3 Finn
The oak door gave on the second kick. I went in through the wreck of it before the top hinge finished tearing out of the frame.
Splinters skated across the marble foyer. Two Conclave familiars—pale, sharp-toothed things wearing tailored suits to mimic humanity—came off a console table near the stairs. The near one got his sidearm level and put three rounds into the doorway where a slower man would still have been standing.
I wasn’t there anymore.
I read the room the way I read a backdraft—where the air moved, where the panic would flow, which throat the pressure would push toward first. The pressure pushed toward the stairs. I went to the stairs.
The dead-magic round from my sidearm took the near familiar through the shoulder. The inert slug punched him back into the console, the wood splintering under his weight. I was on the second one before the crash finished.
Tear him open, the wolf snarled against my ribs, a hot, desperate pressure. Let him bleed.
“He’s not on the list,” I muttered, driving my elbow across the familiar’s jaw. Bone gave with a wet crunch. I set the unconscious body against the banister and kept moving.
The house told me everything. Sixty feet of hall running back toward a wing that breathed unnatural cold. Conclave officials didn’t need hearths. They needed preservation. The air smelled of old paper, dust, and the faint, coppery reek of blood kept in refrigeration.
No clove. Only the stale air of a monster’s tomb.
The wolf’s head came up anyway. It threw its massive weight against the bars of my chest, whining low and pathetic in my throat, searching for a scent he couldn’t find.
Empty, my wolf grieved.
“It has to be,” I whispered to the dark hall, my boots silent on the runner. “She’s at least a full mountain range east of here. That’s the point.”
Dead zone. No dormant blood for ninety miles.
The real map—Santos’ bloodline activated original that glowed with the location of every sleeping dormant in the western states—was safe with the hotshots, guiding the pack toward the next rescue.
I carried a standard Forest Service topographic map folded in my pocket, heavily marked in my own charcoal, tracing the spaces where I could safely hunt.
Safe. Sloane was safe from me tonight. That was the whole devotion of it, and it tasted like the ash marking my wrists.
I reached the steel doors at the end of the hall.
Inch-and-a-half plate, magnetic locks, the kind of upgrade a monster installs when he knows what he deserves.
I put my palm flat against the metal. Cold.
Ward-cold, the high-tier Conclave magic vibrating up through the steel into the bones of my hand, filming the back of my teeth like a battery held on the tongue.
I stepped back, put a dead-magic round through the mag-lock, and kicked the door in.
Justiciar Darrow had built himself a study out of a courtroom’s worst dreams. Shelves of black-bound ledgers, a desk the size of a coffin, and behind the desk, rising off the floor in a shell of amber light, the ward.
Darrow stood inside the glowing cage. He wasn’t human, and he wasn’t trying to hide it tonight.
His skin carried the translucent, bruised quality of an old vampire, the veins at his temples standing out black against the waxen flesh.
His eyes were entirely pupil, two deep wells of bottomless, arrogant dark.
He didn’t recognize me. Why would he? I was wearing soot-stained shirt and an old leather harness, smelling of smoke and cheap engine oil. To a creature like this, I was nothing but a filthy stray who had stumbled into the wrong estate.
“Do you have any idea whose home you just destroyed, you repugnant mutt?” Darrow sneered.
His voice was thin and reedy, a dry hiss that scraped the walls.
“A Conclave Justiciar. You reek of wet dog and forest dirt. How you bypassed my security is irrelevant. The local Auditor will have you flayed and mounted on the courthouse steps for this.”
I stood in the ruin of his doorway and let the room settle around me, counting the anchor points of the ward. Four floor-set crystals, one at each cardinal, feeding the shell. And there, on the desk, the master anchor—a fist of raw amber veined with gold, humming loud enough to rattle my fillings.
“Justiciar Darrow,” I said. My voice came out level. It always comes out level. It’s the last thing standing when everything else is on fire.
“You will address me as Your Eminence,” Darrow snapped, baring a set of elongated, yellowed incisors. “I am calling the Guard. You are censured, shifter. You are marked for execution. Get on your knees and you might survive long enough to stand trial.”
“You authorized the intake and suppression dormant wolf shifters,” I said, stepping into the room. “You signed the harvest orders with your own hand. You purchased aurum latens for your own use.”
Darrow’s laugh was a dry, rattling cough. “You’re one of those Ridgeline Hotshot vigilantes? A backwoods zealot come to avenge the livestock? You have no proof of anything, mutt. My ledgers are sealed by the High Council itself.”
“I have the proof I need,” I told him, tapping the breast pocket where the list I’d made from Tommy’s Blood-Glass Ledger sat heavy against my ribs.
“You have nothing!” Darrow stepped closer to the edge of his amber cage, his black eyes blazing with aristocratic fury. “The law protects me. The Conclave protects me. A feral dog like you isn’t smart enough to—”
“Who says I care about your law?” I asked softly.
Darrow lunged for the heavy silver bell on his desk to summon whatever guards were left.
