“If the air-filtration system holds up, a week. Months if we had water.” Will thought about the other systems; everything else was in good shape, including their food supply. “Water’s definitely our biggest problem.”
Robbie had a notebook and had been sketching out the Omega floor plan. “Any reason me or Dad couldn’t go out during daylight and bring bottled water back in?”
Will might not be sure of his feelings for Randa’s father, but he liked Robbie a lot. He reminded Will a little of Glory—practical, straight talking, but with a surprising sense of humor. “I think that’s a great idea. You have any objections, Aidan, Mirren?”
Aidan gave Robbie his most serious look. The vampires of the Penton scathe knew to pay close attention when they saw that expression. “You realize we’re putting ourselves at your mercy if we do this. If we give you a key to Omega, it leaves us vulnerable.”
Robbie nodded. “Anything that puts you at risk also puts my sister at risk. I won’t take any chances.” Yep, Will really liked Randa’s brother.
“No key. We leave the steel doors locked,” Mirren said—his first contribution to the discussion. “Rob can take the key to the hatch but not the steel door. He can bring the water to the exit room before dusk, and we’ll open it and let him in immediately after.”
“That acceptable to you?” Aidan looked from the colonel to his son. “I haven’t seen any signs that Matthias has humans working for him, so your risk is minimal. My vampires can’t go out in daylight, but neither can his.”
The colonel nodded at Mirren, and unless Will was mistaken, there was a grudging respect there. Caution recognized its kin.
“Let’s talk strategy, then.” Aidan did his “mayor of Penton” routine, welcoming the visitors, thanking them, apologizing for dragging them into this mess, and acknowledging that he realized the only reason they’d come was because of Randa, who spent a lot of time looking at the floor.
Colonel Thomas cleared his throat. “Rob and I came up with three main options, and of course, you might have more.”
Aidan smiled. “We have three as well, with a lot of variations. Each has its pros and cons. Why don’t you start?”
The colonel rose from his seat and began pacing the length of the walls. Will exchanged an amused look with Randa. If Mirren started his habitual pacing, they’d have either a parade or a collision.
“First option is going public,” the colonel said. “I mean, really public—media public. Get fucking Brian Williams and NBC News down here with a satellite truck.”
Mirren pushed his chair back and fidgeted. The man wanted to pace so badly he was practically twitching. “Won’t work,” he finally said. “Humans would freak. You’d have panic. And if the humans panic, the vampires panic.” A dramatic pause. “You really don’t want that to happen.”
The colonel gave Mirren a half smile. “Exactly the conclusions we came to. It might be a necessary move at some point, but it would require a lot of negotiations, a lot of time. And we need to move quickly before this Matthias guy and your Tribunal strike again.”
“Speaking of which.” The colonel turned and pinned a glare on Will, which Will didn’t like any better coming from him than from Mirren. “Matthias is your father—your human father—but also a vampire?”
Not a father in any way beyond donated genetic material. “He was turned when I was seventeen. He turned me, my mother, and my sister when I was twenty-two. They didn’t survive. I did.” Barely.
“You can’t negotiate your way out of this?”
If he thought that was a possibility, he’d have turned himself in a long time ago. “My father doesn’t negotiate. And my allegiance is with Penton.”
The colonel nodded. “I figured it had gotten past the negotiation stage. Just had to ask.”
Aidan cleared his throat. “Matthias, and a majority faction of the Vampire Tribunal, want Mirren and me dead, so this goes a lot deeper than Will. You should know the charges against us, just so everything’s up front. I illegally turned a woman vampire in January—my mate, Krys. She was dying, attacked by someone Matthias had sent in to kill me, and it was the only way to save her.”
The colonel studied him, then turned to Mirren. “And you?”
“Long story. I killed someone to save my mate—also involved Matthias.” Mirren crossed his arms over his chest and said no more.
“Will?” The colonel paused. “And Randa? Are there charges against you by the Tribunal?”
Will thought about Shelton. He couldn’t exactly blame that death on self-defense, unless belated self-defense was legitimate. But no one had witnessed that, and he wasn’t sure the Tribunal would care once they’d learned Shelton’s history. “We’re clean.”
“Regardless, what we’re saying is that, for Matthias, nothing short of the destruction of this community will be enough,” Aidan said. “We have enough dirt to bring him down if we can get the Tribunal to listen to us without sounding like it’s our word against his, but there are several Tribunal members on the fence. They’re afraid to act until they see who’s most likely to win. And, as you just heard, our hands aren’t completely clean.”
“Sounds like Congress, and most of their hands aren’t clean, either.” The colonel started pacing again. “OK. The next option we came up with was for me to pull one of my special-operations teams together, come into Penton, and help you clean house.”
A growling dissent rose from Mirren’s end of the table. “That’s the most—”
The colonel held up a hand before Mirren could go further. Will looked up and found Robbie biting back a smile. Will wasn’t the only one who thought the colonel and Mirren were cut from the same length of steel pipe.
“Even though we discussed it, I realized this was an unviable solution, Mr. Kincaid. It’s a short-term answer that would lead to more problems. You’d lose whatever support you have within your Tribunal and, ultimately, be in even more danger.”
