“The lower levels,” she says, professional mask sliding back into place. “According to the facility maps I found, there’s a main laboratory three floors down. That’s where...”
She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. That’s where the Broken are kept. Where Crane conducts his experiments. Where the screaming Jace warned us about never stops.
Where, in Lyra’s visions, everything ends badly.
We leave the archive room through a service stairwell, descending into darkness lit only by emergency lighting that casts everything in sickly green. The temperature drops with each floor, becoming unnaturally cold even for this mountain facility, like something is deliberately chilling the lower levels.
The smell intensifies too. That chemical wrongness mixed with sickness and fear, thick enough to choke on. My leopard recoils from it, and I have to force my animal side to settle. We need its senses, its strength. But the instinct to run from this place, to get Lyra away from danger, is almost overwhelming.
We’re between the second and third sublevel when I catch movement from below.
“Lyra,” I breathe, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. “Something’s coming.”
We flatten against the wall just as shapes emerge from the stairwell below—three of them, moving with that jerky, unnatural gait that marks them as Broken. The emergency lighting catches on malformed limbs, faces twisted between human and animal, bodies that move wrong.
One is massive. It clearly started as a bear shifter, but now walks with wolf-like legs that don’t properly support its weight. It drags itself forward on knuckles that are too long, claws scraping metal. Its face is the worst part: half-ursine muzzle, half-human mouth, both frozen in permanent snarl.
The second is smaller, more humanoid, but with feline legs bent backwards at the knees. Lynx, maybe, or mountain cat. Itshuman torso is too thin, ribs visible beneath patchy fur, and its face… gods, its face is caught in an expression of agony that makes even my battle-hardened stomach turn.
The third makes my blood run cold. Wolf body, massive and grey-furred, but with human arms that reach and grasp. And wings, eagle wings, I think, that sprout from its shoulders at wrong angles, unable to fold properly, twitching with involuntary spasms.
They’re climbing toward us, drawn by our scent or sound or simply because we’re the first living things that aren’t already broken that they’ve encountered.
“Back,” I order Lyra, already reaching for the shift. “Get back to the archive room. Bar the door. I’ll?—”
“We fight together,” she cuts me off, her voice hard as steel. “You said it yourself.”
There’s no time to argue. The bear-wolf hybrid lunges with surprising speed, its malformed body surging up the stairs with pure rage driving it forward.
I let the shift take me.
It’s always been effortless, natural as breathing—skin to fur, human to snow leopard in the space between heartbeats. My massive leopard form explodes into being, frost-white fur marked with darker rosettes, muscles coiled and ready. The cold doesn’t touch me; it never has. Ice is my element, my birthright.
My magic flares without conscious thought, coating the metal stairs in treacherous ice, making the footing lethal. The bear-wolf slips, crashes, but recovers with disturbing coordination given its mismatched limbs.
I meet it with claws and frost-enhanced fury.
The impact drives us both into the wall. My jaws clamp down on what should be throat but feels all wrong, its tissue too thick, its bones misaligned. The creature screams, a sound that’scaught between animal roar and human agony, and claws down my side.
Pain lances through me, but I hold my grip, shaking my head violently to tear flesh. Behind me, I’m aware of Lyra fighting. Light explodes in controlled bursts, precise strikes that target nerve clusters, disrupting motor function in the lynx-hybrid trying to flank us.
The wolf-eagle thing launches itself at my back with those horrible human arms reaching to grab, to hold, to?—
Lyra’s healing light flares so bright I see it even with my attention focused on the bear-wolf. The blast hits the wolf-eagle mid-leap, and it crashes to the stairs with a shriek. Not killed, As a healer, Lyra can’t bring herself to kill even twisted things like these, but it is stunned, and temporarily incapacitated.
I finish the bear-wolf with a brutal twist, feeling something vital tear. It collapses, chest still moving, but no longer a threat. I spin immediately to assess?—
The lynx-hybrid has recovered from Lyra’s neural strike. It moves with terrible speed despite its backwards-bent legs, launching itself not at me but at her. At Lyra, who’s focused on keeping the wolf-eagle down, who doesn’t see it coming?—
“LYRA!”
I lunge, not thinking, just moving. I’m fast. We Mountain Cats are built for explosive speed, but I am not fast enough. The hybrid’s claws extend, four inches of twisted keratin aimed at her throat, at her chest, at?—
I hit her from the side, knocking her clear. Feel claws rake across my ribs, my shoulder, deep furrows that burn like acid. The hybrid’s toxin, the same thing that made it what it is, floods into my system through the wounds.
Falling. I’m falling, and shifting, human form returning without my conscious choice as my magic destabilizes. I hit the floor hard, blood already soaking through my shirt. My shoulderscreams, ribs on fire, and underneath the pain I feel something worse—wrongness spreading through my veins like poison.
“Magnus!”
