16 Tommy
The foam hit my back and I went down to one knee on the wet tile and let myself stay there.
Cold. Industrial-cold, the kind that came out of a nozzle at pressure designed to strip paint, and it smelled like a swimming pool that had murdered someone—bleach over something sour and wet underneath, the ghost of every body that had been hosed down in this white-tiled box before me.
Two guards had my shoulders, holding me against the wall while the spray worked me over.
My skin wanted to fix itself. That was the problem. That was the whole entire problem.
The chemicals ate into a blister forming along my forearm and my cells lit up underneath it, eager, stupid, ready to knit the burn shut in the time it takes to blink—and I clamped down on it. Held the wolf’s gift by the throat. No. Stay broken. Stay human. Let it hurt.
It hurt.
A hoarse sound tore out of me, and I let it. Let my knees fold the rest of the way. Let my whole body do the thing a terrified California boy’s body would do under a chemical hose, which is shake and crumple and beg.
“It burns—” My voice cracked right down the seam. “It burns, please, what is this, what are you—”
“Hold still,” one of the guards said, bored, and cranked the nozzle higher.
The water turned to needles. White light off white tile, and somewhere a drain sucking it all down, and I pressed my forehead to the wet wall and went somewhere else.
I went to the transport. To the dark iron box and the diesel scream and my mate strapped to the bench with her spine bowing off the wall, coming apart against my mouth with no sound the engine couldn’t eat.
The taste of her was still on my lips. It had survived the chemicals, survived the foam, was surviving all of this—rain and dark honey and the salt-warm reality of her, and I dragged the inside of my lip across my teeth to find it again, and there it was.
I did that. The thought came up through the pain hot and fierce and absolutely shameless. I pulled her back from the edge. I gave her what her body was screaming for and I took nothing, and she came apart in my hands and she’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive.
My cock ached. Even now. Even here, under the hose, with the burns opening up along my ribs—the want sat low and heavy and unrelieved, a deep throbbing soreness in muscles I’d held locked for an hour while I worshipped a woman I wasn’t allowed to claim, and I could not bring myself to be sorry about a single second of it.
Let it ache. A man could stand under a chemical hose forever if he had something like that to taste.
Stay breathing. Stay invisible.
Reed’s voice, or the memory of it, scrambled and far away.
The packs were coming. Every alpha within a few day’s run, all of them turning their faces toward this green dot on an old map, and my job was to be here when the ash started falling.
To be the man on the inside who blew the doors when the cavalry hit the wall.
Which meant the man on the inside had to find all the keys that opened all the doors and keep being a confused, blistered, harmless thing that nobody looked at twice.
So I shook. So I begged.
Finally, the nozzle cut off.
The silence after was its own assault. Just water dripping off me, off the tile, gurgling down the drain, and my own ragged breath bouncing off the walls.
“Up,” a guard said, and they hauled me up by the arms, and my feet skidded on the wet floor, and I let them skid.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The calibration room smelled like burnt rosemary and something organic going wrong, and the thing making the smell was standing by the copper pod.
High Alchemist Joss. Up close he looked even worse than before.
His face hung off the bone like wax that had gotten too near a flame, soft and sliding, and from the corners of both eyes that blue light wept down in slow fat drops, glowing, and where it hit the floor it hissed and left a small smoking pock in the concrete.
He watched me come in the way a man watches a steak come off the grill.
“There he is.” The light dripped off his jaw. “My rare little thing.”
I gave him the eyes of a cornered animal, even though I’d rather rip out his throat. Behind him, against the wall, a control console threw cold light up onto a column of gray linen, and the column had a face, and the face was scrubbed clean of everything.
Kaia.
She didn’t look at me. Of course she didn’t.
Her hands moved over the glass of the console, sure, practiced, a Steward running a routine she’d run a thousand times.
The pad under her index finger took her touch and she held it.
A fraction too long. A heartbeat past the function, pressing the cold glass like it was something warm she didn’t want to let go of.
There you are. The relief of it went through me sharp as the burns. Still in there. Still mine.
A guard balled up my clothes and threw them at my chest, and I caught them against my wet skin. The wolf in me went very still and very awake, because the vial rode in the thickened seam of my pants and Joss’ weeping eyes had not left me once.
