Chapter 112: Everybody Scream Together Now

The servant stairs were tight. Stone walls close enough that Tavian’s shoulders brushed both sides as he maneuvered Derek down each step.

They hit the half-landing between floors and stopped.

The stairwell continued down but the passage was blocked by a wall that shouldn’t have been there. A dividing wall between the servant staircase and the floor it serviced, interrupted by a small indoor window. The window connected the stairwell to the corridor on the other side, a pass-through designed for trays and linens and the small practical exchanges that kept a keep running without its residents ever witnessing the machinery.

It was the size of a person. A small person. A person who was not an Alpha, not a Beta, not a Gamma, and certainly not any of the three men currently occupying this stairwell whose shoulders had been designed by a Goddess who apparently did not anticipate servant architecture.

Maria looked at the window. Looked at the men. Looked at the window again.

She moved without being asked. Without announcement. Without a word of explanation to anyone because the math was obvious and Maria Emberclaw did not explain obvious math. She climbed through the window headfirst, one arm leading, hips twisting sideways to clear the frame, legs following with the practiced ease of a woman whose wolf was the size of a horse and whose human form had retained exactly none of the horse’s dimensions.

Miniature Maverick’s hologram went through with her.

Maria disappeared. Footsteps on the other side. Quick. Purposeful. Then voices sounded on the other side.

"Emberclaw, what in the Goddess’s name are you doing in the servant corridors?"

"Picking you up, High Luna. Through the window. Right now."

There was a pause long enough to contain an entire generation’s worth of protocol violations being calculated and dismissed.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The main stairs are blocked. The fire stairs are gone. This window connects to the stairwell where your grandsons are. Both of them. They need medical. The main stairs are collapsed so I need you to come with me and fit through a window that is going to be insulting. I apologize in advance."

There was another long pause.

"They both are there," the High Luna repeated.

"Yes. We are both here, Gran," Landon called loudly through the other side, irritation threaded in his voice.

The pause ended. Footsteps approached the window. Two sets.

Maria’s face appeared in the frame first, climbing back through with the efficiency of a woman who had already done this once and considered the return trip a formality. She landed on the half-landing and turned, reaching both hands back through the window.

The High Luna’s hands found hers. The crown appeared first, because the High Luna of Thunderfang went through a servant window crown-first and the crown was not negotiable. Then her face, irritated like her grandson’s.

When her slippers found the landing, she straightened and adjusted her crown. Then her eyes landed on Nova.

"Why are you carrying the slave, dear?" she asked Alpha Thunderfang, visibly confused.

Nova blinked back at her completely over this shit. She was not going to apologize for being carried against her will.

She opened her mouth, probably to say something less strategic due to the lack of oxygen her brain underwent, but what came out was a full-body cough.

By the time the cough was finished, the High Luna had moved on. Probably for the better. She was studying Derek.

"Let’s move," Alpha Thunderfang said.

✦✦✦

THUNDERFANG - COURTYARD

The courtyard had been having a relatively calm evacuation until a head fell out of the sky.

Derek’s punt had been accurate. The trajectory had been clean. The rotation had been tight. What nobody had accounted for was the landing zone, which was the courtyard where three hundred evacuated wolves were standing in pajamas in the snow wondering if they could go back to bed.

The head hit the cobblestones with a wet thud that silenced every conversation in a forty-foot radius. It bounced once. Rolled twice. Then it stopped face-up in the snow, one milky eye staring at the sky, jaw hanging open, grey-green flesh steaming in the cold air like a steak that had been left on a grill in hell.

"Is that a—"

Sierra didn’t finish her question because it moved.

She screamed. The scream was genuine and earned and hit a frequency that activated every maternal omega in a fifty-foot radius who all screamed in harmony with her, creating a choir of terror that could have been heard from the hover pods still circling overhead.

The jaw snapped shut. The milky eye rotated in its socket. The entire head began dragging itself across the cobblestones by its jaw, opening and closing its mouth against the ground like a fish that had traded water for stone and was making the best of it. The movement was wrong in every way that mattered and several ways that hadn’t been invented yet.

"BACK! EVERYBODY BACK!" Sebastian was already moving, arms wide, herding wolves away from the thing on the ground that was inching its way across the courtyard with the determined pace of something that had somewhere to be and the loss of a body was a setback it was working through. "WARRIORS, PERIMETER. PUPS BEHIND THE FOUNTAIN. MOVE."

The courtyard erupted into organized panic. Wolves scattered. Warriors drew blades. Pups were scooped up by parents who had questions they were choosing to ask later.

Celeste Starborne stood five feet from the head and did not move.

She was watching it. Her silk robe fluttered in the wind. Her hair was still perfect. Her makeup was still flawless. And her lips were twitching. The twitch was small. Involuntary. Located at the left corner of her mouth. It lived there for two seconds before she caught it and replaced it with the appropriate expression of horror that a future Luna should wear when a severed head is crawling across her courtyard.

Sebastian noticed the twitch. He clocked it, stored it, and said nothing because saying something meant acknowledging what he saw and acknowledging what he saw meant a conversation he was not equipped to have in a courtyard at midnight while a head was doing laps.

"PRINCESS, PLEASE STEP BACK," he called.