18 Tommy #2
“Steward.” The Warden ignored me entirely and clicked his radio at Kaia, who’d stepped out behind me with her chin level and her face carved from ice, wringing pond water from her sleeve like the whole thing was a tedious clerical matter. “What happened?”
“He’s unstable, flailing,” Kaia said, dry as old paper. “He went into the water hazard and pulled me in. I redirected him into the service corridor for a towel before he could injure himself or a guest.”
The Warden’s radio crackled. He held it to his ear, listened, and his mouth twisted with something between boredom and contempt as his eyes raked over me—the shaking, the chattering, the towel, the whole sodden pathetic package.
“The Alchemist saw the guest’s episode,” she said. “I’m escorting him to Dorm B to dry out first and then he sees the Alchemist.”
“Steward Thorne, change your uniform and pull the calibration logs for the incident,” the Warden said. “I’ll escort the patient. The Alchemist will want it all documented before tonight.”
There it was. Our perfect out, handed to us by a man who thought I was livestock and Kaia was a clipboard. I let my shoulders sag with watery relief—oh thank you, yes, dry clothes, Dorm B, the babbling fool’s reward—and for one microscopic instant my eyes cut to Kaia’s and hers cut to mine.
Logs. Sub-level. Find Finn.
She gave me nothing. Not a flicker. But the message went down the thread between us clean as a struck bell—which in its own way signaled how little time Nadia’s potions had left—and then she turned on her heel, all gray spine and cold purpose, walking off to go bury herself in a terminal and pull this whole place apart from the inside.
“This way.” The Warden gripped my arm—right over the burns, and I let it sting—and marched me down the corridor toward the ward-gate that sealed off the dormitory wing.
I shuffled. I chattered. I narrated my own hypothermia in exhausting detail.
And the whole time my wolf, blanketed and snarling, was doing what it did best: mapping.
This building had lived under my skin since day one—the Midnight Wolf bloodline ran quiet and ran observant—and I knew exactly where the heavy doors were.
The restricted stairwell. The sub-basement antechamber.
The place where they’d dragged my packmate into the dark.
The Warden stopped at a gate and turned his back to work the hex-lock, both hands, his attention fully on the glowing keypad.
I slipped sideways into the dead air and was gone.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
I walked quickly down the twisting corridors. While Kaia checked the computers, I’d decided to search for Finn the old fashioned way—with my nose.
I rounded another corner, but then a door opened at my elbow.
Pale eyes swept the corridor in both directions before they came to me.
Sloane.
She stepped back into the supply room and I followed her in. The door settled closed behind us without a sound. Tight space. Shelving floor to ceiling, folded linens, a smell of old bleach and dry cotton. No camera.
Underneath her usual precision was something worn thinner than it had been on the catwalk. Her jaw was set. Her hands were still.
“I couldn’t leave,” she said, without preamble. “Not once the Inner Circle arrived.”
I nodded. “We came back for all the new intakes. And a shot at the Inner Circle.”
“Sloane. The doors. How do we—”
“Every ward, every seal, every cell lock was built on the dormant harvest. With the Harvest Floor now empty and the potential dormants not yet ready, it should have been easy to break the wards and blow open all the doors.” She kept her voice low and level.
“Three weeks ago I got eyes on the sub-level schematics. They’ve built a new rig—some kind of biological power conduit.
The design is dormant-spec, but the grid isn’t pulling dormant frequencies anymore.
It’s pulling an active wolf.” She met my eyes.
“Someone active was plugged into it earlier today. An active wolf is powering the whole ward system now.”
I went very still.
“My pack brother, Finn,” I said. Not a question.
Sloane closed her eyes.
“They dragged him through the corridor to somewhere down below. We saw it on the lawn.”
Her hand came up flat against the concrete wall beside the shelving, steadying herself. The linens above it didn’t move. She held that for a count of three, the way you hold something that’s trying to tip, and then she turned back.
“I can still blow the ward doors.” Her voice had not changed register.
That was the thing about Sloane—what she felt ran very deep and came out very flat, and you had to know her to read the difference.
“I’ve had the purge token for months. Pulled it from the calibration vault.
It’s a master credential—ward sequence override, every gate in this facility, all at once.
But the purge reads three simultaneous authorizations.
Three hands on three terminals. I can run the master, but I can’t be in three places. ”
“You’ve got three,” I said. “You, Kaia, and me.”
Something shifted in her face. Not relief—closer to the feeling of a weight that had been held alone for a very long time finding another set of hands. “That’s if I can trust your alpha.”
“You can.”
“Okay let’s say I can. When the packs hit the wall—the power draw will spike. That’s the window. The spike runs for maybe ninety seconds before the backup grid compensates. In that window the purge has the fastest path, the least resistance. If we miss it we lose the window.”
“We’ll be ready.”
She was already looking away by the time I had the door handle.
“Tommy.”
I stopped.
“Tell Kaia—” She stopped. Started over. “Never mind. I’ll tell her myself. When this is over.”
I went through the door.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The escaped dormants from last week seemed to have made everyone sloppy.
I felt it the second I got past the dormitory wing—the whole building running thin and distracted, guards pulled to cover gaps, an unsecured checkpoint where the post should’ve been manned and wasn’t, just a propped door and a coffee cup gone cold on a stool.
Somewhere up the chain they were still trying to explain to the Inner Circle how fifty souls had walked out of a maximum-security harvest operation, and the explaining had thinned the herd down here to nothing.
I wandered like a man looking for a linen closet.
That was the cover and I wore it loose—if anyone caught me I was the confused soaked idiot who’d taken a wrong turn, sorry, so sorry, where’s the gift shop—but under the slack shoulders my wolf was driving now, nose lifted, threading down through the stale lavender toward the thing underneath it.
Blood. Wolf blood. Pack blood.
It pulled me to a heavy iron door at the bottom of a short service stair, the kind of door that had no business in a wellness retreat, hex-fiber sunk into the frame and a smell coming around the edges of it that turned the lavender into a lie I wanted to tear down with my teeth.
I should have walked away. The job was patience. The job was breathing. The job was being the harmless thing until the ash fell.
I pushed the door open.
The room was concrete and low-ceilinged and lit by a sick fluorescent white, and the cold came off the walls in a fall I felt in my back teeth, and in the center of it, chained—
Finn.
Suspended by both wrists, his boots barely reaching the floor.
Shirt stripped off. His back—Goddess, his back—laced open with fresh lacerations, long and deliberate, the blood running down in bright runnels to drip off the waistband of his jeans and pool dark on the concrete. His head hung slack with exhaustion.
And by the far wall, a glass syringe in one hand and a smear of glowing blue light streaking the back of the other where he’d wiped his weeping eyes, stood High Alchemist Joss.
Joss spun, robes swinging off his frame, the weeping light running fast and furious down his wax-soft face. “What in—who let—”
My wolf hit the inside of my ribs like a truck through a wall.
Everything in me, every cell of the Midnight Wolf, the whole ancient bloodline that had walked into dark rooms for generations, came up screaming with one single intention: cross the concrete, take the melting head in both hands, and twist until the weeping stopped forever.
The blood scent was a blindfold soaked in gasoline. Pack. Brother. Hurt. KILL.
My vision tunneled. My jaw ached around teeth that wanted to be longer. The blanket over the wolf strained and frayed and I felt the gold come up hot at the back of my own eyes—
Finn lifted his head.