A guard rounds the corner ahead. He sees us and reaches for the weapon on his hip. Briar is past me before I register the movement, a blur of dark hair and intent, and the guard is on the floor with her knife at his throat.
“Which way to the holding cells?” she says. Calm as a woman asking for directions to the post office.
He points. She zip-ties him, and we move on.
The magic continues to guide me, pulling, tugging, the bonds getting louder with every step. I can feel them individually now. Ravenclaw wolves. My wolves. People I grew up beside, people I searched for, people who’ve been waiting in this place while I sat in a diner drinking coffee with the man who sent them here.
The anger is useful. I let it fuel the magic. Wards snap into place ahead of us as we move, shields covering the corridor, deflecting a burst of gunfire from a second guard who appears at an intersection and fires three rounds before one of the Ravenclaw fighters takes him down. The bullets hit my ward and dissolve into sparks. The shield holds. Stronger than anything I’ve thrown before, stronger than it should be, the power flooding through me with a force that’s almost too much to control.
I don’t question it. Not now. The power is here, it does what I tell it, and the wolves behind these walls need it.
We reach the holding area. A heavy door, steel with an electronic lock. I press my hands against it and feel for the energy underneath. Syndicate magic, crude but effective, designed to suppress the wolves inside. I push against it. My magic meets theirs, and for a second, it’s a contest, their suppression grinding against my power like stone against stone. Then mine breaks through. The lock clicks. Their defense shatters. The door swings open.
The room behind it is large, low-ceilinged, lit by buzzing fluorescents. And it’s full of wolves.
Not standing. Not fighting. Sitting. Lying. Huddled in groups on thin mattresses laid out in rows. The air is dense with the scent of confined creatures—unwashed bodies, old fear, the sour undertone of illness. Some look up when the door opens. Others don’t; too exhausted, too beaten down, too deep in whatever the Syndicate has done to them to register that something has changed.
I count. Thirty, maybe more. Not just Ravenclaw. Wolves from multiple packs, collected over months or years. Some in terrible condition: thin, scarred, bandages on arms, throats. A woman near the wall is cradling her arm against her chest, the wrist wrapped in cloth that’s been changed recently but not recently enough. A man in the second row has the vacant stare of a wolf whose spirit left before his body did.
Among them, I see faces I recognize. The Hartwell family: Joanna and Ben and their son, thinner than I remember, not a teen anymore, Ben’s arm around Joanna’s shoulders in a grip that says he hasn’t let go in months. The Donovans, a couple in their forties who disappeared eight months ago, sitting side by side with their hands linked. Martin’s face turns toward the door with an expression that breaks me. Hope. After everything. He still has hope.
In the far corner, sitting apart, two wolves I don’t recognize but who carry themselves with the careful stillness of survivors: a woman in her early twenties with short dark hair and steady eyes—watchful, assessing, not broken despite everything—and a man near thirty, quiet, positioned between her and the door as if guarding her out of habit.
“Ravenclaw?” the woman says. Her voice is rough from disuse.
“Yes. Plus Frostbourne. I’m Willow Corvus. We’re getting you out.”
Her expression changes. Recognition. The name means something to her.
“I’m Arden,” she says. “This is Lachlan.” She stands. Looks at the room full of wolves. “Some of them can’t walk.”
“We’ll carry them.”
I turn to the breach team. “Start moving them toward the south exit. Those who can walk, pair them with those who can’t. Go.”
The Ravenclaw fighters move into the room. The evacuation begins. Slow, messy, the logistics of moving thirty traumatized creatures through a facility under assault. Some resist, flinching from contact, pressing against walls, the reflexes of wolves who’ve learned that hands reaching for them mean pain. Our fighters are patient. Gentle. They’ve been briefed.
I stand at the door and hold the ward open, my magic sustaining a corridor of protection between the holding room and the south exit. Despite the dampening field, the power flows through me: steady, vast, more than I’ve ever channelled. I can feel the wolves moving through my shield, each one registering as a presence, a bond, a life. I’m the conduit. The thing that holds the path open while they walk through it.
And I can feel Conner.
Not through the radio. That’s been dead since we entered the building. Through the pull. The same pull that connected us at the truck stop, that reached for him across a parking lot, that read his intentions before he opened his mouth. He’s somewhere in the facility. East, I think. The signal is muted by whatever’s inside these walls, but it’s there: warm, alive, fighting.
Then it vanishes.
One second, he’s there, a presence I’ve been tracking at the edge of my awareness. The next—nothing. A void where he was. As if someone reached into the signal and ripped the wire out.
Behind me, a voice. One of the Ravenclaw fighters, pressed against the corridor wall, hand on his earpiece. “What the hell just happened?”
Another voice, further back, someone with a line to the perimeter team: “East wing. The whole east side just went up. Secondary explosion; looks like they blew their own charges.”
“Fuck. The Forrester went in there. I saw him cross the open ground five minutes ago.”
The words reach me the way sound reaches you underwater. Delayed. Distorted. Arriving after the impact has already landed.
The east wing just went up. He went in there.
My magic falters. The ward I’m holding flickers. The lights in the corridor buzz and dim.