10 Sloane
The repeater station was a little gray equipment shed with its single lattice mast. The guy-wires hummed a note I could feel in my back teeth now that I had teeth that could feel such things.
Two guards on the door, rifles slung.
One walked the perimeter with the bored, heavy tread of someone who’d been at it all day.
They looked human enough, but that was likely an illusion.
And behind the shed’s thin steel wall, three more heartbeats, one of them slower than the others, one of them a man who thought he was in charge.
Wardens. Hex-woven rigs on their belts—I could smell the dead-magic on them from here.
Somebody in the Order had looked at a map of every peak transmitting closest to the Third Saint’s frost blanket and then put their monsters on the door.
Smart. I’d have done the same.
“Six,” I breathed.
Finn lay against the rock a hand’s width to my left, close enough that his warmth rolled off him and pooled against my side, and I felt him take the number without a flicker.
“The good news is they’re bored and they’re hot. The bad news is those belts. Dead-magic. Our wolves go near one of those rigs, it’ll try to put them back to sleep. So we don’t let them touch us.”
“How long until—”
The wire drew tight down my spine.
Not a warning this time—the wave itself, hour on the hour.
Heat rolled up out of the base of my skull and spread, and the whole slope tilted under me.
We’d taken care of the last round against a tree, my thighs still deliciously sticky from his mouth and his seed.
But even so, my breath went short, and my wolf surged forward hard enough to blur my sight gold at the edges.
The station and the monsters all went too bright, too loud, too close, the fever cranking every dial I owned past the red line.
I could have hidden it. I’d hidden worse from harder eyes.
“Wave’s cresting.” I said it flat, to the rock, to him. Every word of it cost me something. “I’ll be running hot the whole way through the fight.”
Finn went still beside me. “Sloane. Can you fight?”
That was the whole question. Not should you. Not let me handle it. Not the long gentle speech I’d braced for on instinct, the one where a man tells a woman her own limits in a kind voice and takes the work out of her hands for her own good.
Just—can you fight? A professional asking a professional.
I turned inward and looked. Really looked. I asked my wolf. Then—
“Yes.”
“Then you take the walker. I take the two at the door. We take the three inside together.” He was already moving, low, the ash-gray shape of him sliding along the rock.
He looked back once, and his eyes had gone gold in the dark, and there was no fear in them at all—only that terrible steady faith that hollowed me worse than doubt ever could.
Even still in my human form, the walker’s heartbeat reached me from forty feet, a wet slow drum I could have found blindfolded. My wolf read him—prey, prey, prey.
I threw a strike I’d trained for my whole time with the Lodestone Underground and my arm went a full six inches past where I’d aimed, faster, harder, the walker’s throat already crushed under the heel of my hand before my brain had finished sending the order.
He dropped without a sound. I’d overshot.
The two on the door turned at the wet thud of their man going down.
Finn was already on them.
I do not have clean words for what happened next.
The fever burned every hesitation out of me, and the wolf came all the way forward, and I stopped calculating and simply knew—knew where the first man’s weight was before he committed it, knew the second was reaching for the hex-rig on his belt before his hand cleared his coat, knew it the way I knew my own name.
I raced to Finn’s side and took the reaching hand at the wrist and broke it against the doorframe.
Drove my elbow back into the first man’s face and felt bone give.
And the whole time my blood sang a high golden note that had no thought in it, only yes and more and this is what you are, this is what you always were.
“I thought the door was mine.” Finn barreled through the door and launched himself at the three inside.
Deeper, my wolf urged, drunk on it, hauling me down toward the red. Don’t stop. There are three more inside and they hurt our people and we could open them up, we could—
The red rose to meet me. I felt myself start to go into it, the place where the woman drowns and only the animal comes back.
“Finn.”
His name. Just his name, the way he’d told me.
And he was there—not his hands, his hands were busy putting a Warden through the shed’s steel wall on the far side, but his presence, flooding up the bond warm and vast and steady, a mountain I could set my back against. Not pulling me out. Standing where I could find him.
I came up out of the killing dark still myself, still holding the reins, the woman and the wolf running the same body toward the same door.
By the time I hit the interior the fight was already over.
