The weight lifted off the door. The stairwell went silent in a way that made your skin not fit and the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up.
Elias swallowed. "It’s thinking."
"Not helpful," Lachlan muttered, but his eyes went flat and serious.
The thing moved again—up, not away. Claws on concrete, steady, confident. It hit their landing door with a test: a low, slow press, mouth to seam. The air it pulled through slled like blood and lemon leaves and rotten at.
The seal moaned in the kitchen and tried to climb the cabinet again. Sera moved without looking at it and planted a palm on its skull. It went still without aning to.
"You open," she told Alexei, quiet and sharp.
Zubair cut her a look that would have stopped most n in mid-step. She didn’t blink.
"We hold the door or we fight the door," she added, voice level. "Pick the ground."
Zubair’s jaw worked once. He didn’t like choosing between bad and worse. He did it anyway. "On ," he decided. "We open. We pull the door in. We take the hit here, not in the fra. At the end of the day, we need a door."
"Not if we’re dead, we don’t," pointed out Alexei.
"Count," Lachlan groaned.
"Three," Zubair gave, already setting his feet.
"Two."
"One."
Alexei ripped the latch and yanked the door inward.
The stairwell filled.
Not with air. With a head.
White fur matted to gray where lt had run. Ears flattened. Eyes black as pits.
The skull too big for any wolf Elias had ever seen, jaw built like a hinge for tearing seals off ice.
The ceiling forced it down; the width of its chest made the doorway a choke point. It tried to snarl and the sound couldn’t find enough room.
"Now," Zubair barked.
The room erupted.
Two rifles and a pistol hamred the face and chest in controlled bursts—Zubair center line, Lachlan high, Alexei low. Muzzle flash lit fur and teeth. The rounds buried into a coat so dense the animal barely flinched.
Blood didn’t fly. It sneezed a clotted spray and shoved forward as if the shots ant less than weather.
"Back!" Zubair snapped.
The beast wedged its shoulders through the fra, claws biting tile, head thrusting toward the warm and the bleeding. Elias aid for the eye, squeezed twice, watched the rounds glance on bone at a bad angle and vanish in fur. The recoil punished his wrists. He adjusted by instinct, moved to the hinge of the jaw, fired again.
The wolf—if that word still ant anything—hit the flipped couch and shoved it aside with a lazy heave.
The seal scread, pure animal terror, and thrashed. Sera stepped left as if the whole scene obeyed choreography she understood and put herself between the animal and the greenhouse door.
"Spread," Zubair barked, dragging the thing’s attention off the kitchen.
Alexei shifted right, firing on the move. Lachlan moved left, stock tight to shoulder. Elias reloaded badly and hated the tremor in his thumb, slamd the mag ho anyway and kept the barrel up.
The wolf lunged.
Sera didn’t move.
At the last second it cut toward the louder threat—Lachlan. He t it half a step before it got to him. His skin flushed dark and then blue, the whites gone out of his eyes like soone had blown the lamps. Nails lengthened to the kind of hook that rips. He went in low for the throat the way he had done in alleys before the world ended.
He hit like a man and a thing. The wolf hit back like a wall.
They crashed into the dining table. Wood exploded in all directions.
Lachlan’s talons raked fur and found skin, left shallow furrows that closed with heat and fat. The wolf shrugged him off with a whip of its head and ca around faster than the room allowed for.
"Move!" Elias shouted without aning to, and then the wolf was on him.
He got an arm up where a throat would have been. Teeth t forearm instead. Pressure found bone and tried to solve it.
The sound he made belonged to the part of a man that isn’t civilized. Zubair was there in the sa breath, muzzle jamd to ear, firing point-blank. The shot rang in the animal’s skull and made it blink. It did not let go.
Sera’s creature rolled up her spine and made her vision narrower than a rifle barrel.
"I’ve had enough," she told it. It had been waiting for that word.
The storm scread.
The wolf dragged Elias backward, front paws scrabbling for purchase in the blood that slicked the floor.
Zubair put two rounds into the hinge of the jaw, trying for the nerve. Alexei slashed at the eye with a knife and got eyelid and nothing else. Lachlan launched again, blue and wrong and magnificent, clamped on a back leg and pulled with everything in him. The leg ca half an inch.
And it still wasn’t enough.
Sera moved.
She did not draw steel.
She crossed the room in three steps, hands bare, grabbed the wolf’s jaw at the back where fur thins and nerve runs close, and shoved two fingers into the corner of its mouth.
It tried to wrench away. She went with it, pivoted, drove its head into the edge of the broken table with a crack. Its teeth released Elias a fraction and that fraction was the difference between an arm and a stump.
"Down," she breathed into its ear.
Sothing in the animal—instinct or fear—hesitated.
Zubair took the mont and hauled Elias clear. Blood sheeted to the floor. Alexei caught the dic’s weight and shoved him toward the stove. Lachlan lost his grip and hit the tile shoulder-first, rolled, ca up feral-eyed.
The wolf shook its head and ca back angrier.
Sera didn’t give it space.
She jamd her hand deeper into its mouth, past the hinge, fingers finding the soft where even thick animals are thin, and ripped sideways. The jaw popped. Cartilage tore. The beast shrieked—no longer bored, no longer unbothered.
It lurched to bite and its mouth wouldn’t close right.
"Now," she snarled.
The room hit it as one—Zubair’s barrel under the tongue, Alexei’s knife in the ruined eye, Lachlan’s talons in the tendons of the foreleg. The animal folded toward the pain.
Sera finished it the way a thing finishes another thing: quick, brutal, efficient.
And when it stopped moving, the storm outside was sohow louder.
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