Chapter 286 The Manchester Raid
POV: Callum | Manchester facility
This joint operation is the first real thing to come out of the truce, and honestly, neither pack expected it to happen this fast. It's like we're being tested before we've even figured out all the rules of our new arrangement. But the practical test is actually clearer than the theoretical framework about what this truce really means when it counts.
Twenty-four wolves from the Rookeries and sixteen from True Pack. That's the number I came up with after running the operation against what we know about the facility's setup. Forty wolves heading north in two vehicles, and you can feel the awkwardness that comes when mixed groups haven't worked together before. But the reason we're here is big enough to override the discomfort of not knowing each other.
Cormac and I haven't actually talked since we signed the treaty three weeks ago. It's not a hostile silence or anything. Just the kind of quiet that happens when two people sign a document and then give it time to settle before having the next conversation. The van from Manchester station to the facility is the first enclosed space we've shared since the signing, and enclosed spaces have their own special kind of energy when two people are managing something important together.
"We go in the same formation as before," I say. "Before" meaning the second Fell facility and Holmesford and all the other facility entries we've done over the years as a coalition. Cormac knows what I mean, and that shared knowledge is common ground that seven months of pack split, a treaty, and careful distance haven't erased.
"I'll take the east corridor," Cormac says. "You take west."
"Dante takes the sublevel," I add.
"I know," Dante says from the front seat, where he's been sitting since Manchester station with the focused energy of someone who's been in this specific position before—the point person of an operation he identified and organized, managing the weight of having brought everyone here.
The facility is a converted industrial unit on the edge of Manchester's northeastern district—exactly the kind of place the Order always picks because it's big enough for their equipment and has that special anonymity of buildings that are operational but unremarkable. Dante found it through the supply chain, and I've been staring at the floor plan for twelve hours.
We go in at three in the morning. Same timing as always, because it works. The entry is clean, the way it is when the team knows what they're doing. I miss Tom's ward-breaking skills in that specific way you miss something when you reach for it and it's not there. But we've compensated with the approach Isla worked out—two of the True Pack wolves have some magical training and can handle basic ward systems, even if they can't deal with the complex layered ones that Order-trained mages build.
The mages are inside and awake. That's the variable that changed between surveillance intel and the operation. Awake mages defending a facility they know is being raided is a whole different situation from what I planned for.
The first mage comes through the east corridor door just as Cormac's group is clearing the second room. The exchange is brutal in the way that fights with trained Hermetic mages always are—offensive wards hitting with that force and silver-infused energy the Order always uses, the kind that does serious damage in the time it takes to close the distance. Cormac takes a hit across his left shoulder that I see from the junction, and I know from the way he absorbs it that it's real, not just a glancing blow.
He doesn't slow down.
The three of us—Cormac, me, and two Rookeries wolves—take the first mage down with that specific collaborative rhythm that comes from having fought together before. The way we distribute our attention and time our press means the mage can't handle all the threats at once. The mage goes down.
The second mage is in the sublevel with Dante. I hear the exchange rather than see it—the distinctive sounds of a fight happening in a confined space. Then the sound that means it's over, a different quality from the noise of a fight still in progress.
The third mage runs. That's always the variable with operations like this—someone who assesses the situation and decides running is the right call. The running mage exits through a secondary access that wasn't in the facility's floor plan, which means it was built specifically for this contingency. The True Pack wolves at the perimeter don't catch him before he's out of surveillance range.
We hold the facility and we find the children.
Eight of them, ages three to ten, in the holding rooms on the facility's lower level. Their condition is what you always find in these places—the quality of something being managed as a resource rather than cared for as a person. The eight of them respond to our arrival in the same range of ways the children in the first Fell facility did—wariness and fear, the specific alertness of people who've been in a bad place long enough to know that changes in the bad place aren't automatically improvements.
The youngest, three years old, doesn't respond to anything. She's alive, her vital signs are there, but she doesn't track movement or respond to voice. It's that specific withdrawal that prolonged early-life trauma produces in very young children. Isla will know how to address it, but I can't do anything about it in a Manchester facility at three in the morning.
I pick her up and she doesn't protest or engage. I carry her out with the rest of the eight while Cormac manages the two mages we've captured and Dante checks the perimeter.
Cormac and I are standing outside the facility at 4:15 AM with eight children and two prisoners. There's a specific quality to having done something together that required both of us, and it's different from the treaty signing, which was formal and witnessed and recorded—the quality of something that happened and which the record would contain.
This is different. This is the quality of two people who fought side by side and know what that means.
One of the captured mages, when I do the initial questioning before the Parliamentary handover, says it with the flat certainty of someone who believes what they're saying and wants the person questioning them to understand that they believe it.
"There are four more facilities," he says. "We'll never stop. The research is too valuable."