19 Kaia #2
They were heading for the drainage tunnel. The same spillway Sloane had cleared for the last escape, the one good road out from under a burning building, and it ran down past the sub-basement, and the only way to it was where we now stood.
Joss stopped dead.
His glowing eyes went over the three of us—Sloane stripped to her undershirt at the master terminal, me in my gray coat, Tommy with his hand still out for a comm—and his ruined face did something terrible.
It smiled.
Tommy’s hands shot up, palms out, and the babbling idiot poured back over him like water finding its level. “Whoa—okay—a lot of guns, that’s a lot of guns for a wellness facility, I was just—we got turned around again, this building is genuinely a maze, has anyone considered better signage—”
Joss laughed.
Dry. Cracking. The kind of laugh that came out of a man who’d just been handed the one thing he’d stopped letting himself want, and the blue light flared so bright at the corners of his eyes it lit the underside of his hood.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, no. Not this time, little reservoir. Not this performance. I’m afraid your brother told me everything. ”
The cold dropped through me.
“Did you think me blind?” Joss took a step closer, the syringe glinting.
“You wandered into my interrogation looking for towels and I believed you, because you were good, you were very good. And then I plugged your strung-up packmate into my new rig an hour ago, and do you know what it can do when you force it into an active wolf’s chest?
” His weeping eyes never left Tommy’s face.
“It doesn’t just drain him. It opens him.
Every door he has. His pack-link spilled into my rig like wine out of a cracked jug, and your brother—stoic creature, admirable really, he gave me nothing with his mouth—has been screaming your true name down the tether the entire time.
Thomas.” The name landed like a slap. “Not a dormant. Not a confused little human who took a wrong turn. An active wolf. Sovereign-blooded.” His smile widened, splitting the wax.
“A Midnight Wolf, walking into my house.”
Tommy let his hands stay up. Let his face stay blank. But the thread between us had gone taut as wire, and I could feel the wolf in him coiling.
“And that’s not even the best of it.” Joss’ voice climbed, drunk on it.
“I read the whole of him while the gold ran through his chest. Your alpha. The one currently throwing fire at my wards.” The syringe rose, pointed lazily toward the window, toward the burning slope.
“The Inner Circle has wondered about him for years. A pack assembling itself like a quorum. Like a new Compact.” The light wept faster.
“And there it was, in your brother’s bleeding head, confirmed at last. The Founding Alpha.
You think you can come into our house and overthrow three hundred years of sacred work? ”
“Buddy, I genuinely do not know what any of those words mean—”
“Hold the cattle,” Joss told the Wardens, flicking the syringe at the potential dormants without looking.
Then he leveled a glowing waxen finger at Tommy, and all the drunken triumph in his voice went flat and business-like and that was so much worse.
“String this Royal up next to his brother. Two Sovereign batteries running my fortress. With the both of them we won’t need to leave after all.
We’re staying right here. I’ll have power enough to run wards over this whole range for a century, and power enough to reach down their own pack-link and crush their Founding Alpha in his tracks.
He’ll burn his fire against my dome until his heart gives out and he’ll never know why. ”
He looked at the Saint.
“Put it on its knees.”
The Saint glided forward.
The cold poured ahead of it, and the air bent, and then the pressure hit Tommy like the whole building had fallen on him at once.
He went down—his knees cracking against the floor and his head snapping forward, both hands flying to his skull.
Blood came in a fast dark sheet from his nose.
Then his ears. His whole frame shook with the effort of holding a shape he was being crushed out of.
Don’t shift. I felt the command in him, ferocious, lucid, even folded over and bleeding—because a feral wolf in a hallway full of hostages and gun barrels meant Eli dead, meant Livia dead, meant me.
He took it. He knelt there in the lavender stink and the falling-ash light and he took the psychic gravity meant to break a wolf in half, and he took it to keep the rest of us breathing, and the blood ran off his chin and pattered on the floor.
And then his wolf stopped asking his permission.
The gold blew through his eyes all at once, blazing, no rim left, the whole iris drowned. His scent broke loose and rolled out across the room—warm sunbaked stone and that green storm-note, his and only his, suddenly everywhere, suddenly real, shoving the engineered lavender out of the air.
He was dying on his knees for us. For me.
Something happened in my chest.
It wasn’t the Heat. The Heat was a fever.
This came from under the Heat, under the wolf, under the gray coat and the cold tile and the wild rose and the whole twenty-six years of being told my own body was a disease.
It came up out of the oldest part of me, the part my mother had read to by penlight, the part that had looked at a watercolor of three sleeping pups and ached—and it looked at the man bleeding on the floor, the one who had put his mouth to my skin like it was holy, the one who had asked for nothing, and it said one word.
Mine.
The last bit of Nadia’s potion shattered.
I felt it go—a detonation—and my own scent rushed the hall to meet his, storm and stone braided together.
Joss’ head turned toward me.
I moved.