Page 14 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

I made a deal a long time ago. With the part of myself that knelt on asphalt in the dark and couldn't get the ambulance door open fast enough, couldn't reach her fast enough, couldn't stop the bleeding with hands that shook so hard the gauze tore in my grip. I made the deal on my knees with blood on my palms, sirens in my ears and Rachel's pulse fading under my fingers.

Be ready. Every time. No matter what. Nobody dies on your watch.

The terms haven't changed.

Knox steps into the ring. Varak rises to meet him.

Chapter 7

Isla

The alarm tears me out of a dead sleep at 2 AM. I jolt upright in Tom's bed, the sound filling the apartment isn't a smoke detector or a car horn. It's a compound alarm. Industrial, piercing. I've never heard it before. I've lived in a wildlife rescue center for six years where every sound has a function I can identify in the dark, and this one says run.

I'm dressed in thirty seconds. Jeans, flannel, boots unlaced. I open the apartment door and Garrett fills the hallway.

"Get downstairs and stay inside."

He's moving fast for a seven-and-a-half-foot minotaur, his shoulders nearly touching both walls. He doesn't stop when he sees me.

"What's happening?"

"I said, stay inside."

He's already past me. I hear the front door slam and his footsteps hit gravel, and the alarm keeps screaming.

I don't stay inside.

The security floods on the residential wing throw white light across the lot, and Garrett stands on the gravel path between the garage and the front door. He stands broadside with his feet planted and his head lowered, and the growl rolling out of him carries across the lot with a resonance I feel in the soles of my boots. Behind him, the building where every woman and child on this compound sleeps.

A man runs. I catch him at the edge of the floodlight's reach—human, medium build, dark clothes, sprinting for the tree line like his life depends on it, because it does. Jax closes on him from the garage side, the wolf shifter covering ground in strides that eat the distance, but the man hits the trees first and disappears into the dark.

Jax follows. The crashing through the underbrush fades into the tree line and then there's nothing.

Garrett hasn't moved. He holds his position between the building and whatever just happened, and that's when I look down at the gravel path and see the fuel cans.

Two of them. Five-gallon, red plastic, sitting upright on the path twenty feet from the front door. One cap off, the other loose. The smell hits me before I process what I'm seeing—gasoline, the kind that coats your sinuses and sits on your tongue. A dark stain spreads from the open can across the gravel in a line that runs toward the building.

He started pouring.

Whoever that man is, he walked onto this compound in the dark carrying ten gallons of fuel and started pouring it toward the building where the families sleep.

Sarah comes through the front door with Reeve on her hip. Her face shows nothing I can read in the dark, but she sees the fuel cans, the pour line and the direction it runs, and her arm tightens around her son.

"Get inside now," she says.

I pass Sarah on the porch and go through the front door. The hallway fills with bodies. Jess has her son against her shoulder and her free hand on Morgan's back, guiding her toward the interior. Morgan moves with both hands under her belly and the set of her jaw locked. Ava follows with Ellie and Holly. Nina appears from the far room carrying her baby, and the baby cries the thin, startled cry of a child pulled out of sleep by a sound too big to understand.

"Interior rooms," I say. "Away from the outside walls. The fumes need to ventilate before anyone goes near that side of the building."

Jess looks at me.

"The bathroom on the hall has no exterior windows," she says. "Kids in there first."

We get them in. Reeve, Finn's son, Nina's baby, Lily half-asleep and asking questions nobody answers. Kim lowers herself onto the bathroom floor with her back against the tub and both hands on her belly, and Morgan sits beside her on the closed toilet lid. Holly leans against the doorframe, arms crossed.

I go back outside.

Garrett stands on the path. The two Cascades allies flank the building's corners, and Jax emerges from the tree line shaking his head.