My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 165: My Pack Put a God-Piece Back in Its Grave in Front of Everyone Who Buried Us

The link gave on the fourth stroke.

Soren heard it go, a clean metal note under the hall’s noise, and the fragment’s front limb came free of the serviced chain with a slowness that said it had all the time in the world and knew it.

The limb rose. The eyeless head rose with it.

Forty feet of reception hall between the broken square and the last guests wedged at the west doors, and the thing in the ground had just bought itself an arm.

"Selah, cage. Maren, shepherd. Grimm..."

The wolf was already moving.

◆◆◆◆

Selah stood up off her knee and walked toward the opening.

Walked. Into the cold coming off a primordial piece, palms out, and the frost poured up her arms and off her fingers in columns, and she raised a ring of ice around the broken square that went from floor to nothing in under a breath, a white cylinder with the fragment inside it and her body as the only pump feeding it.

The fragment put its free limb through the wall.

The wall closed behind the limb and held at the shoulder, and Selah’s breath went ragged and the ice thickened where it gripped, and she looked at the trapped limb with the face she used on badly carved swans.

"You don’t get the room," she said.

Maren hit the limb with fire.

Not to burn it. Shadow that old didn’t burn, everyone in the hall who’d read a primer knew shadow that old didn’t burn, so Maren didn’t try.

She laid the flame along the floor under the limb in a moving carpet, heat the thing didn’t want to rest on, and the limb lifted off the tile and pulled back toward the only cool ground left, which was the opening it had come out of.

She was herding it. Fire as a sheepdog, driving a god-piece toward its own grave one uncomfortable yard at a time.

The crowd at the doors had stopped screaming.

Soren clocked it without turning.

Three hundred people who should have been gone were packed in the doorways watching, and the delegation grays had the best view, and somewhere in the gallery a feed was running because a feed was always running.

Fine.

They’d built the festival to measure Class Z in public.

Let them measure.

◆◆◆◆

Grimm went into the cylinder through her own shadow.

One second she was beside Selah’s boot, the next the dark inside the ice ring had more wolf in it than it should hold, and she came up under the fragment’s half-made head with her hackles full and her shut eyes aimed at the center of it.

The fragment struck at her.

She wasn’t where it struck. She was on its shoulder, then inside the joint of it, moving through the thing’s own substance in ways the thing did not appear to enjoy, and every piece of loose shadow her body touched stopped being the fragment’s shadow and started being hers.

That was the part Soren filed.

Not that she fought it. That she took it. Fistfuls of the fragment’s own mass peeled off under her and swung to her side of the fight, and the shadow did not resist her claim, did not contest it, did not even hesitate the polite half-second a stolen thing hesitates.

It obeyed her the second she reached for it.

It obeyed too fast.

He put it on the count, right under the oiled chains, and he kept feeding the channels because the fight wasn’t done and the count could wait.

◆◆◆◆

The cost came due all at once.

Three channels wide open, ice and fire and shadow all drawing through him at combat load, and something at the middle of Soren thinned again, no meter for it, no number, just the specific hollowing behind the sternum that meant the wire was carrying more than the wire.

His nose bled. He wiped it before the doorway crowd could see and kept his feet planted and his face bored.

The bored face was for the delegates.

The blood was the price of the bored face.

Grimm drove the fragment’s head down into the opening. Maren’s fire carpet rolled forward and took the last cool floor away. Selah walked her ice cylinder inward a yard at a time, the walls contracting, and the fragment folded back into the dark under the reception hall one limb at a time, hauled by a wolf who owned more of it every second.

The broken halves of the exhibition square were still tilted into the pit.

Selah sealed them.

She knelt at the seam with both palms down and poured everything left in her arms across the split, and the ice went down into it, filling, packing, a plug of white a body-length deep, and the frost climbed her own neck doing it and her lips went the gray-blue they went past her limit.

The floor stopped breathing.

The hall was silent except for one delegate, somewhere in the gray, applauding alone until he understood no one else was going to.

[DING! — Pack bond consolidation under combat load. All channels held. Alignment recommended.]

◆◆◆◆

Soren crossed to Selah and got a hand under her arm before she tried standing on her own, which she would have, which was why he got there first.

"Room temperature," he said. "Now. That’s an order I’ll enjoy."

"The seal needs..."

"The seal will hold until morning. You won’t."

She let him take the weight, which from Selah was a speech.

Maren banked her fire and came in on his other side, ears flat, tail rigid, running hot enough that standing between the two of them was standing in a doorway with winter on one hand and a stove on the other.

"Everyone saw," Maren said.

"Everyone was supposed to see something tonight." He looked at the doorways, at the grays, at the faculty faces doing the fast math of who would answer for a grave under a festival. "They just didn’t get to pick what."

◆◆◆◆

Grimm came out of the pit last.

She rose through the sealed seam’s shadow with the extra mass still on her, bigger than she’d gone in, and she stopped on the ice plug and turned back toward the dark she’d come out of.

Below the plug, through the white, the fragment was still sinking.

It should have been done. It was beaten, herded, dispossessed, and the grave was closing over it, and there was nothing left in the fight for it to spend a motion on.

It spent one anyway.

The eyeless head turned, down there under the ice, all the way around, and aimed itself up through the plug at the wolf standing on it, and held there through the whole slow drop into the dark.

It wasn’t a threat. Soren had been threatened enough in two lives to know the shape of one.

The head tilted.

A slow, deliberate tilt. Recognition. The thing in the grave knew the wolf standing on it.

Grimm stood on the seal with her hackles flat now, very still, shut eyes aimed straight down, and she did not tell Soren what was passing between them, and the bond, which carried her to him every hour of every day, carried him nothing at all.

The fragment sank out of read.

The wolf stayed on the plug a moment longer.

Then she came off it and pressed her head into Soren’s hand, and her body was calm, and the calm was the loudest thing in the hall, because everything else that had touched the fragment tonight had needed to recover from it, and she had needed nothing.