Chapter 110: Archimedes, You Beautiful Bastard

A girl had just ignored two Alpha commands, baited a headless body into a room, stolen a weapon from its chest, locked it inside using a mechanism she had been imprisoned by, and was now walking through fire to save her mate.

BANG.

Behind her, the door shuddered from the inside.

BANG. BANG.

It held.

She had blood still running from her nose. Her legs were still fighting for every step. A blood vessel in one of her eyes had burst, turning the left side of her vision into a red filter. Anytime she tried to speak, she coughed. And she was light-headed from the lack of oxygen.

All distractions.

Nova Grey was going to make this shit work.

She studied the angle of the beam on Derek. It was across his torso, embedded in the stone on both sides, the weight of it concentrated on the lowest point, which was Derek’s ribcage.

She could see his breathing getting shallower. His eyes found her face and what lived in them was terror.

"Nova, baby, go back to the stairs. Please. You’re hurt."

She didn’t acknowledge that. She was in puzzle-solving mode and the puzzle was physics.

Lever. Fulcrum. The fire poker was four feet of iron with a curved tip.

She wedged the tip under the beam at the exact point where stone met wood, where the gap was widest, positioning the poker so the long handle would give them maximum leverage. They needed every advantage possible, and this one was easy.

Her eyes swept the floor once.

Bingo. A chunk of stone from the collapsed ceiling sat two feet away, heavy, angular, the right shape. She kicked it into position under the poker with her boot. The iron settled against the stone fulcrum and the physics of the arrangement announced itself to everyone present.

She looked at Alpha Thunderfang, acknowledging him for the first time. Pointed at the poker.

He understood instantly. He was off the floor and over the beam in a second, both hands on the poker, planting his feet wide, ready to push down with the full weight of an Alpha who had been trying to lift this thing with his hands and had just been handed a better option by a girl who scored in the 99th percentile of intelligence and was using every decimal of it.

Alpha Thunderfang pressed down on the poker. Iron bent but held. The beam groaned, shifting upward, one inch, two inches, the stone beneath it cracking as the fulcrum bit deeper.

Nova grabbed Derek under his arms. The strength came from something she would never be able to explain. It came from the same place the glow came from, the same place the Alpha-command-breaking came from, the same place that gave her the speed to save that child during the parade.

She pulled.

Derek slid backwards across the stone, his body coming free from under the beam one rib at a time. He was saying something. Words that she couldn’t fully register because the ringing in her ears was still screaming and her focus was allocated entirely to the task of extracting him and her hearing had been deprioritized to a level that no longer existed.

His torso cleared the beam. His hips. His legs. Free.

Alpha Thunderfang let the poker go. The beam slammed back down so hard the stone floor fractured in a spiderweb beneath it.

He was at Derek’s side in a flash, pulling his brother’s arm over his shoulder, hauling him upright with the raw, graceless urgency of a man whose brother was alive and the alive was still negotiable. Nova was already under Derek’s other arm before Alpha Thunderfang finished standing. Derek’s weight landed on her and her knees almost buckled but they held because tonight her knees were taking orders from the same place the strength had come from and that place did not accept the word no.

The red flame that had been coiled around her swelled outward. It expanded past her shoulders, past Derek’s body, past Alpha Thunderfang’s back, wrapping all three of them in a sphere of Emberclaw fire that pushed the corridor blaze away with the authority of something that had been told to protect her, and that now included two additional people, and it was going to do it until it ran out of fuel or the building ran out of fire.

They moved.

Nova’s legs were screaming. Her vision was tunneling again. Blood was still running from her nose and the burst vessel in her eye was making the left side of everything look like it was being viewed through a red filter. Derek’s weight on her shoulder was enormous and her body was sending formal complaints to every joint south of her neck.

She kept moving because the alternative was stopping and stopping meant dying and dying meant Derek died and Derek dying was the one outcome in the universe she had decided was unacceptable and the decision had been made and the decision was final and her legs could file their complaints in writing.

Alpha Thunderfang looked down at her.

"Release."

The ringing stopped immediately.

The cessation was so sudden it felt like a sound of its own, a vacuum where the pressure had been. Her ears popped. The Alpha command was gone. Her legs were hers again. Her body was hers again.

They moved faster.

They reached the stairwell and passed through the archway. That’s when the temperature dropped by a noticeable amount.

Maria was at the bottom of the stairwell, right where the Alpha command had frozen her. On her wrist, a six-inch Maverick Emberclaw hologram stood.

His blazing red eyes locked onto Nova immediately. He looked absolutely furious at her. No words were needed. He could get in line behind Celeste and Alpha Thunderfang.

"Release," Alpha Thunderfang gritted.

The command left his mouth like a leash being dropped. Maria’s body unlocked in a single instant, every muscle firing back online at once, and she was moving before the feeling fully returned to her legs to where Nova was.

Nova stepped aside without a word. Maria could carry his weight. Nova was struggling. Continuing to try was pride dressed as help and Nova was too smart to confuse the two.

Maria ducked under Derek’s arm, replacing Nova’s shoulder with hers, taking his weight with the ease of an Alpha’s sister whose bone density had been forged by the same bloodline that bench-pressed canoes.