“The third production run is clean,” Carson says without turning. “Yield’s up twelve percent. I’ve got enough processed blood to distribute to six territories by end of month.”
“Good.”
“Not good enough. Renaud’s territory alone could drain the first three batches, and if the lords who hedged at the council smell a limited supply, they’ll start bidding against each other instead of coordinating, and we lose the diplomatic leverage the cure was supposed to buy.” He finally turns. His eyes are red-rimmed. The man hasn’t slept properly in days and it shows. “I need more of your blood. Another draw. Larger than the last.”
“Schedule it with Elena.”
“Elena says you’re already at her recommended ceiling for the month.”
“Then schedule it anyway.”
He gives me the look he gives unsolvable problems. “You can’t pour from an empty cup, Maximus. Your healing factor is extraordinary but it isn’t infinite. If I drain you past recovery, I lose the source entirely, and the cure dies with it.”
“It won’t die.” I say it with the certainty I’ve used to send men into fights they might not walk out of. “I heal. Draw what you need. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
He opens his mouth to argue, and the intake system shrieks.
A high keening whistle from the intake shaft above the lab, air being forced through filters at a pressure they weren’t designed for, and under it a smell that arrives so fast it’s in my lungs before I’ve finished placing it. Sweet. Acrid. Like crushed flowers rotting in a closed room. I’ve breathed witch-craft before. Nothing else smells sweet while it burns.
Witch-modified, and coming through the air system.
Through the bond I feel a spike of protective force, the twins responding before either of us, an instinctive push aimed outwardfrom wherever Celeste is in the compound, fierce and precise and telling me everything I need to know about what these children will become.
“Gas,” I say. “Out. Now.”
Carson doesn’t hesitate. He hits the lab’s emergency seal, a red button recessed into the bench that locks the centrifuges and secures the blood supply behind airtight containment, and I’m already moving, grabbing him by the arm and driving him toward the door while the guard at the entrance goes for the corridor alarm.
The two fighters outside have their weapons drawn. The sweet acrid smell is thicker in the hallway, pouring from the ceiling vents. The ventilation system. Someone who knows its layout. Someone who mapped every intake, every filter, every junction.
Nadia.
Marcellus’s voice hits the comms before the alarm finishes its first cycle. “Compound breach. Gas attack. Source is the north ventilation intake. All personnel seal and hold.”
I hand Carson to the fighters. “Medical wing. Go.”
They take him and move, and I’m running toward the north intake, the shadows pouring off my shoulders and flattening ahead of me, hunting, spreading across floor and walls and tasting the air for the threat.
The intake shaft is at the building’s northeast corner, a reinforced access panel that maintenance uses for filter changes. The panel is open. The bolts are cut. A canister sits wedged into the shaft, hissing, the witch-modified gas pouring from its valve into the compound’s air supply, and the smell is dense enough here that even my lungs burn.
I rip the canister out of the shaft with my bare hands. The metal is hot. The gas sprays across my forearms and the burn is immediate, a witch-crafted compound designed to incapacitatevampires, and I throw the canister through the open panel into the outside air and close the shaft behind it.
The burn fades. My skin heals. The gas disperses in the night air outside, harmless once it’s not concentrated.
No one at the access point. No footprints. No scent trail the wolves can follow, which means she had a witch cover the approach, and which means she’s already gone, and which means this was never meant to succeed.
It was meant to remind us she can reach in whenever she wants.
The medical wingis full by the time I get there.
The gas reached three corridors before the ventilation closed, and Dalton has twelve people on oxygen and two with chemical burns to the throat. No fatalities. The witch-modification was calibrated for unconsciousness, not death, which means Nadia wanted Carson alive and she wanted the cure intact and she wanted to take both.
Celeste meets me at the wing entrance. She’s been here since the alarm, organizing triage, and the evidence of her work is visible in the corridor, three doors crushed shut with the power, the metal bent at the frames where she held them closed against the gas pressure. The force it took to hold three doors shut at once while pregnant shows in her face, the pallor under the warmth, the fever-brightness in her eyes.
She reads my face and the new pink skin on my forearms and the smell still clinging to my clothes, and the bond opens between us. I feel what’s in her. The fury, bright and clean. The fear underneath it. And under that, deeper, the physical cost of the last hour. She used her gift to close off corridors during the evacuation, andthe effort ran hot through her, and the fever is banking under her skin.
Then something happens that shouldn’t.
The bond pulls at the strain in her, as if the connection between us is reaching for the cost and trying to absorb it. Her fever is high but banking faster than it should, and my own body feels the faint echo of effort I didn’t spend, a tiredness in my muscles that belongs to her work and not mine.
