Lucas shrugged. “Like Avi said, it’s a suicide mission. There’s a very good chance he’s going to have an exit strategy. The kind that involves bodies. Mostly ours.”
“How would he accomplish that?” Zane asked.
“Blow us all up in the same house his dad died in?” Archer suggested. “Symmetry, remember?”
Was that really Nathan’s end game? If so, Thomas couldn’t, in good conscience, let them go with him. He wouldn’t allow his family to die for him. That just wasn’t going to happen. Even if he had to sneak off when they weren’t looking. He just had to find a way to slip free of Aiden.
Noah shook his head. “How do we combat dynamite? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we’d have just lying around.”
“C4 most likely,” Archer said offhand. “TNT is far too unstable.”
Noah frowned. “It alarms me that you know that off the top of your head. And it still doesn’t answer my question.”
“Depends on how he plans to detonate said bomb,” August said. “If he’s wearing it and holding a trigger, we have a better chance of surviving the blast, but fewer chances of stopping it.”
“Is that what you would do?” Felix asked August. “‘Cause I’d plant the explosives around the house at key joists to cause a collapse and I’d detonate with a cell phone, something remote on the off chance I make it out.”
“Felix has a point,” Asa said. “If he wants to take us with him, he’s going to leave that house as rubble.”
“A cell phone to detonate would be ideal,” Archer said. “Easy fix.”
“How so?” Arsen asked.
“Signal jammer,” Mac said. “If he plans on using a cell phone, it would block the call until we could disarm the bomb, supposing there is one.”
“Who knows how to disarm a bomb?” Atticus asked. “Dad taught us a lot of things but not explosives.”
“I can do it,” Mac said. “I’m trained in explosive ordnance disposal. Building and deactivating bombs is part of my military training. It’s also one of the many skills we teach at the Watch.”
“I’m starting to think the Watch isn’t a real place, like Hogwarts, or Dr. X’s academy for mutants,” Adam said. “Tell the truth, you’re just living in the desert getting high all the time and spinning these elaborate fairy tales about psychopathic Gen Zs.”
“Don’t be jealous,” Archer said, blowing him a kiss. “You can come visit whenever you want.”
“He’s just sad he didn’t get his owl,” Noah said, patting Adam on the head like a puppy.
Thomas would never get over the way Noah handled his son. Of all of them, Adam had been the hardest. He was the baby, the spoiled one. The one who had a hair trigger and the least control of his murderous impulses. Yet, Noah treated him like a dog who’d been beaten, combating his blustering by reacting to him like he was an adorable infant.
Adam was like a German Shepherd that had traded in dog fighting for duckie pajamas and flower crowns. Noah had just…quieted something in Adam and Thomas was beyond grateful to him. For that and a million other things he could never fully articulate.
“So, what’s the plan then?” Asa said. “And who gets to go? ‘Cause I really don’t want to miss out on the violence. Lucas said we can try to skin him. Like all of him, like Fukushi Masaichi.”
“Who?” Aiden asked, frowning.
“He would skin people of their tattoos when they died then preserve them in a museum,” Avi said, barely containing his excitement.
This was the part of the job Thomas hated. Early on, he’d had a certain cruel streak he’d passed on to his children. Not just the need to kill those who were a danger to others, but to punish them in the most heinous ways possible before their deaths. Asa and Avi had taken to it with a relish that Thomas had never been able to quell.
“Yeah, do we draw straws?” Avi said.
“You promised me I’d get to torture this man for going after our kids,” Lucas said. “I’m holding you to it.”
Thomas took a deep breath and let it out. He didn’t want to endanger any of them. Lucas was right. Thomas could feel it. Nathan Jeffries or McAvoy or whatever he was calling himself was on a suicide mission and he wanted to take at least Thomas with him.
“You can’t both walk into a trap,” Thomas said to August. “You have children to think of.”
“Well, you’re not leaving me behind,” Lucas said.
August scoffed. “And I’m not letting my husband walk into an ambush alone.”
