Nathan and Liam stepped out, slamming the car door behind them. I watched as the two disappeared, moving faster than any human could manage.
“You have no intention of driving off without them, do you?” Peter asked.
“None.”
“At least you’re consistent.”
He put his head back and shut his eyes while I watched out the window. There was nothing to do but wait.
The sight in my left eye had lost some of the white haze, settling into a bunch of dark blurs. Shapes were still difficult to distinguish, though I had hope they would become clearer as my eye healed, but I’d noticed strange flickers overlaying some of those shapes.
For instance, the wolf wrapped in green and bronze vines. Peter with an emerald green at his core, his colors more vibrant than any other I’d seen.
I didn’t know what it all meant yet. Just another thing in my life that inspired more questions than answers.
Time passed and Peter snored in the front seat while I kept watch. Liam’s hour was almost up when the back doors opened and he and Nathan slid inside.
I turned, noting that both of them had different shades of blue threading through their bodies, creating a tangled spider web overlay. Liam’s shades were considerably brighter, a blaze that flickered and beckoned.
“Find anything?” I asked, ignoring the temptation to just keep gazing at his blues and silvers. It felt almost intimate looking at it, especially when a spark leapt from him to my arm. I jumped as it meandered in a lazy circle that I swear I could just barely feel before it faded. It felt like a soft touch against my skin.
“Something wrong?” Liam asked.
“Nope. Nothing.” I kept my face expectant and resisted the urge to close my left eye.
He looked like he didn’t believe me but didn’t press.
“We followed the wolf to a house. I didn’t see your friend but there were several spooks in there. I’m willing to bet your friend is too.”
I turned to the front and took a deep breath. Hope leapt inside even though he hadn’t seen her.
“Could you tell how many were in there?” I asked in a steady voice.
“I counted seven, maybe eight,” Nathan said. “That’s just what I could guess from the windows. There could be more in other parts of the house.”
“Did they have lookouts or guards?” I asked.
“At least two in the upstairs windows, one in front and the other in back. One on each door downstairs and two outside,” Liam said.
Nathan nodded. “Heavily guarded. It won’t be easy getting in there.”
Not what I had hoped to hear.
I handed Liam the phone, watching as he texted Brax the address of the lair of the demon tainted puppet master.
If this was a military operation, we would create a distraction on one side, probably with the help of explosives, then go in the other with an overwhelming show of force, clearing each room one by one from bottom to top.
There were several problems with that technique tonight. One, there were only the four of us and whoever Brax managed to bring. Peter’s loyalty was extremely suspect. He was as likely to hit one of us with friendly fire as the enemy. Not exactly the show of force I was accustomed to.
The second was that I had a strong feeling the others wouldn’t be relying on guns, which meant any clearing technique that I was familiar with wouldn’t work.
The last and most important was that the enemy would have heard us coming before we stepped foot over the threshold and have had plenty of time to murder my friend.
I sighed and rested my head against the seat. Sometimes it felt like fate hated me, like I had stolen her candy at some long ago point and she just kept dumping bad circumstance after bad circumstance in the hopes that I’d break.
She was a fickle bitch, that one.
War, as I’d already experienced, was nine tenths waiting and one tenth sheer gut wrenching terror, mixed with a deluge of adrenaline and motion. Waiting, for me, had always felt like the equivalent of having a root canal without any painkiller. I’d rather get whatever was coming over with so I could get to the next part—living with the consequences.