We stood there a second in the ticking silence of it, both of us breathing hard, a fan rattling in the corner, a deck of cards scattered across a crate where three Wardens had been playing gin ninety seconds ago and now lay dead like the guards.
My hands started to shake, the fever ebbing and leaving the tremor behind.
“You overshot every strike,” Finn said.
“I know.”
“You dropped three men in the time it took me to reach the wall.” He wasn’t smiling, exactly. But something moved under the granite of his face, something that made my chest hurt. “You’ve done this kind of thing plenty of times before. But you’ve never done it unsuppressed.”
“No.” I wiped my mouth. My knuckles came away red and I couldn’t have said whose. “No, I never have.”
“You’re extraordinary,” he said, flat, factual, the way another man might report the weather, and went to find the antenna line before I could do anything humiliating with my face.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The transmission wouldn’t punch.
Finn had the shed’s passive relay open and the comms unit off his kit wired into the antenna line inside four minutes.
I called the splices while he held the panel, and none of it mattered, because when he keyed the mic the only thing that came back was the jamming—a thick, flattening wall of nothing that ate his voice whole.
“Fireline actual, Fireline actual, this is Calloway. Do you copy?”
Nothing. The wind screamed through the guy-wires. The western sky had gone to the color of a sunset.
“They’re blanketing the whole band.” I hunched over the unit, working the frequencies, and my newly sharp ears could hear how the jamming thinned at the very top of the range but not enough.
“We can hear the edge of a clean channel up high but we can’t get over the top of it.
Not from the ground. We’d need—” I stopped.
“Altitude.” Finn was already looking at the mast.
“You are not—”
“I’m not going to climb it.” He was crouched at the base of the lattice, and he’d peeled the ash-gray sleeve back off his right forearm.
The deepened tattoo there had begun, faintly, to glow.
My whole body went cold under the fever.
“I don’t have to. The Ash Oath, Sloane.” He looked up at me.
“It spent its whole life learning how to turn a signal down.”
Understanding hit me.
“No.” I dropped to my knees beside him and got both hands around his forearm, over the glow, and it was hot, already too hot. “Finn, no. That magic is built one direction. You try to run concealment as a beacon, you’re forcing a river uphill. It’ll fight you. It’ll fight you inside your own body.”
“My pack’s about to walk into a trap. Maybe already on their way.” His free hand came up and covered both of mine where they gripped his arm. “I am not going to kneel here and hope.”
I looked at him. At the jaw set in that devastating line. At the gold eyes that held no fear for himself and every fear in the world for the men down that mountain. And I understood that there was no version of Finn Calloway who let the signal die because sending it might hurt.
“Then you don’t do it alone.” I dug my thumbs into the ash mark. “It’s still half mine. It answered your blood but it was sworn in my hands, and I know how it bends. You push. I’ll steer. The second it starts hauling toward the dark, you let me have that part.”
He searched my face.
“Deal,” he said, and pressed the mic to his mouth, and shoved.
The fire came up out of his wrist blue-white and cold, climbing his forearm like it had been waiting forty years for a reason, and I felt it through the bond the instant it caught—felt the Oath rear back against him, every strand of it hauling toward silence, toward the muffle, toward the dark it was made to make.
He was trying to make a lighthouse out of a shroud.
The burn went wrist to elbow in a breath. His face didn’t change. That was the worst part—he just kept his mouth on the mic and kept pouring want down the line, get through, get through, while his own bloodline cooked him from the arm up.
“Fireline actual. Calloway. Do you copy—”
I reached into the Oath and caught the strand that fought him hardest, the one hauling toward the dark, and I steered it—took the concealment where it wanted to smother and turned its face east instead, fed it up the antenna line in a clean current.
The burn didn’t stop. But it changed. It became a river running through him instead of against him.
The jamming cracked open like ice on a thawing river.
“—Calloway, this is Reed, copy weak, say again—”
Finn’s whole body sagged an inch against the current we were holding together.
“Do not follow the map.” He got it out fast, in the order it needed to come, while I held the line steady under both our hands.
“The coordinates are false. They’re gathering into clusters so you’ll read it as a rescue and come running.
It’s not a rescue. It’s bait. The whole thing is a kill-funnel with a mercy sign on the door. Do you copy.”
A silence that wasn’t the jamming. Just a man stopping in the dark.
