Carolina Moon

The Lion’s Den: Tess

“Tess…I love you,” K.C.’s voice rang in my ear.

The line went dead even as I screamed his name. “K.C., no! You can’t-“ I was cut off by the static ringing. I was left feeling hollow and shaken. I didn’t have time for a breakdown, but that didn’t stop me from screaming and slamming my fist against the dashboard. I tried to reconnect, but there was nothing except static.

I sniffled as I pressed myself back against the seat. I blinked away the tears that were stinging my eyes. “He’s doing his job,” I told myself, my voice as shaky as the breath I sucked in. I looked at Leon. He was quiet as he navigated the streets with the speed of a madman. “Now I have to do mine.”

We didn’t pull up to the front. Instead, Leon killed the lights and coasted into a dark alleyway behind the substation. I could feel the energy humming in the air, even before we got out of the car.

The purple glow above the building was terrifying. It wasn’t just a light, it was ionized air that caused even the chain-link fence to shake. The Grid-Keepers were pushing the capacitors to a breaking point to ensure the pulse blanketed the entire county.

Leon didn’t say a word as he handed me a sidearm and gestured. I nodded, and then hung back, triggering the remote detonator for the smelting plant while he took out the rear guard with a clinical efficiency. I wasn’t a soldier, but I held onto the weapon like it was a lifetime, my knuckles turning white as I clutched the cold metal in my terrified grip. I followed him through a side maintenance door, letting him lead the way through the building.

The inside of the substation was a terrifying nightmare of sparking wires and high tech cooling units. In the center of the main room, three men in grey tactical gear sat hunched over a master console. I assumed these were the Grid-Keepers “Regulators.”

I once again stood back as Leon created a distraction, moving through the shadows and behind a metal shelving unit as he drew gunfire from two of the guards to himself. I moved through the shadows in the opposite direction, keeping close to the master transformers. I could see the master override switch, but it was locked behind a physical biometric scanner.

I looked at my watch. The timer for the smelting plant should’ve been hitting its final thirty seconds. The green loop I had sent to the plant was already beginning to feedback into the substation’s receivers.

I wasn’t going to have time to hack the substation’s biometric scanner. I wasn’t even sure that I could. I was an auditor-turned-retail-manager, not a cyber specialist. Were it not for Leon’s technology, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go half of what I had so far.

Instead, I set the gun down on the floor beside me, and hardwired my laptop into a cooling vent’s logic board. If the smelting plant was about to blow, it was going to send a massive surge of power back through the lines. The substation was designed to absorb that power for the pulse. I needed to find a way to reverse the polarity of the intake valves.

The moment of truth was being closer. 00:05… 00:04… I could see the lead Grid-Keeper and the moment he realized their machinery was being tampered with. He leveled a sidearm at me. I glanced at my own gun on the floor, I didn’t know how to shoot it anyways. My eyes met his again, and I hit the execute command just as the white light of the smelting plant’s explosion reflected in the substation’s high windows.

The feedback loop from the plant hit my reversed valves, and the entire building’s electrical system fried in a shower of sparks. The substation didn’t pulse out. Instead, the building started to shake. It was imploding.

The lead Grid-Keeper was thrown back by the console’s explosion, causing the shot that he fired to zoom past me, just inches from my head. I fell flat on the floor, my ears ringing as my laptop became a melted hunk of plastic. In the sudden, absolute darkness of the dying building, I crawled toward the door.

I didn’t care about the Grid-Keepers. I just needed to get to the street. I needed to know if the man who told me he loved me was still alive.

With the exception of crumbling, falling cement, and the electrical frying of the technology around me, the building was silent. I heard a sudden, ragged coughing in the dark. “Leon?” I called out, my voice thick as I choked on the falling dust. I was either making myself a target in the dark, or I was giving Leon a point to focus on. The building was collapsing fast, and we needed to get out.

“Tess!” Leon’s voice was a rough rasp, barely audible over the groaning steel. A heavy hand grabbed the back of my jacket, hauling me to my feet with a strength that only a werewolf could muster after being tossed through a wall. “The back exit, now!”

We scrambled through the settling dust. The floor beneath our feet shook with the final, dying shudders of the substation’s core. Behind us, the master console erupted in a secondary geyser of blue sparks. The grey tactical gear of a fallen Regulator was lit up for a split-second before the ceiling finally caved in.

The humid Florida air hit me like a physical blessing as we stumbled out of the service door and into the alley just before the second floor fell into the first floor of the building. I didn’t stop running, even as we hit the street. My legs burned and my vision was swimming with spots from the flash of the explosion.

I turned towards the river. The skyline of Kingsport was a jagged silhouette of black. The city was dark. No blue pulses. No static. No grid.

“Look,” Leon breathed as he stopped behind me. He pointed over my shoulder in the direction of the smelting plant. A massive, orange glow dominated the horizon. The smelting plant was now a beautiful, terrifying funeral pyre.

“K.C.,” I whispered, my heart doing a slow, painful roll in my chest.

I didn’t wait for Leon to tell me it was too dangerous. I didn’t wait for a tactical plan. I started running toward the glow, my combat boots slapping against the asphalt of the empty streets with a sting that I felt in my shins.

My mind was a frantic loop of K.C.’s last words. He had loved me in the classroom. He had loved me when I was trapped in that penthouse, and he had loved me in the marsh. I hadn’t said it back. Not tonight. Not when it mattered.

It felt like I ran for miles. I could hear the sirens wailing in the distance, the fire trucks coming to put out the flames before they could spread through the city. I didn’t stop though.

I rounded the corner onto a service road, and was hit with a shimmering wall of heat that smelled of melted copper and scorched earth. The smelting plant was already a skeleton of blackened girders.

“K.C.!” I screamed, my voice cracking as it was drowned out by the roar of the fire. “Kayvan!”

Through the haze of smoke and the flickering orange light of the fire, I saw movement near the tree line. Several figures were hunched over shifting silhouettes in the dark.

I saw Marcus first. His shirt was torn and his shoulder was a bloody mess. He leaned against a tree. Then a few yards away, I saw a large, dark shape in the grass.

My knees went weak. I stumbled, my hands hitting the pavement as I scrambled forward. The shape moved. A low, pained groan echoed through the air. A sound that was half-man, half-wolf.

I reached him, just as he pulled himself upright. He was covered in soot, his shirt mostly burned away from the explosion. His skin was mapped with angry red splotches. But his eyes — those honey brown eyes — were wide open.

“Tess?” he croaked, his voice sounding like it had been dragged through the very fire behind us.

I didn’t say a word. I threw my arms around his neck burying my face in the crook of his shoulder. He winced, his breath hitching. His arms came around me though, locking me against him with a desperation that told me the Alpha had finally let go.

“I love you too,” I whispered against the heat of his skin. “I’ve always loved you.”