offered through the earpiece. She was behind us on Kaelthar, the smoke-grey dragon keeping a tight formation with Yrden, who carried both Theron and Anya. "Concentrated supernatural activity can read like corruption at a distance."
"It's not interference." Draven's voice was flat. "I can feel the shape of what's being done to them. I've seen this before."
My chest went tight.
Aegis Elite. He'd spent years running private security for beings most healers wouldn't touch. He'd seen corruption and grafted magic and god knew what else in contexts I'd never been anywhere near. That was probably what he meant. That was almost certainly what he meant.
I held onto almost certainly like a railing.
"What the hell does that mean?" Raze's voice cut in, sharp. "Seen what before? What are we flying into?"
Right. Raze hadn't been part of the investigation. He didn't know about the facilities, the bond experiments, the network. He'd been training with us every day and running drills every night and he had no idea what Draven and I had been piecing together in the Library after hours.
"I'll explain later," Draven said. "Stay focused on the approach."
"That's not an answer—"
"It's the one you're getting right now." Draven's earpiece voice had gone to that particular register—calm, smooth, absolutely not open for discussion. Military Draven. The one who gave orders, not requests.
Raze went quiet. I could picture his face—jaw tight, eyes narrowed, not happy about being shut out but trusting enough to table it.
Good. He was here. Whatever was down there, Raze was the kind of person you wanted at your back, full briefing or not.
"Coordinates in two minutes," Theron said. No comment on the exchange. No questions about what Draven was sensing or why I'd gone silent. He knew we'd been investigating. He'd told me as much on the path two days ago.
"Copy," I said, and my voice came out steady. Good enough.
Below us, the terrain was changing—flatter, more open, the tree lines giving way to fenced pastureland. I could see a cluster of structures ahead, barely visible without city light to define them. A property. Rural. Isolated.
Thalon began his descent without being told, and the other dragons followed.
We landed in a field fifty yards from the main structure—a barn, wide and weathered, flanked by two smaller outbuildings and a stretch of fencing that had seen better decades. The kind of property you'd drive past on a back road without looking twice.
My boots hit frozen ground and the cold came up through the soles immediately. February earth, hard as concrete. Thalon's claws left gouges in the frost as he settled, his scales shifting from deep obsidian to burnished gold.
Theron was already on the ground. The rest of us quickly joined him.
"Approach formation," Theron said through the earpiece. "Quiet. Eyes open."
We moved toward the barn on foot, five abreast with spacing between us. The property was silent. No lights in the barn, no movement from the outbuildings. Dead grass scraped against the fencing. My breath made ghosts in the air.
Thalon's presence burned behind me—not physically close anymore, but present. Through the bond, I could feel his attention sharpening, his massive head tracking our movement toward the structure.
"Something beneath us." His voice in my mind, low and certain. "The earth is wrong here."
I filed it. Kept walking.
The barn door was unlocked. Theron pushed it open and we filed in, spreading to cover corners the way he'd made us practice until we could do it in our sleep.
Stale hay. Old equipment rusting in the corners.
A tractor that hadn't moved in years. Cold air that smelled like damp wood and nothing else.
Draven stood in the center of the space, turning slowly. His eyes had gone distant—that look he got when he was reaching through Amrion, extending his perception past what his own senses could touch.
"They're directly below us," he said. "The bonds are down there. I can't tell how many—the warding is dampening what I can sense—but it's not a few." He stopped. Swallowed. "The signatures are wrong in the same way."
The same way as what?
He hadn't finished the sentence. He didn't have to finish it for it to mean something—he could have meant the same way as any corrupted bond he'd catalogued in the last ten years of his career. Dozens of possibilities. Hundreds.
My brain offered one anyway, unbidden, and I shoved it down before it could fully form.
My Draconis Heart gave a hard pulse against my ribs.
Lunessa crouched and pressed her palm flat against the barn floor. Dirt and concrete, cracked with age. She was quiet for a moment, her amber eyes going unfocused the way they did when she let her earth magic feel through the ground.
"He's right," she said. "The substrate is reinforced. This isn't a barn foundation—there's structure below this. Deep."
"I don't see a door," Raze said, scanning the walls. "No hatch, no stairs, nothing."
He was right. The barn was just a barn. Except Draven said there were people suffering directly beneath us and Lunessa said the ground was reinforced and I was standing in the middle of it all thinking where's the entrance, where's the—
The pressure wave hit my chest before I heard anything.
