“Nathaniel is thinking about blowing the bomb before I get there. He’s convinced the bomber is trying to kill me with my two cats, so I’ll die for sure.”
“Probably true,” Nicky said in a very matter-of-fact voice. I could almost picture the smile on his face: pleasant, unreadable.
I thought at Nathaniel, thought hard, Don’t you dare!
The bomber screamed, “What is that? If you shift, you die!”
“The energy in here just spiked. We’re all nervous enough that our human friend here felt it.” It was his way of warning me off.
The bomber was more sensitive than I’d hoped. Damn it!
“Where are you?” Nicky asked.
“Just down the road,” I said.
“Traffic sucks, huh?”
“You don’t want me to come inside,” I said.
“No.”
“You think he’ll blow it as soon as I step inside?”
“I think so.”
“Crap.”
“Yes.”
“Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Not sure that’s a good idea.”
The bomber started screaming, “Tell her she has ten minutes, that’s it, that’s it!”
“Hear that?” Nicky asked.
“I heard. Tell him thirty,” I said.
“I’ll try.” He hung up.
“Tell us what’s happening,” Hill said.
I told them where everyone was, and that the bomber’s nerve seemed to be failing him. “He’s starting to panic.”
“If it weren’t a dead man’s switch that’d be good news,” Hill said.
“How quick are Nathaniel’s reaction times?” Zerbrowski asked.
I glanced at him. “Fast.”
“Faster than you were in the warehouse when you stopped Billings from hitting the kid vampire?”
I thought about that. “Yes, he’s faster. They all are.”
“Everyone in there?” Zerbrowski asked.
I nodded.
Claudia said, “Anita’s fast, but she’s not as fast we are.”
“She’s still human,” Pride said.
“What are you thinking?” I asked Zerbrowski.
“I think your boyfriend is right. I think this guy will blow you and them up as soon as he thinks you’re close enough to die with him.”
“Not helpful,” I said.
“Hear me out. There was a group of men playing ball in Israel when a guy in a bomber vest with a dead man’s switch came in; they jumped him, held his hand pressed on the button until the police got there and shot the bomber.”
“He’s human,” Dolph said, “you can’t just kill him.”
“He’s a human involved with the group that killed two cops. Anita’s warrant of execution allows her to kill anyone who is involved in the crime that the warrant pertains to.”
“That’s when you’re on an active hunt,” Dolph said. “It was never intended to allow a police officer to shoot a human being in cold blood.”
“If it was your wife with an arm around her neck and a bomb pressed to her back, would you be shooting in cold blood?” I asked.
“No,” he said, finally.
“Wait,” Hill said, “you’re saying we let Anita go in there, and hope that all of them figure out that they’re supposed to jump the bastard and hold him until we get in and kill him?”
“Yeah,” Zerbrowski said.
“Nathaniel isn’t trained in hand-to-hand combat,” Claudia said.
“Dev and Nicky are,” Pride said, “and Sin isn’t bad for a beginner, and he’s wicked fast.”
My pulse was in my throat again, but my skin was cold in the sunshine. “I can ‘tell’ three of them what we plan to do.” I made air quotes for the tell part.
“Nicky’s good,” Claudia said, “he’ll move when they do.”
“You mean when I do,” I said.
“He’s human with a couple of vampire bites on him,” Pride said. “He won’t be stronger than Nathaniel, Sin, Dev, and Nicky.”
“You’re saying I won’t get a piece of him?”
“You won’t need to grab him,” Pride said.
“I don’t understand.”
Bram spoke for the first time. “He means you get to blow his brains out so that he can’t set off the bomb.”
Dolph shook his head. “I’m not sure this is legal.”
“I’ve read those warrants backward and forward,” Zerbrowski said, “it’s legal by the letter of the law, and there’s no trial to worry about, because once a warrant is executed it’s done.”
We all looked at each other.
“I don’t like the idea of you going in there alone,” Hill said.
“He never said no police,” I said.
Hill smiled, and it was a fierce flash of teeth, like showing fangs. “Then I got your back.”
“We,” Killian said, “we got her back.”
And that was what we did. I let Nathaniel and the others know what I needed them to do. I trusted that Nicky would move when Nathaniel did, and I bet his life on his speed and ability to wrestle the bomber long enough for the others to cross the room and help him. They just needed to wait, and then I’d be in the room with full SWAT backup. It all depended on Nathaniel using that same hand-eye coordination and speed that made him so amazing on the dance floor, in the gym, at the shooting range, to keep the bomber’s hand pressed tight to the switch. That was all he had to do, and then the others would be there, and they’d pile on top of the bomber… and either they’d have him safe until we got there to finish it, or they’d all blow up together. As plans went, I’d heard better, but Hill, Killian, and the rest were willing to walk in with me. They were willing to trust that if I believed the loves of my life could do this, then they could. I trusted the men in my life, and Hill, Killian, Derry, and the rest, trusted me. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
48
I HAD TO keep my face uncovered so the bomber would be certain I was actually one of the heavily armed people about to come through the door, but other than that I geared up as if it were any other monster hunt. In a way it was, it was just part of an ongoing vampire hunt. I let myself fall into the rhythm of moving with the men in that shuffling movement that looked like it should be slow and awkward, but was anything but.
We were almost there, almost at the door I’d gone through a hundred times, a thousand times. I dropped my shields just enough to let Nathaniel “see” me above him. I was careful to stay further away psychically than I had before, because he needed to be as fast and smooth as only he could be, and I needed to move with precision with the men around me. We both had our jobs, our strengths, and we needed them now. I let Nathaniel know we were coming through the door, and then I cut ties, so everyone was alone in their heads. So, when Derry pushed the door open, and we slipped through in a wedge, the only way I knew Nathaniel hadn’t fumbled the first grab was that nothing blew up. In fact, it took a second for our eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior, to find that all the men were in a pile on the far side of the room. They had dog-piled the bomber.
I ran, I ran the way I had in the warehouse, except this time I wasn’t moving to save some stranger from getting hit. I was moving to get to the men I loved, before the man they were struggling with could blow them up. I was across the room, above the pile of them before I’d had time to think. It was like magic, even to me, that I was just suddenly looking down at Nicky’s broad back, his one big hand wrapped around everyone else’s, like a desperate game of top-of-the-baseball-bat, Dev wrapping himself around the bomber, pinning him to the wall, his hand underneath Nicky’s, Sin with his arms around the man’s waist like he’d tried to tackle him, and Nathaniel with his hands around the man’s one hand, his hair in its braid and the muscles of his shoulders showing through the edges of the cut tank top, and the man’s face that I’d seen only through their eyes until that moment, as he looked wide-eyed at me. He had time to yell, “No!” Then I shot him through the forehead, just above his eyebrows. Blood and thicker things exploded out the back of his head, but the entry hole was small, neat even. I put another bullet beside the first one, and the back of his head was just not there anymore. His eyes rolled upward, and now all we had to do was hold on until the bomb techs got inside and told us we could let go.