Blinding the Wolves

The flooded cistern smelled like an open grave dug in salt marsh.

Six Fuar-Chuan killers stood between us and the only dry ground in three square miles. Two guarded the submerged mouth of the cooling conduit behind my heels, blocking the narrow escape tunnel back to the open bluffs. Four fanned out across the black water ahead, their boots anchored in the submerged silt, cutting off the metal catwalks and the dry staging platforms.

Did they expect us to panic?

Wolves from the northern crags never understood coastal mud. On hard rock, heavy muscle and pack-line formations won skirmishes through brute momentum. In knee-deep brine, thick leather and broad shoulders were just dead weight waiting to drown in the undertow.

Steel rasped against wet leather. Six hooked gutting blades cleared their scabbards in synchronized rhythm, the cold iron clicks echoing off the vaulted brick ceiling.

Lorcuin did not shift his footing. His left shoulder remained locked against mine, broad, solid, and unyielding as harbor granite. Even through the soaked canvas of my tracking jacket and the wool of his dark coat, alpha heat radiated off his frame in steady, suffocating pulses. My skin prickled where our arms pressed together. Beneath the collar of my shirt, the old scar over my collarbone flared with a sharp, phantom burn.

My stomach twisted into a tight knot, the air in my lungs suddenly turning thin and hot. For two seconds, the splashing water and the dripping pipes faded to a dull, muted thrum. All I could smell was crushed cedar, sea salt, and the dark copper tang of his skin.

Mate, my inner wolf rasped, pacing against the inside of my ribs with urgent, clawed paws.

Shut up, I told her. We’re in a kill box.

"Four front, two rear," Lorcuin said under his breath. His deep baritone barely disturbed the oily scum drifting across the water between our boots. "I take the forward line. You clear the conduit."

"Brilliant plan," I muttered back, keeping my eyes locked on the squad leader in the center. "Except your heavy greatsword needs four feet of clean swing. You have barely three feet between that rusted crossbeam and my left ear."

"Then duck when you hear the backswing."

"I am not ducking for your heirloom butter knife, Lorcuin."

The four northern wolves in front broke into a charge.

They did not roar or signal. Fuar-Chuan raiders were trained for silence and ambush. They lunged through the knee-deep water in low, predatory crouches, throwing twin wakes of black brine that slapped hard against my thighs.

The two behind us moved at the exact same instant, their hooked blades sweeping inward to take my kidneys and hamstrings in a pincer.

I did not wait for the steel to arrive.

I pivoted hard on my right heel, braced my lower back against Lorcuin’s hip, and jammed the iron-shod butt of my ash wading staff deep into the silt between two submerged flagstones. Using the staff as a fulcrum, I threw my weight backward and kicked both heavy leather boots out of the water.

My iron-studded heels caught the nearest rear assassin dead in the chest.

Ribs shattered with a wet, cracking snap.

The assassin collapsed backward with a strangled wheeze, his hooked blade splashing into the churned conduit as the current dragged him under. The second rear guard adjusted his balance instantly, his serrated edge whipping horizontally in a vicious knee-level slash meant to sever my tendons.

I dropped flat into the black brine.

Freezing water surged over my collar, soaking my hair and filling my nostrils with the sour bite of wolfsbane distillate. The assassin’s blade hissed through empty air an inch above my nose.

Rolling sideways through the silt, I came up on my right knee beneath his reach. I reversed my grip on the six-inch iron dock-spike in my right fist and drove the tapered point straight upward into the soft meat of his inner thigh.

The rogue shrieked, his voice bouncing wildly against the brick vaulting. Dark, venous blood erupted into the swirling water, turning the black surface purple under the gloom.

Behind me, Lorcuin went to work.

He did not brawl like a gutter rat, and he did not waste motion. He fought with the crushing, disciplined lethality of an heir raised in the Tonnaragh war pits.

Even with the low iron girders cramping his overhead reach, his bluish steel blade moved in tight, piston-like thrusts and brutal short arcs. He caught the first charging wolf on the crossguard, redirected the assassin's hooked blade into a stone pillar, and drove the heavy pommel of his heirloom hilt straight into the bridge of the man’s nose.

Cartilage and facial bones gave way with a sound like wet timber snapping under a dock crane.

