Chapter 106: Must’ve Been Another Tavian, High Luna

The thing didn’t stop. Its head swiveled backwards on its neck at an angle that spines do not authorize, the milky eye finding Landon with the calm of a creature that considered a fire poker a minor inconvenience.

CRACK.

Derek’s axe came down on its neck from the side.

The head separated. It rolled twice, trailing fire, and stopped face up in a puddle of something that used to be the rug. The body stayed standing for a full second with the poker still through its chest, swaying, like it needed a moment to update its operating system on the new development.

Then it dropped.

Maria was already moving with Nova, red flame cocooning them both, boots slipping on the wet stone as she made for the doorway. Behind her, she heard Derek breathing hard and the sound of Landon pulling the poker free.

She didn’t see what happened next. The sound told her everything.

There was a scraping noise. Wet. Deliberate. The sound of something dragging itself across stone towards something else, and the something else was its own head.

Derek saw it. The headless body was pulling itself across the floor towards the head that was sitting five feet away with its mouth still open and its one good eye still tracking and the whole arrangement was so profoundly, cosmically fucked that Derek Thunderfang, the man who had a line for everything, produced exactly one.

"Yeah, no."

He punted the head through the open window with a kick that would have made a Helix football scout weep, and watched it arc into the snowstorm four floors above the courtyard. If there had been goalposts, he would have split them.

Landon grabbed the window frame and slammed it shut so hard the remaining glass cracked. Then both brothers moved for the door without looking back because the body was still crawling and staying to watch it figure out its next move was a decision neither of them was willing to make.

The corridor was somehow worse than the room. The fire had spread in both directions, climbing towards the ceiling where the melted sprinkler pipes hung like modern art designed by an arsonist.

Maria was ten feet ahead, carrying Nova, the red flame pushing outward in a sphere that cleared a path through the orange. Nova’s coughing had quieted to something shallower, which was either improvement or the opposite.

Derek closed the distance to them. "Maria, give her to me."

"When she’s touching me, the fire doesn’t burn her," Maria shot back without slowing down. "You pick her up out of this, she cooks."

Derek’s jaw worked once. The calculation was visible on his face, the math of a man who wanted his mate in his arms running against the math of a man who wanted his mate alive, and the second equation won.

Landon didn’t calculate. He didn’t deliberate. He didn’t run the numbers on which woman to carry and which to leave walking.

He picked them both up.

Both women were off the ground in a single motion that should have been impossible.

The red flame expanded the instant he made contact, Maria’s Emberclaw fire wrapping around all three of them like a shield that recognized more passengers and adjusted the coverage without being asked. The orange fire in the corridor bent away from them, pushed back by the red, and Landon moved through the gap at a speed that made the walls blur.

He didn’t notice the fire turning red around him. He didn’t notice the flames parting. He was carrying two women down a burning hallway and his brain had allocated every available resource to the tasks of running and holding and the task of noticing anything else had been deprioritized to a level that no longer existed.

Derek was behind him. The axe was in his hand. His eyes were on the corridor ahead and his brother’s back and the two women in his brother’s arms and everything was moving and the stairs were close and this was almost over.

Then he turned around.

The headless body was in the corridor.

Standing. No head. The poker hole in its chest was visible even through the smoke, a dark circle where iron had passed through and flesh had objected and the objection had been overruled. It was standing in the doorway of 412 with its arms at its sides, facing them the way a thing without a face can face something, and the fact that it was tracking them without eyes was the part that turned Derek’s stomach because eyeless tracking meant it was using something else and that something else didn’t have a name he wanted to learn.

Maria glanced behind her from Landon’s arm and screamed.

✦✦✦

TWO FLOORS DOWN

Tavian Voltcrest was running up stairs at a speed his body had stopped approving of three flights ago when the scream hit.

His response was immediate, involuntary, and pitched at a frequency that would have earned him first chair in an opera.

The High Luna stopped on the landing below him. She had been climbing at her own pace, ignoring every suggestion to evacuate, ignoring the fire, ignoring the smoke, ignoring the concept of personal safety with the thoroughness of a woman who had decided the concept didn’t apply to her tonight.

She looked up at her Beta.

She had known Tavian Voltcrest since he was a pup. She had watched him train. She had watched him fight. She had watched him stand beside her grandson through every crisis this pack had faced in the last decade. She had heard him give battle commands. She had heard him give speeches. She had heard him deliver strategic briefings with the composure of a man who understood that his voice was a weapon and used it accordingly.

She had never heard him do that.

"Tavian," she said. "Was that you?"

Tavian’s mouth was still open.

"No, High Luna."

"It came from your mouth."

The High Luna looked at him for a long second. Then she continued climbing, leaving Tavian on the landing with the fading echo of his soprano debut.