17 Kaia #2
He’d put himself between me and Eli, talking with his hands, drawing every eye on the lawn to the harmless chattering fool.
And he’d stepped too close. A hand span too close, looming into my space the way social rules forbade, and the scent of him came through the lavender and through Nadia’s potion and through everything—warm sunbaked stone that was his and only his, and the wolf under my ribs surged up off the floor of me with a sound I felt in my teeth.
I held my face flat. I held it by force of will.
“—so really you should be reprimanding me,” Tommy went on, ambling a half-step closer still, his eyes doing their bright stupid tour of the koi pond, the flags, the railing where Joss stood.
And under the volume, pitched so low it threaded straight into my ear and nowhere else, the words changed.
“Got some static from the pack link. Crews are gathering. Every alpha that can run. We hold the doors till the ash starts falling, sweetheart. That’s the whole job.
Patience and breathing.” A beat, his voice climbing back up into the bit.
“—and frankly the croquet here is unregulated too, if we’re being honest, these wickets are not to code—”
Patience and breathing. I let the words go down into me and sit on the panic.
The packs were coming. Reed was turning every wolf toward this green dot on a map, and our one task was to still be standing inside the walls when they hit them, ready to open what was locked.
Which meant Tommy could not get caught. Which meant I could not get caught.
Which meant I had to stand here on a manicured lawn with my mate three inches away and let my face say I am a stranger reprimanding a guest while my entire body screamed otherwise.
“Your condition is noted, Thomas,” I said, flat as the clipboard. “Return to the third wicket. Quietly.”
“Quietly. Got it. I’m basically a monk.” He drifted off, and the loss of his nearness hit me like cold air through a breached door. I breathed through it the way the potion was supposed to let me but the potion was wearing thin.
At the third wicket, someone’s mallet swung wide.
The ball jumped the groove, skipped across the trimmed grass in a long bouncing arc, and came to rest two feet from my shoes.
The game paused. Heads turned. And Tommy, with the magnanimous energy of a man performing usefulness for an audience, said “I’ve got it, I’ve got it” and ambled over at a pace that could not be read as anything but unhurried.
He crouched for the ball near my feet, back to the veranda, the croquet game blocking his face from Joss’ line of sight.
His voice came up below the ambient noise, stripped of the bit.
“Sloane?”
“She said she knows a way to open the doors.” I paused. “I tried to ask her more. She moved off before I could finish the question.”
His fingers went still on the ball. Two seconds.
“I didn’t get there either. The guard had the gate. There wasn’t—” He stopped. Picked up the ball. Turned it once in his hands. “She’s got a reason she’s still in here.”
“The patients. Like why I’m here—”
Tommy nodded. “Maybe. But I think it’s more than that.”
The Warden at the far corner started a slow scan. I didn’t let my eyes move.
“Tonight,” I said. “We find her properly.”
“Yeah.” The bit came back over his face like a mask clicked into place, and he stood with the ball held high, voice climbing. “Found it! Okay, who did this? This is a liability, a rogue ball is a safety concern, I want names—”
The game resumed around his voice, and he drifted back to the third wicket, and the Sloane question went with him, still unanswered, still unsettled, one more weight we were carrying through the afternoon.
Then the wind shifted, and a steel door clanged open at the far edge of the courtyard.
It led to the glass-walled transfer corridor, the one that ran above the sub-basement on its way to the lower lift.
I knew that corridor. I’d walked dormants down it myself, in another life, days ago, a lifetime ago, telling them the lower floors held the proper incubation, the ambient calibration, the loving care.
Two Wardens came through it, and between them they dragged a man.
He was big. Tall, broad, built like the men I’d started, in the last few days, to understand were Tommy’s brothers.
Clothes torn down one side. Blood matted black in his hairline and a fresh runnel of it bright down his temple, one leg dragging, the boot scraping the floor.
They had him under both arms and he was not fighting them, but he was not broken either—his head came up as they hauled him through the glass.
His face was a wall, scarred and stoic and absolutely unbent, the face of a man who had decided a long time ago what they could and couldn’t take from him.
He looked out through the glass at the sunlit lawn for one second.
And the thing that happened in Tommy happened all at once.
The slouch went out of him between one breath and the next.
The bright stupid California tourist vanished like a costume dropped on the floor, and what stood at the third wicket was rigid from the heels up, the mallet forgotten in a fist gone white, the muscles in his neck standing out in cables, his whole body turned toward that glass corridor like a compass needle slammed north.
The feeling came down the smothered thread between us as raw heat, a wall of feral violence so total it stole the breath out of my lungs from across the lawn.
Not anger. Anger had edges. This was the thing under anger, the thing with no language, the wolf in him throwing its whole weight against the cage of his ribs with one intention, which was to cross that lawn and tear the reinforced glass out of its frame and put his teeth in the throats of the two men dragging his brother into the dark.
His agony hit my Heat like a torch laid against soaked kindling.
I felt the potion’s mask go the way river ice goes from underneath, and the fever I’d banked came roaring up through the breach all at once, doubled, tripled, a column of liquid heat behind my sternum with nowhere left to climb.
Sweat sheeted down the channel of my spine under the gray tunic.
The koi pond doubled, swam, the broken coins of sunlight smearing gold, and the gold was at the edges of my own vision now, bleeding in from the corners.
Mine, the wolf said, in his agony and in mine, the words braided so tight I couldn’t tell which of us was speaking. His. Brother. Pack. Mine.
Tommy took a half-step toward the glass.
Just one. His boot came up off the grass and came down again a foot closer, his cover gone, his hand opening on the mallet to drop it, and on the veranda Joss leaned forward over the iron rail and his glowing eyes narrowed and his weeping light ran faster, because a confused dormant didn’t stand like a drawn blade, a confused dormant didn’t turn toward a bleeding prisoner with murder coming off him in waves—
I threw myself into his path.
I crossed the distance with the Heat screaming in every joint, and I got my body between Tommy and the corridor, and I grabbed his forearm right over the chemical blisters and dug my fingers in hard enough to feel him flinch, and I shoved him backward with all the authority the gray coat gave me.
“Guest.” The word came out like a blade laid flat, loud enough to reach the Wardens, loud enough to reach the balcony. “You are out of position.”
His eyes came down to mine, gold rimming the dark of them, the wolf right there at the surface, and for one terrible heartbeat I wasn’t sure the man was still driving.
So I made us fall.