Chapter 153: Muzzle Above the Alley
The dagger edge still carried the blunt notch left from prying open the blast-proof steel plate. Chloe rubbed the blade against the rusted sink, her right arm muscles twitching from the tear. With the dark-gold blood completely spent, the ancient Wolf God body fell into extreme weakness. The wet cold seeped from the floor into her knee joints. She could barely stand straight.
Engine-oil exhaust mixed with rain’s fishy smell filled the abandoned motel room. Chloe’s chest tightened when she breathed. Her trachea felt like rough gravel rubbing back and forth. The old scar where the mark had been carved from her collarbone showed dark purple. The mate bond sent intermittent burning pain. That meant the remnant heart in Victor’s chest had not stopped.
The Costa Godfather still lived. That vast warlord network still ran. The broken-spring mattress gave a metallic creak. Leo sprawled on the yellowed sheets, his overalls shredded to rags on his back. The cub’s belly heaved violently. The gut-rumble shook plaster off the corner wall. The hybrid cub fell into extreme hunger. Chloe dragged her fractured right leg to the pack and ripped the sewage-soaked zipper.
Only two rotten dry rations remained at the pack’s bottom. Leo sat up, his scarlet right eye lit with killing light in the dim. The predation impulse tore at the cub’s central nerve. It was an unstoppable instinct. Chloe tore the wrapper and pushed the hardened dough to the cub’s mouth. Leo bit a corner, his fangs shredding the dry food easily.
The low-grade starch made his stomach cramp. He turned and spat the residue on the sheet. Food without life could not fill a high-rank predator’s consumption. He needed fresh blood and flesh.
Chloe’s stomach turned at the thought. The cub was three years old in body and a thousand years old in blood, and the hunger waking in him was the kind no ration could answer.
She had fed him on dark-gold code and her own spent strength through the long hiding, and it had held, barely, but the seal on his gene-lock had been forced open by the chase, and now the tyrant blood wanted what tyrant blood had always taken: the kill, the hot meal, the dominance of the weak.
She wrapped his burning hand tighter, willing her own Wolf God warmth into the small fist, and made a silent vow she had made a hundred times in the dark: he would feed on the enemies that came for them, never on the innocent. That was the line that made him her cub and not the Council’s weapon.
Irritation made the cub’s breath coarse. His small hand reached up and grabbed the solid steel pipe at the headboard. Chloe was bending to pick up the dropped pack. A sharp steel-twist crack exploded in the room. The wrist-thick solid steel column was crushed into a braid, its break glowing hot white smoke. Chloe dropped the pack and turned, rushing to the bed.
Leo sat in place, his small hand loosening, fine rust flakes falling to the floor.
“Mommy.”
Leo tilted his head, his childish voice carrying beastlike confusion. Chloe grabbed the oil-stained rag and wrapped the cub’s burning fingers. This heat was the sign of high-rank blood power leaking out of control. She lifted the mildewed mattress alone and shoved Leo into the dust-filled corner under the bed.
“Shut up. Retract your claws.”
The ancient Wolf God matriarch’s pressure forcibly cut the cub’s destructive nerve. Leo rolled a weak whimper in his throat and hugged his knees, curling into the deepest part. Chloe slid down against the bedframe into the standing water. The gene lock in Leo’s body had been violently dismantled. Crushing solid steel barehanded was Costa family’s core tyrant destructiveness.
This energy leakage under the double-headed eagle satellite scan equalled lighting a flare in the night. The moment infrared spectrum caught the over-limit biological heat, the purge force would saturate. At the same time, at Cold Castle’s underground medical center. The replacement fluid in the special ice coffin churned violently. Pale light hit the man’s suture-covered body. The detox hoses shook hard.
Victor opened his eyes. The tyrant instinct broke the high-concentration anesthetic. His right palm pressed the blast-proof glass lid. Invisible pressure condensed in the narrow layer at once. The five-centimeter special glass spread dense cracks. Victor swung his fist and smashed the lid. Ice water and glass shards flew, pitting the alloy wall.
Red alarms shrieked through the whole underground space. Leon crashed the door, dragging his damaged mechanical prosthetic, tactical helmet dripping rain. Victor tore off the breathing mask, taking a frozen strip of cheek flesh. He pulled the IV tube from the aortic root. Venom-blood surged from his fingers to the floor. The acid blood corroded the tiles, hissing white smoke.
