Chapter 10 Magnus
MAGNUS
The archive room’s dust-covered terminals cast pale blue light across Lyra’s face as she downloads the last of Crane’s files.
I should be watching the door, scanning for threats, maintaining tactical awareness.
Instead, I’m watching her—the way she bites her lower lip in concentration, how a strand of silver-shot auburn hair has escaped her braid to curl against her neck, the subtle shifts in her eyes as she processes each horrifying detail.
My leopard is restless, prowling just beneath my skin. It knows what I’ve been fighting since that moment in the ice when our magic merged: this woman is ours. Our mate. The one we’ve waited our entire lives to find.
And she’s walked into a trap designed specifically for her.
“Got it,” Lyra says softly, unplugging the storage device and securing it in her pack.
“Everything Crane recorded about his methodology, his victims, the toxin formulas.” Her hands shake slightly as she works.
“Elena will need this. To develop treatments. To understand what she’s facing when the rescued subjects arrive. ”
The clinical detachment in her voice doesn’t fool me. I saw her face when she read those progress reports, watched the way her healing light flared involuntarily—her body’s instinctive response to catalogued suffering.
“We should move deeper,” I say, checking the corridor one more time. “Find where he’s keeping the prisoners.”
“Magnus.” Her hand catches my wrist, stopping me.
Even through the leather of my glove, I feel the spark—storm and ice recognizing each other, reaching for that harmony we created.
“The vision I just had. Crane specifically wants me. When we go deeper, when we find him... he’s going to try to separate us.
Bait me with prisoners who need immediate help, force me to choose between healing them and staying safe beside you. ”
I turn to face her fully, covering her hand with mine. “Then we don’t separate.”
“It won’t be that simple.”
“It is exactly that simple.” I step closer, close enough to smell the storm-rain scent of her. “We go in together. Fight together. Whatever comes, we face it side by side.”
She looks up at me, and I see fear not for herself, but for me. For what she’s seen coming. “Even if it means—”
“Don’t.” I cup her face with one hand, forcing her to hold my gaze. “I told you before. If I have to choose between a long life without you and a short one protecting you, that’s no choice at all.”
“That’s a terrible deal for you.”
“It’s the only deal I’ll accept.” My thumb brushes across her cheekbone, and her eyes flutter half-closed at the contact. “Stop trying to negotiate me out of caring about you. It’s not going to work.”
The moment stretches between us, heavy with everything we’re not saying. Then she takes a shaky breath and steps back, breaking the contact that makes thinking clearly impossible.
“The lower levels,” she says, professional mask sliding back into place. “According to the facility maps I found, there’s a main laboratory three floors down. That’s where...”
She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. That’s where the Broken are kept. Where Crane conducts his experiments. Where the screaming Jace warned us about never stops.
Where, in Lyra’s visions, everything ends badly.
We leave the archive room through a service stairwell, descending into darkness lit only by emergency lighting that casts everything in sickly green.
The temperature drops with each floor, becoming unnaturally cold even for this mountain facility, like something is deliberately chilling the lower levels.
The smell intensifies too. That chemical wrongness mixed with sickness and fear, thick enough to choke on.
My leopard recoils from it, and I have to force my animal side to settle.
We need its senses, its strength. But the instinct to run from this place, to get Lyra away from danger, is almost overwhelming.
We’re between the second and third sublevel when I catch movement from below.
“Lyra,” I breathe, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. “Something’s coming.”
We flatten against the wall just as shapes emerge from the stairwell below—three of them, moving with that jerky, unnatural gait that marks them as Broken. The emergency lighting catches on malformed limbs, faces twisted between human and animal, bodies that move wrong.
One is massive. It clearly started as a bear shifter, but now walks with wolf-like legs that don’t properly support its weight.
It drags itself forward on knuckles that are too long, claws scraping metal.
Its face is the worst part: half-ursine muzzle, half-human mouth, both frozen in permanent snarl.
The second is smaller, more humanoid, but with feline legs bent backwards at the knees. Lynx, maybe, or mountain cat. Its human torso is too thin, ribs visible beneath patchy fur, and its face… gods, its face is caught in an expression of agony that makes even my battle-hardened stomach turn.
