20 Tommy #2
“Thirty seconds, Tommy.” Sloane’s voice had gone iron. “I’m shunting the feedback now. The voltage is dropping but the second it hits zero the rig will try to spike to compensate—that’s your window, that’s when it lets go, and it closes fast. You pull on my zero or you don’t pull at all.”
“Copy.” I grabbed Finn’s forearm above the lead. Skin to bloody skin.
The contact lit up the bond between us, the pack-link flaring open, and I shoved my resonance down into it the way I’d never let myself do—the quiet Midnight line sinking under Finn’s wild Treaty Court fire, feeling for the frequency, matching it, riding beneath it.
And the second I synced, I felt what they’d been doing to him.
Reed’s wildfire.
It came roaring through Finn’s chest, the entire elemental force of my alpha’s fire crashing against the dome a hundred feet out, all of it channeled down through this one suspended body, this one heart, and the weight of it nearly took my knees out.
My brother had been holding back a wall of fire with his own ribcage for an hour.
The agony of it screamed up the link and into me and I rode it, I held the line, my jaw locked so hard my molars ground.
“Twenty seconds.”
I needed more. The sync was fraying, Finn’s blood magic too violent, too high, the aurum latens dragging at my own blood now, trying to bridge into me, and I felt the rig start to read two loads again—
So I reached the other direction.
Up. Through three floors of concrete. Toward the fused gate and the crushing cold and the woman with my storm in her veins.
The bond between us had no potion left to muffle it now, nothing between her blood and mine, and I poured myself up the thread and felt her on the other end—felt the gold in her eyes, the blood on her lip, the lethal calm of her facing down a melting man and a thing made of shadow—and I took the steadiness of her and I dragged it down into my hands.
Help me hold him, sweetheart. I can’t do this one alone.
And she answered. Not in words. In presence. Light flooded down the bond and braided into the sync, storm and stone wrapping under Treaty Court fire, and the three of us locked into one frequency the rig couldn’t tell apart, one source, one load—
“Three,” Sloane counted. “Two. One. Zero—PULL!”
Finn and I roared at the same time.
I closed both hands on the leads and ripped them out of his chest, copper tearing free in a fountain of gold sparks, and the machine let go.
It died loud.
The console blew first, glass shattering outward in a spray, the copper cables whipping and melting and throwing molten beads across the concrete, and every light in the sub-basement died at once and slammed back on as red emergency strobes.
The meter went black. The gold glow in Finn’s chest guttered and went out, and the cables that had been holding him up went slack, and he dropped.
I caught him before he hit the floor.
Over two hundred pounds of half-flayed pack-brother fell into my arms and I went down to one knee under the weight of him and held on.
His head lolled against my shoulder, and for one second—one second only—I let myself feel all of it.
The fear. The love. The terror that I’d pulled too late and the relief that I hadn’t.
My brother, breathing against my neck, alive.
“You’re an idiot,” Finn mumbled into my shoulder. “You used your mate. To sync. I felt her come down the line.”
“She’s got steady hands.”
“She threw you down a flight of stairs, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.” My throat closed. “She did.”
“Good woman.” He coughed. “You better marry her.”
Then the boots hit the antechamber.
A lot of them. Heavy, fast, coming down, and the wolf in me came up snarling and I felt my own face begin to change—the fangs dropping down behind my lip, the claws pushing out through my fingertips, the partial shift the Midnight line could hold when it needed hands and teeth.
I hauled Finn up onto his feet, and his arm came across my shoulders, and when he lifted his head his eyes had gone gold too, and his fangs were down, and the broken man was gone.
The prince his blood had been hiding was standing up in the strobing red light beside me.
“Can you run?” I said.
“I can kill,” Finn said. “Running’s optional.”
The first Wardens came through the broken door and we went through them like they were made of wet paper—claws and fangs and a hundred generations of royal blood, no more hiding, no more towels, two Sovereign wolves who’d been bled and burned and finally, finally let off the leash.
We left them on the floor and hit the service stair and went up.
Up toward the fused gate. Up toward Kaia and the Alchemist and the Saint. Up three flights with my brother bleeding on my shoulder and my claws slick and red and my heart slamming against my ribs.
But I didn’t know.
That was the thing tearing at me as we climbed, the question I had no way to answer—we’d smashed the rig, we’d pulled the leads, the glow had died in Finn’s chest. But the dome.
The outer ward. Had it actually dropped?
Was the cavalry pouring through the breach toward us?
Or had it all been for nothing, the wards already shunted to some other backup grid, and were Finn and I charging up into a building still sealed tight, into the Saint and a hundred more Wardens, alone, to die beside my mate?
Please, I prayed to the goddess. Please let it have worked.
And somewhere above us, the building began to shake.