“You must complete the replacement procedure.”
Leon had just stepped half a pace when the gravity field blocked him in place. Victor closed his eyes to sense the mate contract deepest in his soul. The half-heart pumped slowly. dark-gold blood maintained life. The bond was not broken. That she-wolf had only cut the sensory sharing, shutting him out. Victor walked on glass shards to the global matrix console and pressed his thumb to the scanner.
The holographic screen unfolded Europe’s contour map.
“Mark all three-no-man’s-land zones at Gibraltar’s edge as kill-red zones.”
Fucking hell. Leon’s mechanical arm gave an overload gear-grind.
“The Queen holds dark-gold code. Conventional electronic tracking will be erased entirely.”
Victor’s eye-bottom fury surged. The gravity field swept out. Around him instruments distorted. Blue sparks burst in midair. Invisible force slammed Leon against the alloy wall. His armor dented inward.
“She won’t enter the city. She can only take the cub and hide in monitor-less sewers.”
Victor’s voice was hoarse. His ten fingers tapped afterimages on the console.
“Shut thermal and sonar. Activate full-band high-rank bloodline bio blind-scan.”
Victor slammed the red physical key. System power pushed to its limit. Abandon electronic tracking. Use the Progenitor bloodline sense directly to cover the Southern Europe ruins. The moment Leo leaked pressure, the system would lock position through resonance. Several Night Owl stealth helicopters wheeled in the thunderstorm. At the screen’s bottom right, a code suddenly jumped with a faint extreme-cold magnetic anomaly.
That was the energy waveform Leo’s crushed steel pipe left in the air. The signal flickered only an instant, yet enough to light the whole coordinate. Victor grabbed the black-gold coat and threw it over his shoulders, striding out of the medical bay.
The coat was still wet with the melt of the ice coffin, and the half-heart in his chest gave a wet, ugly rumble with every step, but his gait was the Godfather’s gait, the one that had crossed a hundred battlefields and never once faltered for the watching. He did not look back at the medical bay that had nearly taken him.
There was a child in a ruins who bore his blood and a woman who had spent three years running from the name he carried, and the bloodline scan had just caught the flare of the cub’s power like a beacon in the dark. Victor Costa had died on that table a hundred times in the last hour.
He intended to live long enough to answer the flare. Leon matched his stride without a word, the mechanical leg’s grind a steady counterpoint to the thunder outside, and the Night Owls wheeled toward Gibraltar with their masters’ hunger in their rotors.
At Black Rock town’s abandoned motel. Chloe pulled the spare dagger and sheathed it at her thigh. The cold touch steadied her mind. She reached and drew the cub from under the bed.
“Out. Prepare to break out.”
Leo grabbed his mother’s hand. His sharp nail pricked Chloe’s palm. The two crossed the dim corridor and ran down the mossy stairs to the motel’s back alley. Above, the rain curtain was torn by huge mechanical airflow. Engine roar drowned the thunder. Two pure-black Night Owl helicopters closed in on the cloud layer. Their belly strobes cut the rainy night.
They had shut their searchlights, relying wholly on bloodline lock to form an angle. Rotor gale flipped the steel bins. The standing water slammed toward the ground in the face. Chloe lowered her body and held Leo firmly behind her. The double-headed eagle metal emblem on the hull showed cold light under the electric flash.
The mechanical sound of the belly machine-gun chain turning rang crisp above the rainy alley.
The rotor-wash drove the rain sideways into Chloe’s eyes, and she blinked it away without flinching. The cub’s small hand was a furnace in hers, hot with the power he could not yet hold, and she counted the seconds left before the bloodline scan finished circling the ruins.
Victor was coming. She had known he would the moment the bond had flared, three years of silence breaking in a single dark-gold pulse. But he was coming into a kill-red zone of his own making, and the helicopters above were his, and the gun-chain that sang in the rain answered to his thumb. She did not run from them.
She ran with Leo toward the only man who had ever matched the wolf in her, and the alley filled with the sound of his war. The motel behind them burned to embers in the rain, and Chloe did not look back. There was nothing left in it she needed. Everything that mattered was in front of her, closing fast. Fuck, he breathed, and the word hung in the air between them, heavier than the silence that followed.
