Chapter 202 They Won't Remember
The sheer terror in the Beta's voice caught Fennigan completely by surprise. His head snapped up just in time to see Jax entirely abandon Ginny’s side. Driven by pure panic at seeing his mother drop like a stone through the observation glass, Jax sprinted right back into the blistering heat of the safe room.
Fennigan’s muscles screamed in protest. His body was battered, and his mind was stretched to its absolute breaking point. But seeing his brother charge back into the 120-degree furnace, the Alpha let out a heavy, bone-deep grunt. He forced himself up from the floor, his heavy boots carrying him right back through the threshold to follow Jax into the stifling heat.
Jax reached Elana's cot first, his hands hovering over his mother's unconscious, flushed face. "Veda! What happened? She just dropped!"
Veda didn't look panicked in the slightest. She was casually adjusting the lighter blanket over the former Luna, shaking her head and mumbling irritably under her breath. As the two massive brothers crowded around the small cot, the oppressive, roaring air of the vents carried the Elder's raspy mutters.
"Ain't the heat, and it ain't the root," Veda grumbled, her clouded eyes narrowing at Elana's sleeping face. "It's that stubborn old wolf of hers."
"Her wolf?" Fennigan panted, swiping the sweat from his eyes as he looked down at his mother. "What is it doing?"
"Taking over," Veda said flatly, leaning her weight onto her hawthorn cane. "Her beast did the heavy lifting to burn the Winter's Breath out of her blood. But the second she woke up and her human mind remembered what Damon did... her wolf decided she couldn't handle the emotional shock on top of the physical one." Veda gave a dry, knowing huff. "That ancient beast of hers is trying to force the woman into submission rather than deal with reality. Just knocked her completely out to protect her."
Jax let out a massive breath he hadn't realized he was holding, his shoulders dropping in relief as he realized his mother wasn't dying—she was just forcefully napping.
"Well," Fennigan grunted, the adrenaline finally leaving his system and leaving him swaying on his feet. "Can't say I blame her wolf. I'd like to check out for a while, too."
"Now get her out of here," Veda ordered, waving her gnarled hawthorn cane toward the open doorway. "So we can blast this furnace until the walls turn red. We need to burn off the rest of the toxins and pull every last drop of that ghost-root out through the exhaust. I want it incinerated."
Jax and Fennigan didn't need to be told twice. Grabbing the heavy metal frame of Elana's cot, the two exhausted men shoved it out of the stifling, 120-degree room and into the blessedly cool air of the sub-basement corridor.
The moment the cot cleared the threshold and Elana was parked safely next to the gurneys holding Ginny and Leela, whatever remaining adrenaline was keeping the brothers upright completely evaporated.
The massive Alpha and Beta hit the cool stone floor of the hallway almost simultaneously. They lay flat on their backs, their chests heaving violently as they gasped for clean, unheated air. They were utterly spent—their bodies battered by the bunker explosion, their minds fractured by the emotional trauma of the night, and their strength sapped by the sheer, suffocating heat of the vault.
Veda, however, simply strolled out behind them at her own unhurried pace.
Not a single bead of sweat marred her wrinkled brow. She stepped carefully over the two giant, incapacitated werewolf warriors groaning on the floor. With a heavy, echoing clang, she pulled the massive steel vault door shut and firmly locked the heavy deadbolts into place, sealing the room tight.
She turned her sharp, clouded eyes to Miller, who was staring at the frail elder in absolute, terrified awe from his workstation.
Veda pointed a knobby, trembling finger directly at his high-tech computer console.
"Take that thing-a-ma-jig," Veda commanded, her raspy voice dead serious, "and blast that room with enough heat that it’ll take three days for those walls to cool down enough to even touch."
Miller blinked, his jaw slack, before he frantically nodded and started typing on his keyboard. "Yes, ma'am. Surface of the sun, coming right up."
Behind them, the heavy exhaust fans roared to life, and the muffled, deep thrum of the industrial heaters kicking into maximum overdrive vibrated through the stone floor beneath Jax and Fennigan's backs. The nightmare of the Winter's Breath was finally over.
Jax and Fennigan lay flat on their backs on the cool stone floor, staring up at the harsh fluorescent lights of the ceiling. Their chests heaved in slow, exhausted rhythm. The adrenaline that had kept them moving, fighting, and carrying their family to safety had completely abandoned them, leaving behind nothing but bruised muscles and a profound, hollow exhaustion.
For a long moment, neither brother spoke. They just lay there, soaking in the cold of the stone, listening to the soft, breathing of their mates and their mother sleeping safely on the gurneys beside them.
Then, breaking the heavy silence, Fennigan spoke. His voice was completely stripped of its usual Alpha command. It was flat, hollow, and hauntingly quiet.
"Dad's dead."
He said it point-blank to the ceiling. There was no inflection, no anger, and no relief. Just the cold, brutal fact of it.
Jax didn't turn his head. He just closed his eyes, the cool stone pressing against his skull, and gave a slow, heavy nod. The grief was a complicated, jagged thing. Damon had been a monster, a man who had poisoned his own pack and built a nightmare in a bunker, but he had still been their father. Jax swallowed the lump in his throat, letting the reality of the words wash over him.
Beside him, Fennigan squeezed his eyes shut. His massive chest hitched, a tremor running through his soot-stained frame as the terrifying images of the night caught up with him.
"The babies are so young," Fennigan rasped, his voice finally cracking, bleeding with the raw, agonizing terror of a fiercely protective father. He dragged a heavy hand over his face, wiping at the soot and sweat. "God, Jax... I hope they don't remember. I hope they don't think he was just playing grandpa, and then someone shot him."
The thought of Caspian and Briar's pure, innocent minds trying to process the violence—of them thinking their grandfather was just playing with them right before a bullet ended his life—was a horror worse than the 120-degree vault. It was the kind of trauma that could break a wolf before they even shifted.
Jax finally turned his head, looking over at his broken brother. He reached his heavy arm across the space between them, his hand gripping Fennigan’s shoulder with grounding strength.
"They won't remember, Fenn," Jax said, his voice a steady, solemn vow in the quiet hallway. "All they're going to know is that when the monsters came, their dad was the mountain that stood in the way. They're going to know they are safe. That's all that matters now."