Chapter 104: Miniature Maverick, Maximum Alpha

"Maria, is there a sprinkler system in this keep?" Maverick’s hologram yelled from her wrist, his tiny voice somehow cutting through the roar of a corridor that was actively trying to become ash. The six-inch Alpha was looking like the world’s smallest action hero on the world’s worst ride.

Maria looked up at the ceiling mid-sprint. Pipes ran along the stone overhead, copper and old, the kind of infrastructure that had been installed decades ago and maintained by people who assumed fire was a theoretical problem in a stone keep.

"Yes." She coughed, the smoke finding the gap between Emberclaw immunity and human lungs. "But the pipes are melted."

She was right. The copper had warped and sagged, drooping from the ceiling in soft curves that looked like candle wax. Whatever had been flowing through them had evaporated or escaped through the ruptures. The system was dead.

"Maria." Maverick’s voice changed. "I don’t like this. There’s not enough air for you in there."

The fire didn’t burn her. The smoke didn’t care about bloodlines. Smoke killed Emberclaws the same way it killed everyone else, by filling the space where oxygen was supposed to be and charging rent.

She coughed again, harder. Her chest rattled with it. The corridor was narrowing, the fire closing in from both sides, and the breathable air was a shrinking pocket that she was running through faster than it was disappearing but the math was getting tight.

Room numbers blurred past her. 408. 409. 410.

The door was engulfed. Fire climbed the dark wood from the base to the frame, the flames so concentrated they had turned the color of a sunset and the heat coming off them was strong enough to push Maria back a step, which was a thing that fire had never done to an Emberclaw before and the novelty of it was not appreciated.

She kicked the door. Full force. Her boot connected with wood that should have splintered.

It held.

The impact vibrated up her leg and into her hip and the door didn’t move an inch. Bolted. From the inside, from the outside, it didn’t matter. The thing was sealed.

"NOVA!" Maria screamed through the wood, her voice cracking from the smoke. She kicked again. Same result. Same goddamn door laughing at the same goddamn boot. "NOVA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

Silence answered her from the other side. Then a sound that wasn’t silence. A sound that was worse than silence. The low, guttural noise of something that was inside that room and was not Nova and was not burning.

"NOVA!"

"Maria, focus." Maverick’s hologram cut through the noise with the calm of a man who had broken down doors before and was running the playbook from hundreds of miles away. "Look for a utility closet. Another door that isn’t on fire. The lock is a flush bolt, one on the edge of the door face, hidden when the door is closed. A fire poker, crowbar, or axe is your best bet."

Maria tore her eyes from 412 and scanned the corridor. Smoke and heat and flickering orange in every direction. Three doors down, on the opposite wall, a narrow metal door with a maintenance rune above it that was still glowing blue because utility closets were apparently the only things in this keep that had their shit together tonight.

She sprinted to it. Inside, mounted to the wall next to a coil of hose and a rack of maintenance tools, was an axe.

She grabbed it with both hands. The weight surprised her. This was not a decorative axe. This was an axe built by wolves for wolves, forged for the kind of emergency that was currently consuming the hallway, and it weighed approximately as much as Maria’s entire commitment to upper body training, which was limited to the Moonfire endurance test.

She sprinted back to 412, planted her feet, swung with everything she had.

The axe bounced off the door like she had hit a boulder with a pool noodle.

The recoil traveled up the handle, through her wrists, through her elbows, and launched her backwards. She stumbled three full steps, the axe coming with her because her grip was the only thing that had performed correctly, and her back hit the opposite wall with a thud that rattled her teeth.

The door was untouched. Unmarked. Unbothered. The door had absorbed a full-force axe swing from an Emberclaw princess and responded with the structural equivalent of "was that it?"

Maria stared at the axe. Stared at the door. Stared at the axe again.

On her wrist, Maverick closed his eyes.

"Are you alright?" he asked, in the voice of a man who already knew the answer and was asking as a formality before moving to plan B.

"I’m fine," Maria panted, chin lifted. "I scored high in endurance. The door here was just rude."

THUD. THUD. THUD.

Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairwell. Derek Thunderfang emerged through the archway looking like a man the fire had tried to eat and sent back for being too angry. His skin was red in patches where the flames had gotten close enough to leave calling cards. His eyes were still wolf-gold. Smoke rolled off his shoulders like a cloak made of everything wrong with tonight.

He took one look at Maria, standing against the far wall, holding an axe that was taller than her conviction, breathing hard in a corridor that was running out of air to breathe.

Then he looked at the door.

He crossed the distance in three strides and took the axe from her without a word. No commentary. No smart-ass remark. No performance. Derek Thunderfang, the man who narrated his own heroics, who delivered one-liners during sword fights, who had talked shit to two Alphas while holding a blade at a sacred ceremony, picked up an axe in a burning corridor and said nothing because the woman he loved was on the other side of that door and comedy had been fired.

He swung.