“It wouldn’t even work if you took control of the Tribunal,” Randa said. “I haven’t been turned that long, but I know that the vampires would band together against a common enemy. Kind of like in the Middle East. The individual countries hate each other, but they all hate us more.”
That made sense. Will couldn’t imagine the Tribunal accepting anything that had been rammed down its throat. Even Meg Lindstrom and Edward Simmons, their greatest allies, wouldn’t go for that. “So what’s left? What’s behind door number three?”
The colonel smiled and propped his hands on the table. “A compromise. Think of it as the Hatfields teaming up with the McCoys.”
Cage studied the faces of his scathemates in the silence following the colonel’s pronouncement. Most of them looked as confused as he felt.
“The Hatfields and McCoys is an old story about two feuding families,” Randa said. “Dad, don’t forget these guys are older than they look. Besides me, the youngest here is Will. Aidan and Mirren have lived more than four centuries. They don’t know the Hatfields and McCoys.”
The colonel stared at Mirren and Aidan with what Cage recognized as fear, even though it was well camouflaged. For the first time, maybe, the colonel realized his daughter’s kind were more than regular guys with fangs. Would it make a difference?
Rick Thomas looked at his daughter and nodded. “It’s a hard concept to wrap my head around. But it doesn’t matter. I have a half-dozen elite teams that plan and execute covert operations, which you suspected. We work mostly for the government, on jobs that never have a paper trail, but we’re an autonomous group. I’m in charge, and Rob’s my second.”
“I joined up five years ago, right before you were killed—changed,” Robbie added.
Cage could tell Randa was torn between being daughter and soldier. Part of her wanted to know why she hadn’t been told the truth, but the soldier in her knew it was safer for everyone.
The Hatfields and McCoys, working together. Cage had judged a lot of military leaders over his life. If anyone cou
ld pull this off, it would be Aidan, Mirren, and the colonel.
“So how would this work?” Aidan leaned back in his chair, his pale-blue eyes fixed on Rick.
“Your Tribunal agrees to work with me to help establish a joint operations team. Let’s call it Omega Force—part human, part vampire. It would be jointly run by me and by your Vampire Tribunal or their representative, assuming you can get their support. Robbie and I had already been thinking about putting an elite team together to handle domestic terrorism threats; they’re growing daily. A human-vampire team would be perfect to do that kind of operation.”
Mirren finally couldn’t stand it any longer and rose to prop himself against the wall. He’d be pacing within fifteen minutes; Cage would bet on it. “What would Omega Force do, and how many humans would you have to involve?” Mirren asked.
“Only the team members would have to know about you. The beauty of it is that my government contacts, mostly army and CIA guys, honestly don’t want to know how I get the jobs done they send my way. That way they can have squeaky-clean hands if a mission goes south. I’d say ten people maximum, including Rob and me.”
Cage listened as the colonel laid out his ideas, and the others contributed suggestions. Gradually, he could see from the animation on everyone’s faces that the idea was taking hold.
He liked it too. The vampires on Omega Force could help with intelligence operations and carry out dangerous nighttime missions where their speed, strength, night vision, and invulnerability to injury could save the lives of human team members. Domestic threats from terrorist cells, from religious extremists, from average psychopaths—those cases were exploding as more crazy people had Internet access to things like bomb-building instructions, weapons, and chemical agents. This kind of force could be just as effective in England as in the US. He only saw one drawback.
“I see the benefit to your team, Colonel.” Cage stared at the notes he’d been making. “But I can tell you from working with the Tribunal in the past, their question will be what’s in it for them? And how does it fix our problem here in Penton?”
The colonel nodded. “We were talking about that this afternoon. What would your Tribunal value the most?”
Cage thought they’d like nothing better than world domination and unlimited power, but that probably didn’t fall within the colonel’s power to provide.
“A possible solution to the pandemic vaccine problem,” Aidan finally said. “Our people are starving, and it will be a good nineteen or twenty years before the children born after the vaccine can be tested to see if the blood abnormality is gone. If we could find relief to the feeding issue, and it could be made to look like the Tribunal came up with the solution, they’d go for it.”
That was a tall order, but Aidan was right. Even Cage’s mentor worried about the criticism the Tribunal was taking as the years dragged on without any answers and vampires growing hungrier.
“Well, we can’t provide you with a human food supply, obviously.” The colonel spoke slowly, thinking as he paced. “But can you only feed from a living source?”
Aidan and Mirren exchanged frowns. “As opposed to what?” Cage asked.
“What if we set up a new company, a blood bank that handled only unvaccinated blood? Could the vampires feed from a source like that?”
Aidan nodded. “It could work. A lot of vampires wouldn’t like it, but then again, if they get hungry enough, and the Tribunal buys into it, they might have no choice. My mate, Krys, didn’t get the vaccine because she was allergic to one of the common ingredients. Maybe that’s the public rationale for setting up something like that. We’d need a human to oversee it during daylight hours, but if the Tribunal could have a codirector or something that would give them an equal hand in running it, they might accept it.”
The potential for abuse was great, and how many unvaccinated people would contribute was an issue that would have to be addressed, but it had possibilities.