The third makes my blood run cold. Wolf body, massive and grey-furred, but with human arms that reach and grasp. And wings, eagle wings, I think, that sprout from its shoulders at wrong angles, unable to fold properly, twitching with involuntary spasms.
They’re climbing toward us, drawn by our scent or sound or simply because we’re the first living things that aren’t already broken that they’ve encountered.
“Back,” I order Lyra, already reaching for the shift. “Get back to the archive room. Bar the door. I’ll—”
“We fight together,” she cuts me off, her voice hard as steel. “You said it yourself.”
There’s no time to argue. The bear-wolf hybrid lunges with surprising speed, its malformed body surging up the stairs with pure rage driving it forward.
I let the shift take me.
It’s always been effortless, natural as breathing—skin to fur, human to snow leopard in the space between heartbeats.
My massive leopard form explodes into being, frost-white fur marked with darker rosettes, muscles coiled and ready.
The cold doesn’t touch me; it never has. Ice is my element, my birthright.
My magic flares without conscious thought, coating the metal stairs in treacherous ice, making the footing lethal. The bear-wolf slips, crashes, but recovers with disturbing coordination given its mismatched limbs.
I meet it with claws and frost-enhanced fury.
The impact drives us both into the wall. My jaws clamp down on what should be throat but feels all wrong, its tissue too thick, its bones misaligned. The creature screams, a sound that’s caught between animal roar and human agony, and claws down my side.
Pain lances through me, but I hold my grip, shaking my head violently to tear flesh. Behind me, I’m aware of Lyra fighting. Light explodes in controlled bursts, precise strikes that target nerve clusters, disrupting motor function in the lynx-hybrid trying to flank us.
The wolf-eagle thing launches itself at my back with those horrible human arms reaching to grab, to hold, to—
Lyra’s healing light flares so bright I see it even with my attention focused on the bear-wolf.
The blast hits the wolf-eagle mid-leap, and it crashes to the stairs with a shriek.
Not killed, As a healer, Lyra can’t bring herself to kill even twisted things like these, but it is stunned, and temporarily incapacitated.
I finish the bear-wolf with a brutal twist, feeling something vital tear. It collapses, chest still moving, but no longer a threat. I spin immediately to assess—
The lynx-hybrid has recovered from Lyra’s neural strike. It moves with terrible speed despite its backwards-bent legs, launching itself not at me but at her. At Lyra, who’s focused on keeping the wolf-eagle down, who doesn’t see it coming—
“LYRA!”
I lunge, not thinking, just moving. I’m fast. We Mountain Cats are built for explosive speed, but I am not fast enough. The hybrid’s claws extend, four inches of twisted keratin aimed at her throat, at her chest, at—
I hit her from the side, knocking her clear. Feel claws rake across my ribs, my shoulder, deep furrows that burn like acid. The hybrid’s toxin, the same thing that made it what it is, floods into my system through the wounds.
Falling. I’m falling, and shifting, human form returning without my conscious choice as my magic destabilizes.
I hit the floor hard, blood already soaking through my shirt.
My shoulder screams, ribs on fire, and underneath the pain I feel something worse—wrongness spreading through my veins like poison.
“Magnus!”
Lyra’s beside me in an instant, hands already glowing.
The lynx-hybrid moves to attack again, but she does something I’ve never seen and splits her healing light, half maintaining the neural disruption on the wolf-eagle while the other half creates a barrier of pure energy that the lynx slams into like hitting a wall.
The strain on her face is immediate. She’s channeling too much power, dividing her focus beyond safe limits. But she holds both techniques, protecting me while I’m vulnerable.
“Kill it,” I manage through gritted teeth. “Lyra, just—”
“I’m a healer,” she says, voice tight with effort. “I don’t kill.”
But she does something almost worse. she floods the lynx-hybrid with so much healing energy that its warring biological systems overload, overwhelming it as its human and animal parts try to absorb and use the power in conflicting ways.
The wolf-eagle is stirring again. Lyra can’t maintain this much longer. I try to push myself up, to shift back to leopard form, to do anything useful—
Pain explodes through my chest as the toxin hits my heart. My vision greys at the edges. I’m aware of falling back, of Lyra crying my name, of her hands on my face, my chest, desperately trying to heal wounds that should be simple but are complicated by the corruption spreading through my blood.
The wolf-eagle rises, those human arms reaching—