8 Tommy #3
Her spine bowed and a sound tore out of her that was half scream and half snarl, and her hands—I watched her hands—the fingers wrenched, knuckles splitting wider, and claws came through the tips of them, black and curved and wet, and the gray linen of her tunic split down the seams as something underneath it surged bigger, and her face, oh goddess, was streaming tears even as the bones of it shifted, even as her teeth lengthened and her pupils blew out gold to match mine.
I could feel the agony through the bond, the wrenching torque of a wolf clawing halfway out through a lifetime of chemical cement, twenty-six years of a body told to stay small—and she did it anyway.
She did it screaming. She did it for me.
The wolf’s pain dissolved into a raw, feral pride. She shifted. For us. Beautiful. Strong.
She did, I thought, the bond singing with her heat and her agony. She tore herself open to save us.
Miller had time to stand up. He didn’t have time for anything else.
She hit him like every soft mercy she’d ever offered had been a lie covering this, and her partially shifted clawed hand came across his throat once, almost lazy, almost graceful, and the spray of him went black across the brushed steel, and the patch came off my neck because his hand came off his arm, and I dragged in a breath that felt like swallowing a whole sky.
Miller went down in two pieces’ worth of noise and then no noise at all.
And Kaia stood over him, half-shifted, clothes torn, bare-breasted, ruined, magnificent, her chest heaving, the growl winding down out of her—and then the cost of it caught up all at once.
The dam hadn’t just broken. The whole reservoir had come down.
The shift reversed itself in a hard convulsive shudder, claws sucking back, bones grinding home, and she folded straight down toward the stone, fully human again, the shredded tunic falling away from skin that was radiating—heat pouring off her in waves I could feel from six feet away, her Heat finally arriving like a fever breaking, five days late and all at once.
I caught her before she hit the floor.
She was burning up in my arms, unconscious, slack.
The brushed steel of the elevator doors loomed ahead of me.
A choice had to be made. I could turn back.
I could carry Kaia up the maintenance stairs, slip through the dark corridors, and escape into the woods.
If I went down to the Harvest Floor, I was going into the belly of the beast. If Sloane’s tunnel was a trap, or if the gate was jammed, we’d be cornered at the bottom of a concrete well with no way out.
And going down also meant leaving the people in the auditorium—all of them.
My chest tightened. The wolf paced, looking back up the stairs and then down at the steel doors.
Go down. The tunnel is there. But the others...
I looked down at Kaia’s flushed, sweating face.
We have to trust her, I told him. The pack will return for the auditorium.
We’ll bring the whole crew. But right now, we save who we can.
I had to trust Sloane.
I crouched, keeping one arm locked under Kaia’s knees, and dragged Miller’s limp hand toward the scanner. The steel panel hissed, the light turning green, and the elevator doors slid open. I stepped into the metal box, pressed the button for the Harvest Floor, and let the doors seal us in.
The elevator dropped with a heavy, mechanical hum.
When the doors parted at the bottom, the air was cold and smelled of damp limestone.
A concrete chamber was lined with rows of glass-walled containment cells.
Inside, the pale faces of dormants pressed against the glass—over fifty of them. There were no Wardens, no Stewards. The central assembly upstairs had emptied the sublevels.
I ran to the main console in the center of the room, Kaia heavy against my chest. I slapped Miller’s credential onto the scanner and pressed his thumb to the reader.
The screen flashed green.
MASTER RELEASE AUTHORIZED.
With a series of heavy metallic clacks, the cell doors slid back. I grabbed from a stack clothes for Kaia as the dormant women stumbled out, blinking in the harsh light, murmuring in confusion.
Look at them, I thought, watching the hollow shock on their faces. Decades of stolen heritage, locked in cages by the Order. The wolf snarled, a low vibration of pure protective fury. Ours now. We lead them out. We take back what they stole.
“Go!” I shouted, pointing toward the far wall where a heavy iron gate was grinding upward, revealing a dark, sloped tunnel. “Get to the ravine! Keep moving!”
They started to run, a stream of pale fabric rushing toward the dark opening Sloane had cleared for us. I joined the flow, herding them forward, my hands tight around Kaia, the clothes against her exposed breasts.
As soon as we crossed the wards, I threw my voice down the pack-link, shouting across the mountains.
Reed. REED. Get the trucks, get everyone, get to the eastern ravine. I’m coming out underneath and I’m bringing them—
—and somewhere far away, faint as a struck match in a storm, my pack answered.
I tightened my arms around Kaia and ran into the dark.