Deirdre watched through the window as Stark and Andrew burst into the cellblock. The walls were so thick that she couldn’t hear them, but she didn’t need to. The prisoners went wild as soon as they saw Stark. He had a lot of fans in the detention center.
“After you initiate the magical override, we’re going to have to make it look like you kicked my butt,” Deirdre said. “And you’ll have to get out fast so that Stark doesn’t retaliate against you when he discovers my body.”
Reuben flinched. “Your…body?”
“Unconscious, not dead.” Deirdre drummed her fingers on the holster of her gun. The tapping reminded her of rainfall. She stopped it. “Got any magic that you can toss around to make things look properly mucked up?”
“I can make something,” Reuben said. “I’m activating the magic now, just so you know.”
“Great.”
Deirdre couldn’t take her eyes off of Stark through the window. At any moment, he was going to realize the cells were locked and track her down in the security room. He’d catch her trying to betray him. And he’d make her regret it.
They had to move fast.
She twitched when Stark leaped toward one of the cell doors. He was barking orders to Andrew. Deirdre wished she could hear him so she could figure out what he was talking about.
But then she realized that the locks were melting.
Each one of the cell doors was starting to glow, and the metal was dripping into a white-hot slurry, sealing them closed.
Reuben’s magic was working.
She saw Stark’s mouth open in a shout, and he grabbed the bars of a cell in both hands, as though attempting to rip it out of the wall. For a heartbeat, she felt satisfaction in knowing she’d beaten him for once—but then she saw why the hint of panic was flashing over his face.
It wasn’t just the lock melting.
The inside of the cell was warped with heat and vibrating with magic. Not just that cell, but every cell around it, too. And it was spreading out in ripples to take the next prisoner, and the next.
The incarcerated shifters were screaming. They were so loud that Deirdre could hear them faintly through the reinforced glass.
She whirled on Reuben. He was grabbing more of the charms, activating them as quickly as possible with a resigned expression.
He’d known that the spells wouldn’t just melt the locks. He had planned on killing the prisoners all along.
But these were non-violent offenders.
“Oh no,” she breathed.
Deirdre snapped a kick at the back of Reuben’s head. She didn’t aim well enough to bring him down, nor did she hit him hard enough to cause damage. She only managed to knock him away from the charms.
She hurled herself at the wall of switches. It was easy to tell which would unlock the cells because of the helpful, convenient map.
Deirdre started flipping.
Reuben smashed into her back. His hands tangled in her hair, yanking so hard that she felt like her scalp was going to rip off.
She yelped, grabbing his hands. “Let go!”
“I can’t let you release all those silver-suckers.” His breath stank of pennies, hot and wet on her cheek. He freed a hand to fumble at the holster on her hip.
Deirdre drove her elbow into his gut. He stumbled away and took what felt like half of her hair with him.
Niamh had just permed Deirdre’s hair straight again that morning. It had taken hours.
She jerked the Sig Sauer P226 Nitron out of her holster and fired it into Reuben’s other foot.
He dropped with a cry. But he wouldn't give up that easily. He reached into the collar of his shirt and pulled out a pentacle necklace that glowed with magic.
Outside in the cellblock, people were still screaming. Innocent prisoners were dying, melting from the force of the detention center’s magic, and it was because Deirdre had accidentally done the wrong thing.
Again.
The witch flung the pentacle toward her. He opened his mouth, prepared to speak another word of power.
Deirdre shot him in the chest before he could trigger the magic.
Blood sprayed.
She didn’t pause to watch him fall.
Hands shaking, she shoved the gun back into her holster, flipped the rest of the switches, and then ran to the window. Most of the locks on the cell doors disengaged. The doors opened wide and bodies spilled out.
Some of those bodies were still moving.
But so many of the cells didn’t open. The melted locks ensured that. Inside, prisoners flamed with the glow of dark magic, thrashing as their skin melted over their bones.
Stark managed to wrench one of the doors off by its hinges. Magical flames gushed out, splashing over his cargo pants.