Hope bloomed in Cage’s gut. By God, this could work. “If I might ask a question?”
The colonel turned to him and nodded. “You’re wondering how this would impact vampires outside the United States, I’m guessing, Mr. Reynolds?”
The guy was sharp; Cage had to give him that. “I think this arrangement would greatly interest Edward Simmons, the UK representative on the Tribunal. If I were able to participate in your Omega Force and we are successful, I could see him finding someone from MI6 and setting up a similar arrangement.”
Aidan stared into space as he clicked the end of a ballpoint pen in and out, in and out. “I think the Tribunal’s US delegate, Meg Lindstrom, would go for it as well, especially if we can figure out a fair distribution system for the blood supply. The other nations might be a harder sell. What’s in it for Frank Greisser, for example? He’s head of the Tribunal and represents the European Union.”
They all pondered that for a while. “Offer them help,” Will said. “Describe Omega Force as a pilot project. If it works in the US, then we provide the model and the support to set up teams in their countries. It will make the Tribunal look as if they’re doing something proactive to help their starving people instead of talking about things like systemizing human trafficking.”
Rick Thomas frowned. “They’re seriously discussing that?”
“They’re a bunch of asswipes,” Mirren said.
Aidan smiled. “They are, it’s true. They’re also out of ideas. We’d hoped if Penton worked—and it was working before Matthias came after us—the Tribunal might use it as a model for surviving the crisis. But finding unvaccinated feeders is still a problem. This gives the Tribunal something that makes them look like geniuses.”
Randa cleared her throat. “This all sounds good, but one thing hasn’t been mentioned. What happens to Penton? What happens to Matthias sitting up there in the ruins of our clinic, in the ruins of our town, waiting to kill us all?”
The silence that followed her questions lingered a good thirty or forty seconds. Cage tipped his chair back and thought about it. He wanted Melissa to get her life back, as near as she could, and that meant rebuilding Penton into a safe place.
His heart sped up, and he let his front chair legs hit the floor with a thud. Damn it, that was the answer.
“Melissa,” he said. “Melissa and Glory can talk to the Tribunal. And Krys. They’ve all been victims of Matthias’s vendetta. If they go with Aidan to talk to the Tribunal—behind Matthias’s back, of course—it will help sway them to our side. Between this potential solution and the testimonies, we might not destroy Matthias, but the Tribunal can keep him away from us.”
Mirren flopped back in his chair and grinned at Cage. He was such a sourpuss that when he did grin, it was sort of unsettling. “And make the pardon of all our so-called crimes a condition of the whole deal. This could be fucking brilliant.”
The colonel grinned, and his happy face also was kind of unsettling.
“Let’s make plans, then,” Aidan said. “I’ll slip out to Atlanta with Krys, Glory, and Mel and set up a meeting with whatever Tribunal members I can. If Omega’s been compromised, getting out could be a challenge, but we don’t have any choice. Mirren, you should probably come as well; they need to see you looking all happy and cooperative.”
He gave Mirren his stubborn, authoritative look, and the big man shrugged. “Whatever.”
“I’ll start calling my team,” Rick said. “Robbie, make a list of the guys you think are best suited to learning about vampires and taking on a new kind of project. We’ll want them in place here in Penton within forty-eight hours. Mr. Reynolds, can you and Randa and Will work with my team on the proper way to kill a vampire?”
Bloody hell. The enormity of what they were doing hit Cage like a semi to the forehead. They’d have to share tactics, however. No way around it. This was going to require a lot of trust on both sides and, especially in the beginning, a lot of blind faith. “I will,” he said. He just hoped these new humans, whoever they were, didn’
t want to practice on him.
Randa nodded. “Me too.”
When Will didn’t answer, everyone turned to look at him. “I think there’s something else I need to be doing while all these negotiations and meetings take place.” He lifted his gaze to Aidan’s, and some unspoken words seem to pass between them.
Randa reached over and touched Will’s arm, her expression asking the question for all of them. Cage had wondered how much their relationship had progressed, and the possessiveness of that touch, and the way they looked at each other, told him everything. They might not even realize it themselves yet, but another Penton lieutenant was about to go off the market of eligible bachelors.
Aidan nodded. “I don’t like it, Will. Not at all. But you’re right.”
“Right about what?” Randa asked, looking around the table, looking fierce and ready to kick some butt. “What is it Will needs to do?”
“We need to keep Matthias busy so Aidan and the others can get out of here safely to meet with the Tribunal. It also might prevent him from taking another strike at Omega while we get everything in place.”
Will spoke to everyone, but he looked only at Randa.
“I’m going to give my father something he really, really wants. Me.”
“You really think you need to pack a bag to take with you into martyrdom?” Randa slammed the door into the hallway after following Will into their room. The sharp crack of the door settling into its frame sapped her anger and filled her instead with cold fear.
Will set down the small bag into which he’d thrown a few clothes. “I have to do this, Ran. I’m the only one who can keep Matthias occupied and away from Omega long enough for your dad and Aidan to do what they need to do.”
He tried to slide his arms around her waist and pull her to him, but he wasn’t going to charm his way out of this one.
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