“Copy all.” Reed’s voice had gone somewhere low and old. “The clusters are the lure. Copy, Calloway.” A breath. “We hold.”
The current died out of the antenna line rung by rung as Finn let it go, and the blue-white faded off his arm. He dropped the mic into his lap and sat back on his heels.
For three full breaths neither of us said anything at all.
Because he’d made it. Reed would hold. The clock that had been ticking in my chest went quiet all at once. The relief of it was so enormous I could have wept.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
I stripped the Wardens for anything useful while Finn worked the feeling back into his arm. Ammunition. A field ration I pocketed for him. The squad leader’s slate, which I’d want later. A folding knife. A coil of paracord.
And in the third man’s chest pocket, a compass.
A cheap brass field compass, the kind you could buy at any surplus counter, warm from his body heat, and I flipped it open without thinking to check our bearing for the run to pack territory.
The needle was spinning.
Slow, steady, deliberate, counterclockwise, around and around and around, the way no honest compass on this earth has ever turned.
The world dropped out from under me.
I knew that spin. I’d learned it at fourteen years old in a hedge-witch’s kitchen with chalk on my fingers, learned it the way you learn your own address, learned it because someday my life might depend on reading it fast.
A Lodestone compass, seeded with a witch’s magnet-work.
A safehouse is compromised. Come or run. Choose now.
My hands had gone very cold around the warm brass.
“Sloane.” Finn was watching my face. “What is it?”
I couldn’t answer him yet. I fumbled the squad leader’s slate out of my jacket and woke it and there it was, right there, the reason the Order had a Warden squad parked on a mountaintop in the dark—
It wasn’t because of us or the Third Saint.
The slate showed their patrol grid, their assignments, a sector map with little red pins.
And one of those pins sat in a valley I knew.
A Hearthward I’d carried messages to a dozen times, a house with a witch named Deborah who’d fed me soup and a doorframe penciled floor to ceiling with the heights of children.
Children lived in that house.
The compass spun and spun in my palm, counterclockwise, patient as a wound, and the quiet clock that had just gone silent in my chest was replaced in the same instant by a new one, louder, worse.
“Sloane.” Finn’s voice was very gentle. “Tell me.”
I closed the compass. I opened it. The needle kept turning.
“It’s a Lodestone Underground signal. My people.
The ones who sent me undercover.” My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“A safehouse is blown.” I turned the slate so he could see the red pin.
“There. Over the next ridge. It’s a Hearthward—hidden house, maybe dormants, a witch—Deborah.
And there are kids in it, Finn. I know that house.
I carried mail to that house when I was a kid myself. ”
He looked at the pin. He looked at the compass turning in my hand.
“We should go to your pack. I’m running hot, and we’re hunted, and—” My throat closed and I pushed through it.
“And they’ll have cut me off, Finn. The Underground.
The second I gave you our Oath, I broke it in their eyes.
If we go and we live, they may greet me with a knife.
We could die on that ridge for a house full of people who’ll spit on my name. ”
The wind moved through the guy-wires. I stood there holding a spinning compass and waited for the reasonable man to give me the reasonable answer.
Finn looked out at the sky for one long moment, then he looked at me.
“Then we go over the ridge,” he said.
That was all. No argument. No conditions. No are you sure or think about the pup you don’t know you’re carrying or let me decide this for you.
He got to his feet, burned arm and all. He picked up my coil of paracord, looped it over his shoulder, and stood there waiting for me to lead, because it was my house and my people and my call, and he would no more make me smaller than he would cut off his own hand.
Something in my chest that had been holding itself clenched let go all at once.
“You don’t even know if they’ll want our help,” I said. It came out rough.
“Doesn’t matter if they want it.” He held out a hand. “There are kids in that house.”
I took his hand.
And we went down off the crest into the timber at a run, the compass spinning counterclockwise in my pocket and the fever climbing its slow patient way back up my spine.
We were half a mile down the far slope, moving fast, when the wind shifted and came up out of the next valley to meet us.
And it carried smoke.
Fresh smoke. Green wood and something under the green wood that made my wolf throw her head back and howl inside my chest—a reek of dead-magic.
And beneath even that, faint and sweet and terrible, the smell of a house that had stood hidden for forty years going up all at once.