My second heartbeat—the Draconis Heart—lurched hard against my ribs like something had grabbed it and squeezed. I staggered. Beside me, Draven doubled over, his hand shooting out to grab my arm—not to steady me. To steady himself.
The concealment wards shattered.
I felt it the way you'd feel a window exploding in a room you were standing in—a concussive ripple of magic that tasted like copper and burned ozone.
Where there had been nothing—empty floor, dirt, concrete—there was now a reinforced hatch, heavy steel, set into the ground in the center of the barn.
It had been there the whole time. The wards had made us look right through it.
And with the wards gone, Draven made a sound—not quite a gasp, more like someone who'd been hearing faint static suddenly had half of it clear. His hand tightened on my arm hard enough to bruise.
"The signatures." His voice was low and unsteady in a way I'd never heard from him. "Tess. The pattern—"
His eyes met mine. In the dark of the barn, Amrion's psychic amplification made them look almost black—fully dilated, holding mine like he was asking me to argue with him. To tell him he was wrong. To give him any other answer than the one we both already knew.
I couldn't.
The word we hadn't said to each other in the Library and hadn't said on the flight in was right there between us, pressing against the inside of my teeth, and neither of us was going to be the one to say it out loud in front of the team. Not yet. Not until we had to.
But I felt him know. And he felt me know. And the eight months of mint tea and late nights and we'll go ourselves landed between us in a single breath that tasted like copper and ozone and the bottom falling out of the investigation we'd thought we were still running.
Screaming from below. Muffled by the hatch but unmistakable. Human voices—or not human, it didn't matter—crying out in pain. And underneath it, the sharp crack of magic being used in ways magic was never meant to be used.
People were being hurt down there. Right now.
"Blackwell." Draven released my arm. His voice had steadied—the overwhelm locked down, the soldier taking over. "This isn't a training exercise."
Theron was already looking at the hatch.
I watched his face in the thin moonlight that came through the barn slats—the calculation running behind his eyes.
This was supposed to be recon. We didn't have backup.
Silvius had dismissed this anomaly, which meant we were acting without authorization, which meant if this went wrong—
One beat. He looked at his team. At Draven, who was still shaking off whatever Amrion was pushing through him. At Raze, whose whole body had gone rigid at the sound of screaming. At Lunessa, her hand still pressed to the floor. At me.
Conflict crossed his face—fast, then gone.
Then he was giving orders.
"Anya." His voice through the earpiece was calm.
Precise. Like he'd already made this decision hours ago and was only now letting us hear it.
"Hold position topside. Contact Garrick Burke at the Guild directly—him, not dispatch.
Brief him on our location and what we've found.
When Team Two arrives, you're their point of contact. "
"Copy," Anya said. No hesitation. Practical to the bone.
"Relay to your dragons." This to all of us now. "Thalon and Yrden, perimeter patrol—anything that moves out of this facility, you intercept. Talven, storm cover over the immediate property. Localized—nothing past the tree line. Kaelthar, hold the barn entrance."
I reached through the bond. "You heard him."
"I heard him before he said it." Thalon's voice was molten. Furious. He'd felt the ward-shatter through me, felt what Draven was sensing through the echo of my reaction. "Go, little one. I will be here."
I looked at Anya across the barn. She was already moving toward the door, comm in hand. Our eyes met for half a second—everything we couldn't say compressed into a single glance.
Be careful. I'll see you after.
Her expression said go.
"I'm on point." Theron's voice again, shaped to the room now. "Draven, right behind me—your senses are our radar down there. Raze, rear guard. Lunessa, Whittaker—middle."
"Copy," I said.
Theron hauled the hatch open himself. The metal groaned—heavy, built to seal.
Beneath it, stairs. Not wooden farmhouse stairs—reinforced concrete, industrial, descending into fluorescent light that flickered and buzzed.
The architecture of something that had been built to be hidden, not to exist on any blueprint or county record.
The screaming was louder now. And underneath it, the sound of magic—not the clean hum of someone casting with intention, but the grinding, tearing sound of power being forced through pathways it was never meant to travel.
Theron went in first, his magic live at his fingertips, the concentrated glow lighting the concrete as he descended. Draven fell in right behind him—close, tight, his senses already extending ahead of them both.
I followed.