Chapter 168 The Rescue at Dawn: Part Two

Chapter 168 The Rescue at Dawn: Part Two
POV: Araya

Lucian was on the floor against the far wall with blood-magic chains at his wrists and ankles and torso and around both arms at the bicep, the chains anchored into the stone with the specific permanence of something built into the room rather than added to it. Lior was chained three feet away in the same configuration.

Both of them were alive. Both of them were in pain. Both of them looked at her with the specific quality of people who have been in the dark for days and have received something that was not expected to arrive.

"Mother," Lucian said.

The word was rougher than it should have been, the voice of someone whose body has been working against suppression for seventy-two hours. She crossed the cell in three strides and her hands were on the chain anchors before she had finished deciding to approach.

The blood-magic in the anchors pushed back against her hands with the specific burning of a force that did not distinguish between who was holding it and what their intentions were. She pushed back.

"Can you walk," she said.

"Do not know yet," Lucian said.

Ronan was at the other set of chains working on Lior's anchors with the focused efficiency of someone who had made the calculation that this was the correct action and was executing it regardless of every personal feeling he had about the calculation's object. His hands burned the same way hers burned from the chain contact and he did not stop.

The alarms started before she had the second anchor free.

Not a distant alarm from another level, something detectable through walls. The alarms in this level's corridor, which meant the breach had been detected and the response was close rather than forming.

Lyra's voice from the doorway. "Multiple forces converging. We are out of time."

Araya looked at the chain anchors. At what careful removal would cost in time.

She stopped being careful.

She found the place below management where the Alpha power lived without qualification and she put it into her hands and pulled.

The anchor tore from the stone. The blood-magic backlash went through her palms with the specific searing quality of concentrated dark magic meeting the specific version of power she was and finding the meeting nonconsensual, and she accepted the burning and went to the second anchor and tore that one too.

Ronan tore Lior's anchors from the wall at the same moment, the sound of it simultaneous, and both hybrids folded forward as the chains' structural support disappeared.

Araya caught Lucian. Ronan caught Lior with the specific automatic quality of someone who has reflexes that predate their decisions and whose reflexes do not check with their decisions before acting.

"Can you move," she said to Lucian.

"Yes," he said, which was only mostly true but was true enough.

"Then we move," she said.

The corridor outside the cell had three vampires arriving from the eastern end and six from the western end. The fifty elite warriors addressed all nine of them with the specific focused brutality of people who had already done math on this level's geometry and had determined that the corridor was the most efficient place to establish which way the fighting was going to go.

The fighting went their way.

The ascent through the keep was harder than the descent had been, not because the defenders were better organized, though they were, but because she was now managing two injured hybrids alongside the force instead of just the force, and the calculation of every engagement had an additional term that it had not had coming down.

They were on the second level of the ascent when Lucian's power moved.

She felt it before she saw it. The specific quality of his power at the baseline the Moonstone had confirmed, which was the three bloodlines present simultaneously at full capacity, but moving differently than the baseline. Not directed. Not controlled. The specific quality of something that had been suppressed for seventy-two hours of continuous blood-magic burning and had been pushed past the point where suppression was an available option.

"Lucian," she said.

He could not hear her. Not in the way of someone choosing not to respond. In the way of someone who is not fully present in the mechanism of hearing because the thing happening in their body is consuming the bandwidth that hearing required.

The power went outward.

She had seen him produce power displays before. The Blood Moon transformation. The clearing confrontation where Ronan's wolf had yielded. The corona that had developed during the coronation declaration. All of those had been the power with the specific quality of something at some level of direction, even the uncontrolled Blood Moon version had been responsive to input.

This was not responsive to input. This was the foundational expression of three bloodlines simultaneously present at maximum force with no management structure active to shape it.

The walls did not so much collapse as stop maintaining their prior commitment to being walls.

Then from the rubble, the sound that the mate bond created when two people connected by it were experiencing something simultaneously and the bond chose to express both simultaneous experiences through the bodies that held it.

Lior was buried.

She felt Lucian feel it through the mate bond an instant before Lucian's response arrived, and the response was the sound that came from the place below human or wolf or Lycan or vampire, the place where the specific loss of something that is part of you by the oldest mechanism available expressed itself.

Lior's voice joined from beneath the rubble in the specific shriek of someone who is in agony and is also something more than agony, the shriek of someone who had gone under the stone specifically so that someone else would not, and whose experience of being under the stone was therefore carrying the specific weight of a chosen rather than accidental suffering.

The two sounds met in the collapsing corridor and did the thing that the mate bond's merging of two individuals into something shared produced when both individuals were expressing something simultaneously at maximum force.

They became one sound.

Lucian's howl and Lior's shriek merge into one sound.