1 Reed #3
The gold went out of my eyes. I felt it happen—felt the wolf-gold drain and the black come up to fill it, obsidian all the way through, lit from somewhere underneath by the orange seam of the magma I’d sat on top of since my First Shift. The mountain was done being a mountain.
Twenty years, my wolf roared, tearing through my control, his voice a jagged edge of pure, apocalyptic violence. They had her for twenty years. Now we take her back and we take the men who kept her and we feed them to the fire!
I threw my head back and roared with him, a primal, deafening sound that ripped out of my chest and tore into the wind. I didn’t give a damn who heard it. I let the madness take me, letting the feral, unhinged fury shatter whatever was left of the man I used to be.
I stepped off the ramp into the screaming black.
The fall took the world away. Terminal velocity is a wall you press into, not a drop you take, and my body’s every instinct came up screaming—shift, reach, catch, survive—the ancient hardwired animal certainty that a wolf does not simply give himself to the sky.
I crushed it. I made myself long and heavy and let the ground come up to meet me.
The wind shrieked past my ears, deafening, a physical force tearing at my skin and snapping my clothes like a whip.
The freezing air stung my eyes, but I forced them open, tracking the gray expanse below and the scattered shapes of my crew falling with me.
They were dark silhouettes against the starry sky, bodies plunging toward the earth because of my command, the scent of their adrenaline mixing with the icy chill of the high atmosphere.
The altimeter was ticking down my wrist. Five thousand.
The cold tore at the scars on my arms, biting into the flesh like teeth.
Four thousand. The taste of cold metal coated my tongue, but beneath it, the honeysuckle was back.
Like a warm current of air rising out of the desert, fighting the freezing wind shear.
Three thousand—
—and we hit the ward-dome.
It went through my pack like a sudden shock across the teeth.
My skin crawled, the hairs on my arms standing on end as an invisible roof washed over me, smelling like burnt copper and sour milk.
For half a heartbeat, the pressure was immense, a suffocating weight pressing on my chest, trying to reject the foreign bodies invading its airspace.
But we punched down through it.
Above me, in the black, my wolves fell silent through the seam.
I watched them in my peripheral vision, feeling the vibration of their bodies cutting through the night.
Not a single parachute deployed early. They trusted their hotshot training and trusted me, plunging into the freezing void, the wind roaring, the cold burning our lungs with every forced breath.
Two thousand feet came up like a fist.
I pulled.
The canopy bloomed and slammed the harness into my body hard enough to gray the edges of the world, the desert wrenching from a wall into a floor, the ground rushing up silver and finally, finally close.
I hauled the toggles, spilled air, read the wind off the ridgeline the way Del had briefed it, and drove down toward the dark shape of the compound where the woman I’d mourned for twenty years was breathing.
The desert took my boots, sending a bone-rattling shock up my spine that I barely felt over the surging adrenaline. I hit the ground running, my boots crunching into the coarse sand. The smells of dry dust and ancient rock instantly filled my nose, grounding me in the reality of the desert.
I hauled the collapsing silk down out of the sky behind me, already reaching for the release at my chest. The metal clasps clicked sharply in the utter stillness of the dawn.
My breath plumed white in the cold air, my lungs burning as I sucked in the sharp desert oxygen.
All around me, I could hear the soft, rhythmic thuds of my pack landing in the sand, the whisper of silk folding against the earth like massive exhales.
The air smelled of sage, cold dirt, and the heavy musk of wolf.
I unclipped a weapon, the cold metal heavy and familiar in my grip.
My muscles were coiled spring-tight, every nerve ending screaming with anticipation.
A bead of icy sweat tracked down my temple, stinging as it cut through the grime.
My whole body was one held breath, twenty years long, about to finally shatter the silence.
Del’s voice cracked over the comms. “Touchdown. Maren’s network held. The board is dark. We are ghosting.”
A feral hum of satisfaction vibrated in my chest.
We were in. They hadn’t seen a damn thing. We would move through this compound like shadows, extract my mate and any other dormant wolves, and turn the ground to ash on our way out.
I signaled the advance, moving forward through the scrub brush.
The silence was absolute. Perfect.
And then the night tore open.
Klaxons.
Deep and shrieking, they tore through the quiet like a chainsaw, echoing off the concrete walls of the compound and rolling out across the basin.
The sound was a concussive blast of noise that made my eardrums throb.
Strobe lights bloomed red along the compound’s roofline, painting the sand in rhythmic pulses—the color of the jump lights I’d just fallen out of, the color of blood leaving a wound.
“Boss!” Kenji’s voice over the comms was sharp. “They’re on us! But it’s not the ward! Maren’s feed says we’re still dark on their scrying-grid!”
“Then what the fuck is that?” Judd dropped low into a fighting stance.
“It’s not us.” Del’s voice came next, cold and steady. “Look at the perimeter guards.”
I snapped my rifle up, pulling focus through the scope. The guards on the compound’s outer wall weren’t looking out into the desert—they hadn’t even noticed fifteen hotshots had dropped into their backyard.
Their weapons were drawn, but they were turned inward.
Maren’s magic had worked flawlessly. We had dropped from the sky invisible, shadows moving through a blind spot.
Which meant whatever had triggered those alarms had come from inside the house.
“Hold positions.”
No, my wolf snarled, his claws tearing at the membrane of my skull. She is in the fire. They are tearing her down. We move now!
A heavy boom rattled the ground under my boots, a concussive shudder that sent a plume of concrete dust blooming into the red-lit sky from the center of the compound.
The smell of explosives and the singed air of ruptured ward-spells washed over the wall.
The guards on the parapet began firing wildly down into their own courtyard.
Blood in the air, the beast breathed, tasting the dust through my teeth. Her blood. We leave no stone standing.
War. Already. From the inside.
The magma behind my eyes flared into something that had a heat all its own. A feral terrible want climbed up my throat.
I’d fallen out of the sky to rescue a ghost.
Somebody down here was already tearing the house apart.