The whole pack had come into the compound early this morning to check out an anonymous lead that someone had called in to the hotline. It hadn’t taken very long to confirm that the man in the blurry photo was Darijo Tamm. A little while later they’d tracked the location of the photo down to the White Rock farmers market, where the man had apparently been buying a large amount of food. There’d been other anonymous tips after the first one, pretty much dragging the SWAT team all over the city all frigging day. Now it was dark, and the last tip had brought them to a building the Balauri had apparently been hiding in the entire time.
“You don’t think they’re somewhere in that building?” Gage asked, lifting a brow. “Even after Mike got in close enough to confirm their scents?”
Hale glanced at Mike, then shook his head. “No, I definitely trust Mike’s nose. It’s only that the trail of crumbs that led us here seemed a little too easy to follow.”
“He’s not wrong,” Mike murmured. “We spent weeks trying to get a lead on these guys and came up with nothing. Then, in the space of barely twelve hours, we get multiple anonymous tips leading us right to their front door. Hale’s gut is trying to tellhim the same thing we’re all thinking, that this is a trap.”
Gage nodded with a sigh. “I know. It’s almost a certainty that the Balauri lured us out here so they could face us in a scenario heavily weighted to their advantage. I doubt they’d actually set up booby traps in there, especially since Davina said they want to fight us straight up, but I can see them using explosive devices to weaken us so they wouldn’t have to fight us all at once.”
“It doesn’t help that we still don’t have a way to actually hurt these guys,” Carter said from the farthest corner of the ops van, holding up one of the small test tubes filled with thick pink liquid. “Other than an untested potion of dubious origin that Kat gave us at the last minute. If this pink crap doesn’t work, we’ll have a difficult time dealing with all five of these creatures, even with our greater numbers. And if they start setting off booby traps to weaken us, I’m not sure I like the way this is going to turn out.”
Hale could understand why Carter was less than thrilled at the idea of putting their trust in a pink goo that Kat had whipped up in the kitchen she shared with Connor. The stuff didn’t exactly look very impressive.
“If it helps, the potion Kat made for us includes the blooms off the same tree I used to thump Darijo Tamm with. That has to count for something, right?” Hale said.
“It would if I had any faith at all in your botany skills,” Carter said with a snort. “Just because the tree branch you used to hit Tamm had pink flowers on it doesn’t mean it was from a smoke tree.”
“It also would have been nice if Karissa’s mentor had sent some instructions along with the formula,” Mike added, holding up another one of the glass tubes. “Do we have to feed this stuff to them or give them a massage?”
“Okay, so how are we going to handle this?” Connor asked from where he was standing right beside Hale, pointing toward the layout of the warehouse on the map. “Do we assume this potion stuff is going to work and just go charging in the front door?”
“I don’t think I want to put all our eggs in one basket when it comes to Kat’s potion,” Gage said, motioning toward the sides of the target building where the Balauri were hiding. “We’ll access the roof, then rappel down and use the upper windows for entry. That approach, along with the darkness and our enhanced senses, should give us the element of surprise and allow us to avoid any booby traps they may have set up on the main doors. From there, we’ll see how it goes. If the potion works, great. If not, we’ll have to depend on brute force to try and overwhelm the Balauri.”
Hale grimaced at the thought of trying to take a creature like Tamm down by pure physical force.If bullets couldn’t penetrate the Balauri’s skin, how hard would he and his pack mates have to punch for them to feel it?
Hale tried to focus on the rest of the briefing Gage was giving but found himself tuning out. While he was glad his pack mates had taken his warnings about the possibility of a trap seriously, he realized there was something else still bothering him. But no matter how long he stared at the map, he couldn’t figure out what it was.
It wasn’t until he realized the truck had fallen silent that Hale looked up and saw that the ops truck was nearly empty. Gage, Mike, Connor, and Carter were the only ones still there, and they were all regarding him with blatant concern.
“What’s wrong?” Mike asked him. “And don’t tell menothingbecause I can see that something is screwing with your head.”
“I don’t know,” he said softly.
He took a step closer to the big monitor mounted on the wall of the RV. He reached out and slowly glided his finger across the touch screen, sliding the view to the south. One mile, two, and then faster until he was at least five or six miles from the building they were about to raid. He stopped moving when he reached the northern perimeter of the Sentry Industrial Park and the blank space on the map he knew had only recently been filled by Patterson’s auto assembly plant.
That was where he needed to be.
Now.
He could feel it.
“You think Karissa is in danger, don’t you?” Mike asked softly, coming over to stand beside him.
Hale had no idea why Mike would ask a question like that even as he realized that was exactly what had been worrying him. The grand opening of Patterson’s plant was happening as they spoke, and Karissa was there by herself.
Or at least without Hale.
“How could you know what I was worrying about before I did?” he asked Mike in confusion.
Mike’s mouth curved into a small smile. “You aren’t the first member of the Pack to have some level of precognition when it comes to your soul mate. Remember how Remy got when Triana was in danger? He tracked her down like she was wearing a GPS beacon when he had no idea where she was.”
Hale had only heard about Remy’s adventures in New Orleans secondhand, but he definitely remembered his pack mate saying he could simplyfeelwhen Triana was in danger. That he would do anything to find her when that happened.
Was that what was going on now with him? Was he so unsettled because Karissa was in danger?
Hale realized he’d felt this way before, when they’d both been on the roof of Patterson’s hotel,right before Bagley had appeared. Was the asshole going after her at the auto plant opening?
“I need to leave,” he said suddenly, his heart starting to pound at the thought that he might already be too late. “I know this is the absolute worst time, but there’s something wrong.”
