Chapter 62 62
Kaelen's POV:
I'd been sitting in the stairwell for forty-three minutes when the bond went wrong.
Not wrong exactly. More like... loud. One second it was the steady low hum of Annabeth's fear, controlled, focused, the kind of fear you feel when you're doing something dangerous on purpose. The next second it spiked so hard I almost fell off the step I was sitting on. Raw terror, the animal kind, the kind that doesn't think or plan, just screams.
And then nothing.
Not quiet. Nothing. Like somebody had cut the cord between us with scissors.
I was on my feet before my brain caught up with my body. Took the stairs two at a time, then three, my legs burning and my heart going so fast it didn't feel like separate beats anymore, just one long continuous pounding in my skull. Fourth floor. The hallway smelled like smoke and something chemical, sharp, metallic, and the carpet had scorch marks near room 412 that hadn't been there when I'd walked past earlier.
The door was closed. Locked, probably. I didn't check.
I hit it with everything I had. Not just strength, everything, all the fire and force and rage that I'd spent my entire life keeping under control because that was the rule, that was always the rule. Don't shift, don't burn, don't break things, don't let anyone see what you really are. Twenty-two years of holding back, of taking punches from drunk assholes and smiling through it, of pretending to be small and harmless and normal.
But I was none of those things: I was the fucking force of the goddam nature.
The door came off its hinges. The frame splintered. Something metal, the deadbolt maybe, flew across the room and hit the far wall hard enough to crack the drywall.
Eight men. I counted them in the time it took to blink. Two by the window. Three scattered around the suite. One near the bathroom door. One holding that buzzing device, the source of the chemical smell, some kind of... I didn't care what it was.
And one holding Annabeth. Almost unconscious. Head lolling, hair falling across her face, a needle still stuck in her goddamn neck.
Something broke inside me.
Not figuratively. I felt it happen, physically, this thing in my chest that I'd been carrying around my whole life, this lock, this wall, this careful architecture of self-control that my mother built and my fear maintained. It just... shattered. Like glass. Like ice.
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER!"
My voice came out wrong. Too deep, too loud, vibrating at a frequency that rattled the windows and made two of the men stumble backward with their hands over their ears. I could feel my eyes burning gold so hot that the skin around them hurt, and my body temperature was climbing fast, way too fast, the kind of heat that preceded a shift.
I didn't care.
The two men closest to me moved first. Professional, trained, they came at me from both sides with coordinated precision. The one on the left had some kind of weapon, a rod or baton, I couldn't tell.
I grabbed his wrist and broke it. Just like that, one motion, heard the bones snap and felt them give under my fingers and I didn't feel anything about it. No guilt, no horror, nothing. The sound he made was sharp, a scream cut short when I shoved him into his partner so hard they both hit the wall and the plaster caved in behind them.
The man with the device pointed it at me and pressed the button.
That sound. High-pitched, drilling, the same frequency that had killed Annabeth's fire. I felt it try to work on me, felt it reach into my chest and pull at the heat inside. My vision went blurry for a second, and my fire flickered.
But I wasn't a hybrid. I was a full-blooded golden dragon, and whatever that thing was designed for, it wasn't designed for me. Not all the way. It hurt, sure, made my teeth ache and my skull feel like it was being squeezed in a vise, but my fire held.
I burned the device out of his hand. Didn't mean to burn the hand too but that's what happened, the golden fire jumping from my palm to his fingers to his sleeve to his chest in about half a second, and he went down screaming, rolling on the carpet that was now smoking. The sprinklers kicked on. Water, everywhere, hissing against my skin and turning to steam because I was running too hot to cool down.
Three down. Or two down and one with a broken wrist trying to crawl toward the door.
The man holding Annabeth started to move. Toward the bedroom, toward the connecting door, trying to drag her with him. Her feet were scraping against the carpet, limp, and I could see the needle mark on her neck, a tiny red dot that made me want to burn this entire building to the ground.
Two more came at me. One with a knife, an actual knife, like that was going to do something against a dragon. I caught the blade with my bare hand. It cut deep into my palm, I felt the sting and then the familiar warmth of my own healing closing the wound almost instantly, and the look on the guy's face when the blood stopped and his knife was stuck in my closing flesh...
I head-butted him. Not elegant. My forehead to his nose, crunch, blood everywhere, his and mine. He dropped and I kicked the knife away and then the other one tackled me from behind, arms around my neck, choking hold.
Strong. He was strong, trained for this, knew exactly where to press to cut off air. My vision went spotty for a second and I thought about Marlen, about Lucian sitting in that motel room on Route 7 eating vending machine chips and waiting for me to call. About Annabeth's face when she'd shown up at my door last night and asked for help. About her voice saying don't die tomorrow.
I reached behind me, grabbed the man's jacket, and threw him over my shoulder into the coffee table. The glass shattered under him and he didn't get up.
Five.
The man who'd been holding Annabeth was trying to get to the bedroom door, maybe there was another exit through there, a connecting room or something. I hit him with a blast of fire that caught him in the back and sent him crashing into the doorframe. He went down hard, face-first, and didn't move. Annabeth crumpled to the floor where he'd dropped her, limp, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Six.
The eighth one came out of nowhere. Must've been behind the couch or crouched by the minibar, I don't know, but he lunged at me with something in his hand, a syringe, another goddamn needle. I grabbed his arm, twisted, heard the pop of his shoulder dislocating, and shoved him away. He hit the window and the glass cracked behind him but held. He slid down to the floor, clutching his arm, and stayed there.
Seven.
The man from the bench, the one who'd given Annabeth the ultimatum, the one with the grandfatherly smile, was backing away from where she'd fallen. She was still on the floor near the bedroom door, unconscious, her arm bent under her at an angle that looked wrong. He had his hands raised, palms out.
"Wait," he said. "Wait. Let's talk about this."