The second northern wolf lunged for Lorcuin's exposed ribs while his sword was extended. Lorcuin did not even attempt to bring the heavy steel back. He stepped inside the thrust, caught the attacker’s wrist in a bare, iron-plated grip, and twisted until the forearm snapped. Without breaking his forward momentum, he seized the wolf by the collar of his leather brigandine and hurled the two-hundred-pound warrior headfirst into the copper housing of Vat Two.

The massive metal tank boomed like a bronze cathedral bell, sending concentric shockwaves rippling across the flooded floor.

Two down. Four still on their feet.

The remaining Fuar-Chuan wolves backed off three paces, forming a cautious semi-circle in the swirling tide. They were bleeding from superficial cuts, their wet fur matted with brine, but their yellow eyes glowed with disciplined pack coordination. They had tasted our defense. In twenty seconds, they would adjust their spacing, use their remaining reach, and rush us in unison from four distinct angles.

Could we kill all four before the tide rose to our waists?

Probably. But Lorcuin would take a blade in the flank, and I would spend the next two days stitching my own flesh with dirty sail needle and twine. More importantly, dead men answered no questions. We needed at least one living throat to squeeze for the location of Garbhan’s supply depots.

My gaze flicked upward, scanning the dripping shadows of the ceiling.

Ten feet above our heads, the main brine-flushing conduit ran the entire length of the cistern. It was an eight-inch cast-iron pipe wrapped in rotted horsehair insulation, feeding pressurized seawater directly into the heating boilers of the distillation stills. Near the central support girder sat an ancient brass relief valve, crusted thick with green verdigris and leaking a constant hiss of scalding white steam.

The old cannery engineers had used superheated brine under high pressure to scour the fish oil and scale residue from the holding tanks. If that line was still connected to the auxiliary boiler upstairs, the pressure inside that brass housing was high enough to punch through masonry.

"Lorcuin," I said, my voice low and flat.

"I have the forward three," he answered. His breathing was deep and measured, completely unhurried. The golden ring around his pupils flared with the terrifying focus of an alpha in a death match.

"Give me a launch."

"What?"

"Interlock your fingers and lift. Don't question me."

He didn't waste a heartbeat on pride. He adjusted the grip on his greatsword, lowered his left hand below the surface scum, and locked his thick, calloused fingers into a solid cradle.

I took two explosive strides through the water, slammed my left boot into his clasped palms, and kicked off with every ounce of power in my quads.

Lorcuin surged upward with terrifying, mechanical strength. The sheer power of his lift hurled me six feet into the air.

I caught the rusted overhead girder with my left hand. The raw cut across my palm from our midnight blood oath tore open against the jagged iron, sending a white-hot spike of agony up my forearm, but I locked my fingers like a vice. Hanging suspended above the black water, I swung my legs up, hooked my boots over the iron steam line, and brought my right arm back.

The iron dock-spike gleamed dull and cold in my fist.

"Lorcuin, eyes shut!" I yelled down into the darkness.

I drove the six-inch iron spike straight into the corroded brass seam of the pressure valve.

Then I pulled on the ocean.

I possessed no delicate, scholar-born magic. I knew no refined incantations or noble pack rituals. My power was the raw, filthy tide of the deep Atlantic—the crushing weight of the black depths that rotted sunken galleons, ground granite cliffs to pebbles, and tore iron hulls in half.

I channeled that crushing hydraulic pressure directly into the cracked brass housing.

The relief valve did not merely fail. It shattered like brittle glass with a deafening, metallic roar.

Thousands of gallons of superheated, high-pressure brine and concentrated salt vapor blasted out of the ruptured manifold in an expanding white shockwave.

The cloud hit the enclosed subterranean cistern like an explosion.

A searing, atomized furnace of boiling mineral vapor and jagged salt crystals blasted through the room. Within two seconds, the entire brick vault was engulfed in an opaque wall of blistering white heat.

Down in the black water, the northern wolves shrieked in absolute torment.

To a human, the scalding cloud would have caused coughing and burning eyes. To werewolves whose senses were heightened tenfold, the boiling brine flare was excruciating agony.

Caustic salt crystals coated their dilated pupils, blinding them with chemical burns. The scalding vapor flooded their hyper-sensitive nasal passages and throat linings, scorching their olfactory nerves and obliterating their ability to track by scent. Their predatory coordination dissolved into howling, chaotic panic.

Strike, my wolf snarled in my blood.