Deirdre needed to help. She couldn’t let the prisoners die like that.
She ripped Reuben’s keycard out of his pocket. He didn’t react to being touched. Blood was puddling underneath him, spreading outward by the centimeter. Facedown on the floor, he looked indistinguishable from any of the guards that Stark had killed on their way into the detention center.
Deirdre raced into the hallway. Alarms blared outside the master security room, most likely triggered by something Reuben or Deirdre had done. The sheer volume of it made her brain throb inside of her skull.
Those alarms were even louder inside the cellblock, as though they thought that they could prevent prison escapes simply by deafening everyone. The sound muted the screams of the shifters still trapped inside their cells.
Deirdre shoved her way through the escaped convicts to reach Stark, who was struggling to rip the door off of another melting cell.
The shifter inside was consumed in fire. Electric flames clung to his skin, wet and sticky, eating away at the flesh to expose glistening red meat underneath.
Deirdre had allowed Reuben to do that.
She shouldered up beside Stark and gripped the other side of the door. He acknowledged her by saying, “One…two…
three
!”
They pulled hard at the same time. The metal bent. Reinforced hinges wrenched out of the wall. And the bars came off.
Deirdre leaped into the cell. The instant she crossed the threshold, her body was consumed by heat, powerful and suffocating. Sticky blue fire splattered from runes on the walls. She dodged as much of it as she could, grabbed the prisoner by the shoulders, and dragged him outside.
“Deirdre!”
Andrew tackled her, his massive hands beating at her shoulders and arms. He yanked her jacket off.
She wrenched away from him. “What are you doing?”
He flung her leather coat to the floor and stomped on it. The blue flame had landed on her, eating away at the material.
Oh. That’s what he’s doing
.
She shot Andrew a grateful, embarrassed smile before helping Stark open the rest of the cells.
They acted quickly enough to save two more prisoners. Deirdre tried not to think too hard about what she was doing and what kind of people she might be saving. Many of them were addicts, or petty thieves. But what about the woman beaters? The stalkers? The people who might deserve to be locked up?
She didn’t know who was who. She could have been risking her life for people as bad as Stark.
But if she didn’t save them, then people who were mostly innocent might die, melted to the bone by hexes that she’d let Reuben trigger.
She was too late to save a handful of the prisoners anyway. Deirdre ran to the next cell with a melted lock and saw nothing but a husk of a body on the inside. The death looked like it must have been excruciating.
Stark grabbed her by the elbow, grip crushingly tight. “What went wrong, Tombs?” He didn’t have to speak loudly for her to hear him over the alarms. His voice always felt like it was projected directly into her mind, echoing through her skull.
“The guard tricked me,” Deirdre said. “He showed me where the locks were and then activated the hexes while I was distracted.”
“Did he pay?” Stark asked.
A sudden chill rolled over her at the memory of what she’d done to him. “Yes.”
He looked satisfied. “Good.”
Any time Stark approved of what Deirdre had done, she felt like she’d made a serious mistake.
The cellblock was chaotic with the many prisoners who had escaped: a sea of black-and-white-striped uniforms torn between running for the doors and encircling Stark.
He turned to address them.
“Moonrise comes in thirty minutes,” Stark said. “I am Alpha. I’ll control your changes if you let me. If you run, you’ll have to deal with it on your own.”
One of the prisoners, a burly woman with a shaved head, stepped forward. “We’re with you, Stark.”
His eyes glinted with a dangerous light. “Get to the surface.”
Then he turned from them as though utterly confident that they would obey his commands.
They probably would. Stark was a compelling man in more ways than one.
Deirdre’s heart skittered when she realized he was moving deeper into the detention center rather than following the prisoners toward the exit. “We have to get out of here,” she said, stepping in front of him. “These alarms will be going off at the nearest OPA base. They’ll be after us.”
“Step aside, Tombs.”
“I unlocked all the doors in the detention center. Everyone can escape. What’s left for us here?”
