Chapter 170 The Pursuit
POV: Cormac | Southwark Bank, Thames Dock
He had not fought alongside Callum's people before tonight.
He had fought against them, twice, and he had watched them fight from a distance during the Battle of the Rookeries, and he had formed an assessment of their quality that had been accurate as far as it went. What he had not understood from a distance was the particular thing that made them different from pack fighters, which was not skill or strength or tactical sophistication, though they had all of those, but something in the way they fought for each other, the specific quality of attention they paid to the person beside them, covering without being asked, adjusting without communicating.
Pack fought for hierarchy. Callum's people fought for each other.
He understood the difference better after forty minutes in those tunnels than he had in two years of observing from the outside.
He was on the dock now with four of Callum's fighters and the Parliament guards between them and the boats, and he was fighting with everything he had, which was considerable, because the silver wound in his side from the Battle of the Rookeries had never fully healed and his body had adapted around it the way bodies adapted around permanent damage, working with the limitation rather than past it.
The Parliament guards were vampire-led, which meant they were faster and stronger than his baseline and were fighting with the confidence of an authority that expected compliance, the combat style of people who rarely encountered genuine resistance. He had spent six months as Alpha of a London pack attending Parliament functions and he knew the specific quality of that confidence, the assumption that supernatural law and the hierarchy it maintained were sufficient deterrents.
They were not sufficient deterrents tonight.
He took the first guard with a low strike that used the dock's uneven surface as an advantage, the guard's footing compromised by the gap between dock planks, and drove him into the water before the guard's recovery could complete. The second guard came in fast from the right, silver-edged weapon catching him across the shoulder, and the burn of the silver went straight into the existing wound's nerve pathways with a specificity that made his vision go white for a half-second.
He kept moving.
The boats needed thirty seconds. He could see them from the corner of his eye, the engines running, Isla's shape bent over a child on the first boat, Callum holding the children back from the fighting with one arm and dealing with his own guard with the other. Thirty seconds and the boats could clear the dock and be on the river and Parliament guards on a dock without boats were not a problem anymore.
He bought thirty seconds by putting himself between the remaining guards and the boats and not moving.
The silver wound opened fully under the third strike, the scar tissue that had formed over eighteen months tearing along its original line, and the blood came fast and hot and the pain was significant and he filed it the same way Callum had filed his own wounds in the tunnel, as information rather than emergency, as data that meant he was still standing and could be addressed later.
Finn's face was in his head the way it had been in his head since he had made the decision to come tonight. Not as motivation exactly, not in the way he had expected the thought of his son to feel like, which was as a reason to be careful, to survive. It felt more like a compass point. The direction of who he was trying to become, the version of himself that Finn deserved rather than the version that had been Alpha and had sold the pack to Parliament and had testified against his brother in a courtroom and had meant every word of it.
He was not that version anymore. He was not certain what version he was. But this was what becoming something else looked like from the inside, apparently, which was blood on a dock and a silver wound and four fighters beside him who had no reason to trust him but were fighting the same direction anyway.
The fourth guard hit him low, a tackle that took them both off their feet, and they went down together onto the dock planks and the impact drove the air out of him and he came back up slower than he had gone down.
The fifth guard was on him.
Then the third and fourth together, circling, working the pattern that Parliament enforcers used against lone opponents, the geometry of it designed to eliminate defensive options one at a time.
He heard Callum's voice from the boats. Not calling to him, not yet, but present, his brother's voice carrying the specific quality that Callum's voice had always had when a decision was being made, the flatness that preceded action.
Three guards on him. Five vampires total on the dock. The boats were thirty feet away and the engines were running.
Callum would have to choose.