Chapter 105: Give ’Em Hell, Thunderfang

CRACK.

Wood splintered. The sound punched through the fire’s roar like a gunshot. A chunk of the door cratered inward, revealing the edge of the flush bolt and a view of nothing but smoke and red light.

Derek swung again. Again. A small hole formed. The heat from the other side poured through the gaps in waves that pushed Derek back half a step each time and half a step was the most ground this door was ever going to take from him.

THUD. THUD.

Landon hit the top of the stairs like a freight train that had been given coordinates and a grudge. Shirtless. Gold-eyed. His chest was heaving and his wolf was close to the surface.

He saw Derek at the door. Saw the axe. Saw the hole. Didn’t ask a single question. He planted one foot and drove a kick into the weakened section so hard the frame cracked on impact and the vibration traveled through the stone floor.

The door held. The bolt held. The bolt was the problem. Everything else was destroyed and the bolt was sitting in its reinforced housing like a bureaucrat who had been told to lock up and was following procedure to the letter while the building burned around him.

"Flush bolt," Maverick’s hologram yelled over the roar from Maria’s wrist. "Get a crowbar and pry it open. The bolt is recessed in the door edge. You need leverage, not force."

Maria was already back in the utility closet before the sentence finished. She grabbed the only thing that qualified. A fire poker. Iron. Long. Curved at the tip in a way that was designed for hearths and was about to be repurposed for felony-level door removal.

She sprinted back and handed it to Landon.

Landon jammed the poker into the warped frame where Derek’s axe had exposed the bolt housing. The iron tip found the gap between bolt and frame and he leaned into it with his full weight.

Metal screamed. The bolt bent. The frame splintered outward in a spray of hot wood and iron shavings.

Derek dropped the axe, took one step back, and kicked the door with everything his body had left to give.

BANG.

The door blew inward off its remaining hinge, slamming flat against the interior wall in a cloud of smoke and embers and the sound of something that had been sealed shut being unsealed by three wolves who did not accept the word locked as a final answer.

The room was hell with four walls and a ceiling that was losing its lease.

Fire covered every surface. Floor. Walls. The desk was a skeleton of orange light. The drapes were gone, replaced by vertical columns of flame that swayed like curtains made of something alive. The heat inside was a physical presence, a third occupant that had arrived first and was not sharing.

Maria was through the doorway before Derek or Landon could stop her. The flames around her body shifted from orange to red the instant she crossed the threshold, Emberclaw fire overriding the room’s fire with the authority of a bloodline that had been bossing flames around for centuries.

"NOVA."

She found her on the ground. Face down. One arm extended like she had been crawling towards the window. The other was tucked under her body. Her white hair was fanned across the stone, still faintly gold at the tips, catching the firelight in a way that would have been beautiful if beauty wasn’t sharing the room with a burning corpse and a collapsing ceiling.

Nova was trying to push herself up. Her arms were shaking. Her cough was wet and deep, the sound of lungs that had been breathing smoke for too long and were running a deficit on oxygen that was compounding by the second.

Maria got under her, pulling Nova’s arm over her shoulder, hauling her weight up. The second they made contact, the red flame expanded, wrapping around Nova like a cocoon, the same way it had wrapped around her in the forest when she rode Maria’s wolf and didn’t burn. The fire recognized her and made room.

Nova coughed against Maria’s shoulder. Her body convulsed with it, the kind of cough that sounded like her chest was trying to turn itself inside out. She was alive.

"Maria, move. There’s something still in there," Maverick called.

That’s when the laughing started.

Low. Wet. Coming from the far corner of the room where the fire burned hottest and brightest and where nothing should have been alive, let alone amused.

Maria turned her head.

A man stood in the flames. On fire. Actively burning. His skin was peeling off his face in strips that curled and blackened and fell away to reveal something underneath that was worse than skin and older than skin and had no business being attached to a skeleton that was standing upright and laughing.

His face was rotting. One eye socket was hollow. The other held an eye that was milky white and somehow tracking her through the fire. His jaw hung at an angle that suggested it had been broken and reassembled by someone who didn’t care about aesthetics. He was the single most terrifying thing Maria Emberclaw had ever seen in her life and she had once walked in on her brother bench-pressing a canoe full of people.

Maria screamed. Full volume. From the soles of her slippers to the crown of her skull, the sound exiting her body at a frequency that could have shattered the windows if the heat hadn’t already warped them shut.

Nova flinched against her, still coughing, still barely upright, and the coughing was the only reason Maria knew she was alive because everything else about this situation suggested life had left the building.

The thing lunged.

Inhuman speed. The kind of movement that belonged to something that didn’t obey the same physics as the living.

It closed the distance in a blur, arms extended, the burning flesh of its hands reaching for both of them.

THUNK.

Landon Thunderfang drove the fire poker through its chest from behind, the iron tip punching out the front in a spray of something that was definitely not blood because blood doesn’t smoke when it hits air and whatever this was had been smoking since the poker found it.