Instead of shifting into my wolf like I’m sure he expected of a feral dog, I raised my weapon and put a dead-magic round through the heart of amber on his desk.
The anchor-stone cracked with a sound like a lake giving up its ice in spring. The shell above him guttered. The four floor-crystals shrieked, overloaded, trying to hold a circuit that no longer had a center, and then the whole cage of light collapsed inward and went out.
There was nothing between us but eight feet of Persian rug and three hundred years of ledgers.
Darrow opened his mouth, his fangs descending in a desperate, hissing panic.
Mine, the wolf roared.
I gave it the reins and shifted.
The world dropped into the deep bright grammar of scent and motion. The last thing Justiciar Darrow ever saw was the filthy mutt he had dismissed coming across the desk. He managed a wet, ragged hiss before my jaws closed.
There is no cruelty in the wolf, only consequence.
The teeth found the throat the way water finds the low ground.
I didn’t just kill him. I dismantled him.
The arrogant weight of a vampire who priced wolf shifter girls by the quarter came apart under me in a spray of cold, black blood.
Bone snapped like dry kindling between my jaws.
The desk went over. Ledgers rained down gray around us, and the wolf tore and shook and shredded until the Justiciar was nothing but a ruined, unrecognizable pile of meat and expensive wool.
Then the room was quiet. I stood over the wreckage, my sides heaving, my muzzle dripping black.
The wolf lifted its head and howled the loss into a house that couldn’t hear it—the desolate sound a creature makes when it has done a terrible necessary thing and there is no one alive it loves close enough to come.
I came back into my own skin on my knees in his blood.
The shift out is always worse than the shift in.
In, you’re running toward something. Out, you land in the wreck of it with a human throat and human hands and the full human knowledge of what you just did.
The taste of him—cold, metallic, rotting—was in my mouth.
I spat it onto the ruined rug and knelt there, breathing through my teeth until the shaking in my forearms eased.
“One down,” I rasped to the empty room.
Under the cold blood and the cordite, faint, impossible, the wolf lifted its ruined head one more time and searched the air for clove.
Nothing. Of course nothing.
“Stop,” I ordered myself, digging my fingernails into my thighs. “Stop looking for her. You’re going to kill her if you find her.”
That was the whole hollow shape of it. I made the world one monster safer for a woman I’d never met and yet, somehow, knew deep down in my soul. I did this as far from her as the continent would let me get. She would never know I’d done this, and that was the most holy act of love I could make.
I would die for my mate, even if I never met her in this life.
But I could also kill for my mate.
I pushed myself up from the gore.
Darrow’s safe sat exposed behind the overturned desk, the metal door hanging open from the violence of the struggle. I wiped my hands on his ruined coat and reached inside.
I found bundles of Conclave currency, which I left, and a sealed dossier, which I took. Sitting right beside it was a small, corked glass vial filled with a glowing, viscous golden liquid.
Aurum latens. Pure, harvested shifter magic.
I picked up the vial, my lip curling in a vicious, involuntary sneer. You have no proof, he had said. Zealot. The government rot ran so deep it was structural. They drank the marrow of our women and called it administration.
I crushed the vial in my fist. The glass bit into my palm, but the golden liquid burned away to smoke the second it hit the air, returning to the earth.
I stared at the black blood drying on my boots. Would Brann bringing the Blood-Glass Ledger to the High Council even make a dent? The Council was composed of men exactly like Darrow. They wrote the laws that allowed the cages in the first place.
Maybe Reed is right, I thought, pulling my blood-stained Forest Service map out of my pocket. Maybe the only way to stop the harvest is to burn the whole system to the bedrock. Five royal bloodlines activated. The ultimate override.
But the thought died before it could take root. Five bloodlines meant five mates. It meant finding the woman who smelled of clove and forcing her out into the open, triggering a Heat that would rip her cover apart and paint a target on her back.
No. I shoved the thought away, locking it in the dark with the wolf. Every cell in my body yearned for her, an agonizing phantom itch that would never stop burning, but I would die before I let my own desperation drag her into the light.
I would protect her from the Conclave, and I would protect her from myself.
I opened the dossier and unfolded my map and list of names. I didn’t care about Darrow’s ledgers. I only cared about the next monster on the list Tommy had pulled from the Blood-Glass Ledger that wouldn’t be anywhere near a dormant. Near Sloane.
The High Praetor of Antiquities.
According to Darrow’s communications, the High Praetor was stationed nearby.
I spread my marked-up topography map across the one clean corner of the overturned desk. I took out the charcoal stub and ran the equation again to be sure.
I traced my finger over the charcoal circles I’d copied from Santos. The High Praetor’s most recent location sat in the center of the largest circle. A massive dead zone. No dormants for miles.
Nowhere on the continent could my scent do less harm. Nowhere was there less risk of my mate fighting her wolf under a lattice of suppressants and going into a deadly Heat.
“Perfect,” I murmured.
Something in my chest eased for the first time all night.
I would honor every mile of distance between me and my mate the only way my blood knew how. I’d clear the monsters out of the empty rooms until there were no monsters left.