“Crap,” she muttered. “When we go in, we’re going to be heavily outnumbered.”
Caleb considered that. “We’ll have the element of surprise. That should help balance out the odds a little bit.”
Jes didn’t comment on the part of that observation he’d left unsaid. That trying to arrest these men wasn’t an option. With the kids in there, it wasn’t something they could even consider. They’d have to storm in shooting and wouldn’t be able to stop until they’d taken out every last bad guy. Or the bad guys took them out.
She didn’t even want to think about that possibility.
A backup team of four STAT agents was positioned half a mile away waiting to take care of the kids after she and Caleb rescued them, but they wouldn’t be able to assist. That wasn’t their area of expertise.
“Can you tell whether any of the bad guys are creatures like Darby?” she asked, praying they weren’t.
Caleb kept his attention focused on the house as he answered. “My nose isn’t good enough to tell the difference from outside the house. We’re gonna have to assume at least some of them are like Darby. If so, shoot them in the gut, just like we talked about.”
Jes nodded.
After spending a good part of the morning discussing how they were supposed to go up against creatures that were seemingly indestructible, she’d mentioned the creature she’d fought in the park when they’d been saving the Robinson boy had stumbled back in what looked like serious pain when she’d kicked it in the stomach.
But would shooting them in the gut even slow the things down?
Jake had put a magazine’s worth of large-caliber bullets in the knees of one of those creatures in the park. Caleb had hit another so hard the vehicle’s front bumper had been completely destroyed, then run over his buddy, crushing him flat. After all that, the three creatures had still walked away. Probably without a scratch. And their big plan was to shoot them in the gut and hope for the best.
We are so screwed.
“I was thinking I’d go in through the back door and deal with the ones in the kitchen, while you go through the front door and worry about the kids,” Caleb said casually as he pulled his Colt .45 automatic and slowly chambered a round.
Jes started to agree, but then stopped, feeling the need to point out the obvious. “You know you just volunteered for the most dangerous part of this operation, right? One against four aren’t good odds.”
“Somebody’s got to do it. Might as well be me.” Caleb shrugged. “Besides, Jake would be pissed if I let anything happen to you.”
Caleb must have picked up on her confusion, because he grinned. “Jake pulled me aside this morning before we all split up and asked me to watch out for you. Not that I wouldn’t have done that already, but…you know…”
“Know what?” she asked sharply. “Does he think I can’t watch out for myself? Or do my job?”
She didn’t want to think Jake was the kind of guy who thought she wasn’t as good in the field because she was a woman, but…
“It isn’t like that,” Caleb insisted. “Jake knows what you can do and that you’re good at it, but you’re important to him. He worries about you. Of course, he’s gonna be overprotective. He doesn’t have a choice.”
All she could do was stare at Caleb in confusion.He doesn’t have a choice?What the hell was that supposed to mean?
But before she could ask, she was interrupted by the radio squawking in her earpiece.
“The bad guys have just arrived,” Misty announced. “Get ready. We’ll give you the signal to move as soon as the shooting starts.”
Jes almost groaned in frustration, realizing this conversation would have to wait. But she sure as hell would get back to it—soon.
“Okay, we go with your plan.” Getting to her feet, she pulled her Sig from its holster, racking a round in the chamber, then clicking off the safety. “You go in the back, through the kitchen, and I’ll go in the front. Watch out for the ones coming down the stairs.”
She glanced at the house, then looked at Caleb. He was on his feet now, his fangs elongated and protruding over his lower lip. His claws were partially extended and the muscles of his neck and shoulders visibly twitched. She’d never seen Jake look this jacked up. Maybe it was an omega thing. Crap, she hoped she could trust him in there. There were a bunch of frightened kids depending on them.
“You ready?” she asked.
Caleb jerked his head violently to the side, cracking his neck first one way, then the other. Rolling his shoulders, he grinned at her, revealing a lot more of his fangs than she ever wanted to see.
“Oh, hell yeah,” he growled. “I am so ready.”
Chapter 13
It was obvious when Darby and his crew arrived because Misty immediately lost video feeds all over the hotel. To anyone on the hotel staff watching, it probably seemed like random static, but if you followed the patterns of the outages, you could trace the path as the bad guys made their way through the Lanesborough Hotel’s service corridors.
