“East wing. The subjects in the east wing—secure them for transport. Priority extraction. The children first.”
Children. East wing. They’re going to move the kids.
I look at the facility. The main building is consumed with fighting, Willow’s team inside, the sounds of combat echoing through the walls. Wolves clashing with guards. Flames fanning the structures. A Syndicate operative shifts to dragon form and takes to the sky, intent on engaging with Jericho. It’s a fight that lasts barely seconds. Jericho’s beast is clearly combat-ready; the other dragon is no match for the huge, steel-colored male.
The east wing is a separate structure, connected by a covered walkway. Nobody’s hit it yet. The assault was designed to target the main building where the majority of captives are held.
The children are in a different building. And someone inside is preparing to move them.
I key the radio. “Rook. East wing. They’re moving children. Priority transport.”
Static. Then: “Copy. We’ll redirect—”
“There’s no time. The main assault is engaged. By the time someone pulls off the east fence, those kids are gone.”
More static. Rook’s silence is the silence of a man running calculations that don’t produce a good answer.
I’m already out of the creek bed.
The shift comes without asking. Not a full transformation, something between. My spine elongates, my shoulders widen, my hands thicken with the wolf’s mass while my legs stay human enough to run upright. Fur ripples across my skin, dark and coarse. My vision sharpens, the dark dissolving into shades of gray and silver, every detail of the compound burning clearly. My hearing extends: the crackle of fire, the shouts, the children crying inside the east wing.
I cover the open ground in seconds. Faster than any human could, slower than full wolf form, but with hands that can open doors and carry what I find inside. The east wing’s side entrance is a heavy steel thing with a keypad. I don’t have the code.
I hit it, wolf strength concentrated in one shoulder. The frame buckles. I hit it again. The lock gives. The door crashes inward.
A corridor. Fluorescent lights. The smell hits my enhanced senses, and it’s worse than anything I’ve imagined. Antiseptic and fear, and a stench that I recognize from veterinary clinics. Chemical. Medical. Body fluids. The smell of procedures being done to living things.
I move down the corridor. The partial shift holds: fur on my arms, claws instead of fingernails, my jaw aching where the teeth have lengthened. Doors on both sides. Most closed. One open: a room with a medical table, restraint straps hanging loose, the leather stained and cracked from use. Equipment beside the table: monitors, IV stands, a tray of instruments laid out on a steel surface with the orderly arrangement of tools that get used regularly. A drain in the floor. The drain is what stops me. It’s stained dark. Whatever runs off that table runs into that drain, and whoever installed it knew it would be needed often.
The room is empty… But the straps are still warm. Ahead, deeper in the corridor, I hear them. Boots on concrete. A voice giving clipped instructions. And underneath it, the sound that locks my wolf onto the scent: a child whimpering.
I force myself forward. Past two more closed doors. Through a section where the fluorescent tube has blown, and the corridor goes dark. My wolf reads it in night vision, the details sharper in the absence of artificial light. Scuff marks on the floor. Small ones. The height and stride of a child being walked somewhere she didn’t want to go.
The voices are close now. Right around the corner.
I round the corner. A holding area: a large room with a barred gate, and behind the gate, wolves. Small ones. A teenager pressed against the wall with two younger children behind her. A toddler on the floor, crying, reaching for someone who isn’t there. And two men—guards, human—unlocking the gate, reaching for the children.
“Step away from them.”
The guards turn. See me, half-shifted, clawed, teeth bared, eyes burning in the fluorescent light. Whatever they expected tonight, it wasn’t this.
One reaches for a weapon. Too slow. I’m across the room before his fingers close on the grip, and the wolf’s strength does what ten years of enforcer training refined: a single strike that lifts him off his feet and puts him into the wall. He crumples. Goes still.
The second guard backs against the gate. His hands go up. He’s staring at my fists—the claws, the fur, the fingers that are no longer entirely human.
“On the ground. Face down.”
He goes. I zip-tie his wrists with a strip from my pocket—old habit, always carry restraints—and step past him to the gate.
The teenager stares at me through the bars. Seventeen, maybe. Dark hair, hollow cheeks, the eyes of someone who’s been here too long. She’s positioned between the younger children and me: a shield, a wall, the last defense a teenager can offer. She’s not moving.
“I’m not with them,” I rasp; the partial shift distorts my voice, makes it deeper, more animal. I pull back. Let the shift recede enough that my face looks human, my voice sounds like a man’s. “I’m with the team hitting the main building. We’re here for you.”
She doesn’t believe me. Why would she? A girl her age, in a place like this, has learned that no one comes to help.
“My name is Conner. I’m going to open this gate and take you out of here. All of you.”
I look at the guard on the floor. “Code.”