3 Reed
The corridor ran downhill into the earth like a fire trench, and I worked it the only way I knew how.
“Anchor the corner.” My voice came out low enough that the concrete answered it. “Del, hold the junction behind us. Bowie, Cal, flank left—clear those side rooms and fall back to me. Nobody gets ahead of the line.”
“Copy.” Del’s voice on the net, steady as a spike-camp fire. “Anchoring.”
We moved like we’d moved through a hundred burns—one organism, one intent, the whole crew flowing down the throat of the sublevel with the discipline that had kept us alive across more than a decade of fires that wanted us dead.
Except there was no fire here. There was worse.
There was old blood and the flat lavender reek of the Order’s alchemy soaked into every surface, and it lay over the top of the thing my wolf was clawing to find underneath it.
A Warden came around the far corner reaching for a hex-rig on his shoulder.
Crush him, my wolf snarled, his weight throwing itself forward through my muscles. He breathes the air that belongs to her. Tear him in half!
I took the door beside him off its hinges—ripped it out of the frame with one hand, three hundred pounds of steel and reinforced core torn free like paper—and I put it through him, and the wall behind him, and I did not break stride over the wreckage.
Founding blood in the bones. The ground down here was old and it knew me and it lent me everything it had, and I spent it.
She is close. My wolf had gone past keening into something worse, something that vibrated in my teeth like the ward-dome had. Close. Under the poison-smell. Under all of it. Honeysuckle. Reach for it. REACH—
“Junction ahead.” Kenji, reading his panel through the dust. “Primary corridor forks. East branch is the holding block.” A beat.
“That’s her, boss. Whatever the Lodestone relay pulled, that’s where they’ve got the dormants prepped for Severance.
Telemetry shows massive ley lines feeding into these blocks—drawing live from three unmapped booster manifolds hidden somewhere out in the valley.
If we don’t sever those feeder lines eventually, this whole facility stays pressurized with the suppression drug. ”
Everything in me swung east like a compass needle finding true.
Twenty years came up my throat all at once—honeysuckle and grass and a promise I broke, a watchfire I lit for a woman who was breathing the whole time—and my boots turned toward the east corridor before my mind had finished the thought, my whole body a bowstring loosed, going to her, finally going to her—
Del stepped into my path.
Kenji filled the space beside him.
Two wolves, shoulder to shoulder, standing in the mouth of the east corridor between me and the only thing left in the world I wanted, and Del had put his hands up—palms out, empty, the gesture you make to a spooked animal.
“Reed,” he said. “Don’t.”
Move. My wolf slammed the walls of my chest. Move them or go through them—
“Get out of the way.” I barely knew the sound as mine. It came up from the magma, and it filled the corridor, and I watched both of them lock their knees against the pressure of it. “Del. Kenji. Now.”
Del didn’t move. His mustache was gray with concrete dust and he did not move. “Not this hall. Not you.”
“That is my mate—”
“That’s exactly why.” Kenji’s voice cut in, low and fast, the human calculator laying his cards on the table before I could tear the table apart.
“Listen to me, and then hate me all you want, but you’re going to listen first, because if you walk down that hall right now—you kill her—and I am not going to let you spend twenty years grieving a woman just to murder her the first second you find her alive. ”
The words landed like a spike bar across the back of my knees.
Kill her.
I stopped.
The air around me went razor thin, charged with static and the coppery tang of my own impending violence.
My pulse roared in my ears, deafening and primal, drowning out the alarms, drowning out the very earth groaning under my boots.
I bared my fangs, a deep, rattling snarl tearing from my chest—a sound that didn’t belong to a man, a sound that made the concrete walls shudder.
I was half a breath from tearing my own pack apart just to cross fifty yards.
“You know, boss. You know.” Kenji held my eyes—one of the only wolves in the crew who could, and only because his mind was too busy running numbers to feel the fear.
“You’ve watched it five times now. Brann and Wren.
Santos and Nell. Every dormant mate we’ve pulled out of the dark.
What happens when a suppressed dormant meets her mate? What happens to the body?”
“The Heat.” I ground it out. “The purge.”
“The purge.” He nodded, hard. “The body burns out the suppression compound all at once to clear the way for First Shift. Fast. Violent. For a lightly dosed dormant it’s a few days of hell and they come out the other side.