Stark shoved her aside. “We can’t go until we find solitary confinement.”
There was no point in asking him why he wanted to go there—he had his reasons, and he wouldn’t share them unless the whim struck.
All she could do was hasten their escape.
Deirdre broke into a run. “I saw a map. I can take us there.”
Stark and Andrew followed, but there were more than just two pairs of footsteps pounding behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to see that several of the imprisoned shifters were with them, too.
She was halfway down the stairs to the first floor of the cellblock when guards emerged from the opposite hallway.
Deirdre shouted a warning, hand flying to her gun.
Not fast enough.
The guards at the front of the assault dropped to their knees, shouldering assault rifles that were stamped with the bold white OPA logo.
They opened fire without warning.
Deirdre dived over the railing, arms over her head. She was still ten feet off the ground. She hit and rolled with practiced ease, getting to her feet in a single motion.
Her Sig Sauer leaped to her hand as she ran toward the hallway, angling herself so that she approached the guard sideways. Some of them had riot shields—effective protection against her bullets.
She had to get around those shields.
Bullets blasted into the wall behind her, ripping holes the size of her fist into the concrete. Debris pelted her bare shoulders like bee stings.
Deirdre let instinct move her, keeping inches ahead of the line of bullets.
She ran up the side of the wall. She was fast enough that she got a good six feet off the ground in an arc, rubber treads gripping the concrete as she aimed her gun straight at the line of guards.
Eyes widened behind helmet masks. Muzzles tracked her too slowly. They hadn’t expected her preternatural speed to carry her up the wall like that, and they didn’t react fast enough to defend against her.
Her momentum took her high enough to see over the riot shields.
Even moving quickly, she was calm. Deirdre was always calmer when she was free running. The motions were familiar in a way that assisting prison breakouts weren’t.
She had no trouble aiming. The gun was steady in her hand.
Her finger squeezed.
One head snapped back as the bullet planted into the forehead of a helmet. Her hand moved an inch and she fired again. She hit the guard beside the first. His face shield cracked. He fell, too.
Another shot, another guard down.
Deirdre got three hits before she landed on the floor again. She whirled, hiding behind a pillar.
How many bullets had she used that evening? She couldn’t remember.
She ejected the cartridge and loaded another from her pocket.
It was only then that she realized her calf was burning. Deirdre touched the place it hurt and her fingers came away bloody.
Damn.
One of those wild shots had hit her.
Considering how much it hurt, the guards were carrying silver bullets.
Deirdre lunged around the pillar, gun lifted.
There wasn’t anyone left to shoot.
Stark smashed his boot heel into the last of the surviving guards. The crack of a snapping spine echoed through the room.
Between the Alpha, Andrew, and the shifter prisoners who’d followed them downstairs, they’d made short work of all those guards. It had only taken a few seconds. The abrupt brutality of it was shocking, even now—even after Deirdre had spent weeks watching Stark kill with the same efficiency. She didn’t think she’d ever get used to it.
There would be more guards to follow that first wave. A lot more.
“This way,” Deirdre said, limping down the hallway.
Stark paced her. His nostrils flared. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll heal,” she said.
Hopefully
.
Solitary confinement was another set of stairs and a locked door away. It was marked by several warning signs with bold red letters, each cautioning about the dangerousness of the inhabitants within. According to the signs, nobody could enter without multiple guards, including at least one witch. And it took two keycards to unlock the hallway in the first place.
Deirdre swiped the two badges she’d stolen. The door opened.
The hallway beyond was a long, straight passage broken up in intervals by metal doors reinforced by silver and iron. There were so many warding spells that the air vibrated.
“Figure out how to open all of these,” Stark said.
It wasn’t clear whom he was addressing, but their new escort of prisoners reacted anyway, moving to beat at the doors.
Stark went to the one on the far end and opened the narrow window to look inside. “There she is.” He stepped back to survey the door, eyes skimming the frame, the handle, the runes.
His fist lashed out. He shattered a single rune to the right of the door.