“Give her some breathing room, Mitch.”
The sight of lingering terror in his sister’s eyes added layers of guilt and stopped him. He pulled the blanket she already held around her shoulders tighter at the neck. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she breathed the word, creating a puff of mist. “Thanks for watching out for Kat and Mateo.”
“That credit belongs to Halina and Dex.” Mitch gave her another squeeze before pulling away. “Go. Get warm with the kids.”
She lifted a hand to touch his face but winced when she couldn’t find anywhere to put it. “Take it easy on Halina. And let Teague take care of these cuts. Otherwise I’ll be coming at you with a needle and thread.”
Mitch winced, which made a smile twitch at her lips and eased his concern. Alyssa disappeared into the basement. Halina had long since disappeared into the bathroom down the hall. Mitch stared down the dark stretch, not sure what to do.
“I won’t get cut, you will.” Luke’s irritable voice drew Mitch’s gaze to the living room, where Luke had grabbed Keira’s hands in the act of picking up a large piece of glass. “Go make sure all the glass is out of your skin. Then check the others.”
Luke released her and carelessly scooped pile after pile of razor-sharp glass into a corner with his bare hands, never receiving a nick. Mitch hadn’t expected Luke to be harmed because of his ability, but Keira and Kai looked pretty good too, only minor abrasions bloodying their arms and faces. They’d been shielded at the dining room table by the angle of the shots and direction of shattering glass. He glanced back at the window, then at the destruction around him.
He was trying to kill you to make me cave.
Mitch couldn’t deny he’d been the target. It certainly hadn’t been Kat or Mateo.
He grabbed jackets from the hall tree and returned to toss them to Luke, who distributed them to Teague, Kai, and Keira. Mitch couldn’t throw one on with all the glass still stabbing his skin, but he pulled out a space heater from the office, faced it toward the dining room table, and turned it on.
Quaid, along with a couple of the security guards, had already set up ladders against the house and created a pulley system with ropes from the eaves. They raised and covered the gaping openings with sheets of plywood.
The cold wouldn’t be rushing in for long. But Mitch moved to the fireplace and stuffed it with three more chunks of oak anyway. The skin of his arms and back pulled and he swore. A headache pressed behind his eyes and pain nudged at the back of his skull, making him realize for the first time that he’d probably hit his head sometime during that fiasco.
“Let me work on your back.” Teague’s voice brought Mitch’s gaze around from the fireplace. His brother-in-law stood there in his thick parka, his face pinched with barely contained fury. “It’s pretty bad.”
“Dude, go downstairs with Alyssa and the kids.”
Cash opened the door leading up from the basement. “No, don’t go downstairs. Alyssa just kicked me out. Said I was hovering .”
Teague made a told-you face and gestured to Cash, who took a seat at the table where Teague had set a large first-aid kit. Cash watched Keira wiggle a piece of glass from Kai’s bicep.
“I’m getting sick and fucking tired of these assholes,” Kai muttered, grimacing. “The whole lot of them.”
With the adrenaline wearing off, every inch of Mitch’s skin burned. He looked down at his arms and found his white shirt covered in blood. Had that been the reason for Halina’s frantic response to his white shirts?
The memory sent a shiver through his body.
Mitch wandered over to the table and dropped into a chair. He pulled his arm slowly out of his shirt. The action tugged glass from his skin and made it feel as if he were being ripped apart. He swore and paused a few times to breathe through the pain. And to thank God over and over that he’d gotten the brunt of the glass, not Kat. Not Mateo. Not Dex. Not Halina.
Luke sat in front of Keira, cleaning a cut on her temple, while Keira complained over his fussing, but never moved away. Mitch wished Halina had let him fuss over her. At the other end of the table, Teague started on Mitch’s remaining projectiles with long-handled tweezers.
Mitch’s mind and heart needed relief. Just a few moments of relief. He tried to let his mind go while Teague tugged and tore at his skin. Tried to keep it bent away from the life-altering moment they’d all just shared. Keep it from drifting toward what everyone could have lost. It wasn’t easy. Especially with Teague reminding him.
“Thanks for covering Kat, man,” Teague said. “I . . . don’t know . . .” He shook his head, his normally bright blue eyes deep gray with the almost-terror of what could have happened to his daughter.
“That was all Halina,” he murmured, letting the thought swirl in his mind until it found a place to land. “Halina and Dex.”
Quaid came in the front door, shaking off snow in the foyer, but kept his parka on. “Where’s Jess?”
His presence made Mitch realize how fucking cold he was in the house.
“Downstairs with the kids,” Teague said.
“Oh, sure.” Cash swabbed at Kai’s cuts with hydrogen peroxide. “She lets Jess stay, but I hover.”
Quaid’s mouth turned up in a half grin as he sat at the table in front of his project. A small knife, leather cord, and other supplies were laid out, and Quaid picked up a round piece that had been carved of material the same deep russet and bone color as the rest. But this had been honed into a circle, with another circle removed from the center so it was basically a flat ring.
“The guys split up,” Quaid said. “A few went to search the sniper’s location for evidence. The others are reinforcing and securing the plywood and checking the perimeter. They called in another half dozen for duty. With dogs.”
“Thanks, bud,” Teague said, tone flat, exhausted.
Mitch pointed at the shattered mess in front of Quaid. “What’s—?”
He flinched, cutting off his words, and darted a scowl over his shoulder at Teague. “Perfect opportunity to get back at me for all those jailbird comments, huh?”
Teague lifted his brows. “Hadn’t thought of that, but now that you mention it . . .”
He tugged another shard of glass from Mitch’s shoulder blade and pain sliced down Mitch’s spine. He swore and turned his gaze back to the ring-shaped thing Quaid was messing with. “What’s that?”
“I’m hoping,” Quaid said, wrapping copper wire around one third of the piece, “this will become a haven for Halina.”
“How?”
“This,” Quaid said, touching the material of the ring, then gesturing toward the mess of pieces beside it, “is part of that ferrite bead. It’s one of those ceramic things you see on top of telephone poles that wires run through.”
Teague worked at a particular deep piece of glass in the back of Mitch’s arm and Mitch kept flinching every time it hit a nerve. “Where’d you get that?”
“He climbed up the damn pole with that fucking hammer,” Kai said. “Dumbshit. I had visions of that metal head hitting those charged lines. I told him to let Ransom do it. Was hoping we could finally find a way to tap out a few of his snarky brain cells. But noooo,” he sang toward Quaid. “You never did listen to me.”
Quaid grinned, tying a black leather cord to the ring, and looked at Mitch. “The ceramic material acts as a damper or a choke for electromagnetic signals, absorbing them to some degree, which is why they use them on the telephone lines, to limit interference. This wire,” he pointed to the copper, “is a conduit. A way for her—when she develops the skill—to direct the stored energy, to either dissipate the heat or send it.”