You’ve seen that. You’ve seen it five times.
Well, that’s the easy version.” He took a breath.
“Now do the math on hers. How long have they had her, Reed?”
The corridor tilted.
“Twenty years,” I said.
“Twenty years.” Kenji didn’t blink. “Two decades of Order alchemy packed into her marrow, layer on layer on layer, frozen solid. Her wolf is hiding, Reed, protected by the Goddess herself. But if you walk in there, your blood is going to strike that stasis like a blowtorch—”
“She’s already in danger,” I said, and my hand had found the wall, the concrete crumbling under my fingers. “Every second I stand here—”
She is DYING down there, my wolf howled. They are draining her, we are wasting time, go, GO—
“Get out of my way!” I roared, the sound tearing my vocal cords.
I didn’t think. I lunged. I threw my entire weight forward, slamming into Del and Kenji with the force of a freight train. The impact drove them both backward into the concrete wall with a sickening crack, but they didn’t go down. They locked their arms around me, boots skidding against the tile.
“Boss, no!” Kenji shouted, straining against me, his face red with the effort.
“I said move!” I snarled, thrashing wildly.
The obsidian wolf was completely unhinged now, drowning in suffocating grief, raging against the absolute injustice of being kept from her for one more second.
I threw an elbow, catching Kenji in the ribs, but Del hooked his massive arms under my armpits, locking me in a bear hug from the front.
“Hold him!” Del yelled, spitting blood.
Bowie and Cal materialized out of the dust, dropping their rifles and diving into the fray.
Cal hit me low, wrapping his arms around my waist, his dead weight dragging my legs down.
Bowie grabbed my left arm, twisting it back, fighting against my frenzied, chaotic strength.
I kicked, snarling like a feral beast, saliva and blood flying from my jaws.
I hoisted Cal off his feet and slammed him into the floor, but he didn’t let go. He held on like a vice.
“Let me go!” I bellowed, the sound cracking into a raw, agonized howl that bounced off the walls. “She’s right there! She’s mine!”
“You’re going to kill her, Reed!” Bowie screamed back, his voice cracking with terror as he struggled to pin my arm. “Look at us! You’re going to kill her!”
“I don’t care!” I didn’t even know what I was saying. I was blinding white rage and blinding black grief, thrashing against my own men, tearing at the leash, desperate to rip the world apart if it meant getting to her side. “I waited twenty years! Let me go!”
“Reed, stop!” Del shoved his face inches from mine, his eyes wild, his mustache smeared with dirt. He put his full, immense weight against my chest, shoving me backward. “You’re burning up the corridor! You’re going to kill us and her! Pull it back!”
I could smell singed hair and burning fabric. They were literally burning themselves just to keep me from reaching her. I threw my head back and roared, an agonizing, deafening sound that felt like tearing my own heart out of my chest.
“Every second you stand here she has a chance!” Del stepped in closer, right into the teeth of my aura, taking it on the way only Brann had ever been able to.
“You go down that hall and cross her aura with yours? Twenty years of frost hits Founding fire in one instant. Her body tries to purge all of it at once. There’s no controlled burn.
There’s no thaw. It’s a blow-up, Reed. It’s a slope going over in three seconds flat, and she’s standing on it. ”
His voice dropped, wrecked.
“Her organs will cook themselves inside her before you get your arms around her. The shock will tear her mind to pieces. You will watch her seize and die, and the last thing she’ll ever know is that it was you—again.”
Again.
The dam broke.
The sight of my hotshots burning under my skin forced the tiniest sliver of the man back to the surface.
I stopped thrashing. I collapsed against the wall, chest heaving, sliding down until my knees hit the floor.
The group of them fell back, gasping for air, clutching their ribs and nursing their burns.
I pressed my thumb into the burn scars on my forearm. Pressed until the old magic-seared tissue split and wept, until the pain gave me one square inch of ground to stand on that wasn’t blinding, feral grief.
My voice went to nothing. “I am not standing in a hallway while someone else pulls her out. I can’t. Do you understand me? I can’t.”
“I know.” Del’s hand came up and closed around the back of my neck.
The old grip. The one Brann used. The brother’s hold, and Del had never once used it on me because I was the Alpha and the Alpha does not get held—but he held me now, in the dust and the red light, and he pressed his forehead nearly to mine.