Emberclaw Protocol

Chapter 4: Embrace of Thorns

Cole's blood dripped on Erin's wrist, melting the snow. They gasped at the top of the abandoned observatory, the northern lights streaming through the shattered dome over his mechanical heart. Erin's scalpel jammed between the gears, the blade reflecting the overlapping silhouettes of the two men.

"Your heart rate is off." She tugged at Cole's blood-soaked shirt and ran her fingertips over the bullet hole in his chest, "Mechanical ventricles mimicking human emotional fluctuations?"

Cole suddenly took her hand and pressed it to his left breast, a disorganized tremor coming from beneath the artificial skin, "This holds the wedding ring I retrieved from the crash site three years ago." Half of the ring popped out of his chest at the sound of gears turning, "I embedded it in the power core the night you threw it back in Kayden's face."

Erin's tweezers dangled above the ring holder. The inner ring inscription was visible in the moonlight - not a curse, but a nanoscale equation, "This is the algorithm for immortality from the Wolf Canon..."

Before the words left his mouth, Cole rolled over and pinned her to the observatory. His mechanical tail wrapped around her ankles and his breath smelled minty of coolant, "Kayden's bullets are coated with silver-eating bacteria, and my systems are crashing." He yanked the black cord around his neck and the wolf's tooth pendant slipped into her palm, "Now you have two choices, Ms. Forensics."

Erin cut her fingertip with the pendant and beads of blood dripped into the bullet hole in his chest, "Or create a third option." The moment her blood came into contact with the mechanical heart, the holy tattoo on Cole's back suddenly glowed with emerald fluorescence.

The northern lights suddenly strengthened, and the star atlas spun automatically. The golden lines in Cole's pupils resonated with the brand on the back of Erin's neck, and fragments of memories cut through the sea of consciousness like meteors - the stormy night twenty years ago, the little girl pressing her blood-stained hand against the coyote's oozing right eye.

"It's you..." Cole's mechanical fingers brushed her collarbone, "The little saintly girl who sang me a requiem in the lab."

Erin's scalpel suddenly stabbed into her own shoulder, the bloodstained blade plunging into the interface of Cole's spine, "Now it's your turn to sing to me." She gasped as she activated the neural splice program, "Kayden has implanted a locator chip in my bone marrow and is twenty minutes away from..."

Cole pulled the blade out with his canine teeth, his tongue licking away the blood from her wound, "Then let them have a good show." He suddenly ripped the chains from the observatory and the rusty gear set came crashing down, forming a barrier in the stairwell.

As the footsteps of his pursuers approached, Cole pulled the spare energy tube from the astrogator. In a ghostly blue glow, he unwrapped the mechanical heart's casing and pressed Erin's hand to the beating core, "The key to the immortality algorithm is your brainwave frequency, which is the real reason Kayden is after you."

Erin's lashes swept across his chin, "So three years ago you broke into my dissecting room..."

"It's to make sure your memories were actually erased." Cole tugged at the back of her collar, the holy tattoos were absorbing the moonlight, "The Elders erased all of your memories of the Altar..."

The sound of blasting interrupts the confession. Kayden's drone crashes through the glass dome, and Erin clasps the back of Cole's neck and kisses him in the smoke. Her blood seeps into the crevices of his lips, and the mechanical heart suddenly bursts into a rainbow of light - the astrograph projects a holographic map of the entire city, each point of light a werewolf implanted with a microchip.

"Surprise?" Kaiden's voice came out of the drone, "Your saliva exchange earlier activated the final protocol..."

Cole suddenly rips off his mechanical right arm, revealing flesh and blood crawling with glowing lines. He hurled the severed arm at the drone, and the EMP wave caused the lights throughout the observatory to plummet. In the darkness, Erin felt his real body heat against her back.

"Remember this feeling." Cole bit through her earlobe and circled the nano-ring into her ring finger, "My genetic lock is open only to you." His palm covered her heart, their heartbeats synchronized in the darkness, "Now you are my eternal algorithm."

The moment the pursuers crashed through the steel door, Erin tugged Cole into a leap for the astrograph. As they plummeted through the c***k in the glass dome, Cole wrapped his tail around her waist, his one eye soft and terrifying in the moonlight, "Scared?"

Erin pressed the bloodstained wedding ring into his palm, "More than anything, I'm afraid you can't act out this elopement." She shot her silver crossbow backhandedly, the arrow nailing into the building across the street with a steel cable. The moment they swing in the night wind, Cole suddenly takes her lips and ferries the activation key for the mechanical heart into her mouth.

Kaiden's roar came from high above, "That's my bride!"

"Now it's a defector." Erin gave the helicopter the middle finger, and the instant the steel cable snapped, Cole carried her down into the fountain pool. The vibratory frequency of his mechanical heart was resonating with the holy tattoo around her neck as the curtain of water fell.

They kissed in the floating splash, Cole's blood-stained silver hair tangling around her fingertips. Erin bit open the hidden compartment at his collarbone and removed the last three capsules, "When your father remodeled you..."

"Left the backdoor program in place." Cole smiled softly against her forehead, "As long as the Virgin's blood touches the core for more than three minutes..."

The entire city's wolf howls suddenly turned into cheers. Holographic projections bloomed in the night sky, and all the controlled werewolf chips were disabled at the same time. Erin looked at her reflection in the water, the holy tattoo was growing along her spine in the shape of a feather.

"It's a courtship mark." Cole licked the droplets off her lashes, "Werewolves only manifest once in their lives..."

Erin wrapped a steel cable around his wrist and yanked it toward her, "Then you'll have to hurry up and propose."

The words shattered with the sudden sharp pain that stabbed into his chest. Kaiden's underwater drone extended its mechanical tentacles, and Erin shoved three capsules into Cole's mechanical heart before her consciousness blurred, "Activate... Nirvana Protocol..."

Cole's golden pupils suddenly turned blood red. He tore his tentacles apart and picked up Erin, his mechanical feathers piercing his back, "Grab my horns." As he fully animalized into a giant silver wolf in the moonlight, Erin realized that the pair of horns were the very pointers that the astrograph had lost.

As they skimmed over the city, the holy tattoo on Erin's wrist began to glow. Cole's voice rang directly in her head, "Ready to become a true Wolf Queen?"

She tugged on his ear and laughed softly, "Fix your father first."

"As ordered." The giant wolf suddenly swooped down to the clock tower atop City Hall, "But before the regicide..." The pendulum swung into the shadows as he shifted back to his human form to crush her between the gear sets, "Shouldn't the bride collect a deposit?"

The moment Kayden's bullet shattered the glass, Cole kissed her glowing sacred tattoo. The bells across the city suddenly chimed in unison, and Erin's pupils floated to the ancient totems of the Wolf Clan. As the clock strikes twelve, they hear each other's true heartbeats in the broken moonlight.