Chapter 171 The Black Veil
POV: Callum | Southwark Bank, Thames Dock
He made the choice before he was fully conscious of making it, which was how the worst choices worked, the ones that didn't give you time to reason through them because the time didn't exist and the outcome was already in motion before your mind caught up to what your body had done.
He looked at Cormac on the dock with three Parliament guards working the encirclement pattern around him, his brother's side dark with blood from the reopened silver wound, moving slower than he had been moving twenty minutes ago, and he looked at the boats with eleven children and Isla and his crew, and he turned to the nearest fighter and said the words.
"Get them on the river. Now."
He was not on the boat when it left.
He was on the dock, moving toward Cormac, because the choice he had made was not to abandon his brother and he understood he had told himself it was but the understanding had been wrong, and the two seconds he had spent on that wrong understanding had cost him the boat, which had gone when he had told it to go because his crew followed his orders and he had given the order.
He reached the edge of the guard formation and went through it the way prison had taught him to go through things, without ceremony, taking the damage that couldn't be avoided and using the damage as the momentum for the next movement. One guard went into the Thames. A second went down on the dock planks with a broken collarbone that Callum felt through his own hands, the sensation filing itself away with all the other sensory information that combat produced and that he would not process fully until later.
The third guard on Cormac was still standing.
Callum hit him from behind with enough force that the guard's face met the dock and stayed there.
Cormac was on one knee, holding his side with one hand, breathing in the way of someone managing significant blood loss with the specific discipline of a born wolf who had been hit before and knew how to metabolize pain rather than react to it. He looked up at Callum with an expression that had several things in it at once, none of them simple.
"You should have gotten on the boat," Cormac said.
"I know."
Two more guards were coming from the embankment wall above. Callum pulled Cormac to his feet, and they moved together into the shadows under the dock's overhang, using the structure for cover the way Callum had learned to use every environment for cover, and the guards passed overhead without seeing them in the dark beneath the planking.
They stayed there for twenty minutes, not speaking, listening to the sounds of Parliament guards searching the dock and the embankment and finding nothing. The boats were on the river, far enough out by now that pursuit without their own watercraft was not viable, and the guards' voices carried the frustrated quality of people who had arrived twenty minutes late to something they were supposed to prevent.
When the sounds moved away, Callum helped Cormac up the embankment and through two streets of ordinary Southwark and into a car that had not been part of the plan because the plan had not accounted for this particular outcome.
He drove.
He did not know if Cormac would make it back to the Rookeries. The silver wound was bad, the kind of bad that required treatment he couldn't provide in a moving car, and Cormac was losing color with the steady efficiency of someone whose body was working very hard at something it was not winning. He drove fast and kept his eyes on the road and said nothing because there was nothing to say yet.
At the Rookeries, Isla took over.
She worked on Cormac for two hours in the medical room while Callum sat outside the door and held Lily, who had woken up and did not want to be set down, and he let her not be set down. The other children were in the main shelter, being tended by volunteers, being fed and assessed and given the simple animal reassurance of warmth and people who were not Hermetic Order researchers.
He sat and held Lily and waited and let the costs add up in the accounting that the back of his mind kept running regardless of what the front of his mind was doing.
One fighter dead in the tunnel. One child dead on the boat. Silas dead at the perimeter. Tom's fae debt called, the Seelie warriors returned to Arcadia, that resource spent. The facility compromised but five more still operating. Valentina somewhere in the tunnels, last seen chasing Fell, not yet back.
The weight of not knowing if his brother was alive.
He sat with that particular weight for three days.
Isla stabilized Cormac that night, which meant alive but not certain, the silver wound requiring the kind of sustained treatment that silver wounds at that depth required, which was patience and the specific compounds she had learned to produce from wolfsbane derivatives and the particular knowledge that two years in the Rookeries had given her about keeping packless wolves from dying of things that born wolves healed naturally.
He visited twice a day. Cormac was unconscious for most of it. On the second day he was conscious enough to track Callum's presence with his eyes but not conscious enough to speak. Callum sat with him and said nothing and let the sitting be what it was.
On the third day, Cormac was in the chair beside the bed when Callum arrived. Not standing, not recovered, but upright under his own power, which was a distinction that mattered to born wolves in ways that it was difficult to explain to people who weren't.
He looked at Callum.
"I'm done with Parliament," he said. His voice was rough and slow from three days of unconsciousness and blood loss but the words were clear. "I'm with you now." He held Callum's eyes. "For real this time."