“Whoa—hey—” I clutched the wad of cloth to my chest like I was afraid for my modesty and let my voice climb up into the register that sold panic as comedy.
“The brochure said mineral baths, man. Genuine alpine mineral springs. I have very sensitive skin, I’m breaking out in actual hives, look at this, this is a reaction, I need to talk to whoever runs the spa—”
“Dress him,” Joss said, to the guards, not to me. “Then the pod.”
I made a production of it. Stumbled getting one foot into the pants, hopped, swore, caught myself on a guard’s arm and got shoved off it, and the whole clumsy circus bought me exactly what I needed—their eyes rolling, their patience thinning, a half-second where I was just an idiot getting dressed.
I pinched the seam. The wax seal cracked under my thumbnail.
“—and honestly the customer service here has been a real disappointment, like, top to bottom—” I dragged the flannel up and twisted into a hard fake cough into my own fist, doubling over with it, and under the cover of the cough my thumb went to my mouth and the bitter rosemary-tar drop hit the underside of my tongue and burned all the way down.
“—‘scuse me, sorry, I think I’m allergic to the air in here too—”
“Pod.” Joss didn’t even raise his voice.
The drop from Nadia’s potion spread cold through me, and under my ribs the Midnight Wolf—snarling, hackled, half out of its skin with the need to tear Joss’ wax face off—sank under a gray blanket of nothing, dropping down and down like a stone into a still pond, and the gold went out of my blood.
They put me in the box.
Two steps wide. Copper walls furred with black foam.
I knew this box. The last time I stood in it the dark had been full of her, my mouth on hers, her hands under my shirt, the whole impossible thing breaking open between us—and now the amber pinhole in the ceiling had been cranked up to a blinding white star, and the door sealed with a sucking thud, and the quiet came down like deep water and pressed against my eardrums.
Kaia didn’t climb inside the pod with me this time. There was grief at that and also relief. I would not have been able to—
The magic hit.
It came up through the copper, through the floor, into my teeth, and it wasn’t sound exactly—it was pressure, a hand laid flat on the inside of my skull and pushing, hunting, prying at the seams of me. Looking for the wolf. Looking for what I was.
Give it nothing, I told myself, and gave it the best performance of my life.
I arched my back off the foam and let a wail tear out of me, raw and jagged, the sound of a man being turned inside out, and it was only half theater, because the pressure hurt, it ground against the magic blanket where my wolf hid and the wolf screamed under it and I let that scream come up my throat dressed as human terror.
I fed the machine panic. Pure, unrefined, gushing panic.
I thrashed against the walls and beat the foam with the cuffed wrist and howled like the box was eating me alive, and somewhere out past the copper a man with melting eyes watched a needle climb and climb on a screen and read my hidden rage as something else entirely.
A reservoir. I could feel him thinking it through the wall. A massive, ripe, unrefined reserve. The potential yield from a dormant male.
He took it. He took all of it. Hook, line, and his own greed.
The pressure cut.
The box opened and the cold room air rushed in and I sagged out of it into the guards’ arms, genuinely shaking now, sweat and chemical-water sheeting off me, and across the room Joss dragged the back of one hand across his chin and smeared the glowing blue seepage and smiled like a man at the end of a very good meal.
“What do you think, doc?” I said between gasps. “What’s wrong with me? Can you help me? You’ll let me stay, right? You’ll help me?”
“Oh, we’ll keep you,” he said softly, to me, to himself, to the needle on the screen. “You’ll keep beautifully.” He waved the wet hand. “Let him ripen. General population. A few days. I want him at full bloom before we open him.”
Open him. The wolf turned over under its blanket and showed its teeth at the word, and I let my face stay slack and stupid and grateful.
I caught one last look at Kaia as they hauled me out.
She’d turned half toward the console, profile lit cold and perfect, not a muscle of her face out of place.
But two fingers of her right hand had come up off the glass and pressed flat against the seam of her gray trousers, just for a second, just resting there over her own pulse, and I knew that motion.
I’d felt that pulse hammer under my mouth an hour ago.
Then the door took me, and she was gone.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The guard stopped at the hex-gate.