Her anger finally came up to match my own. Fury lined her gaze as she stepped closer to me. “Do you want to start another world war? When the Dream Wars end, then we have other countries trying to wipe us off the map for harboring these aliens?! I’ve already got Russia doing flyovers in Alaska and threatening to bomb this very lake where we stand! Now Japan is nervous about our involvement with the Galadrias.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Was that what her call was about with Japan? Were other countries nervous that we’d given the Galadrias refuge? Shit. I hadn’t considered that.
“What if we didn’t let them stay in America?” Damien piped in. “What if I used my wealth to buy them an island? Somewhere remote. Away from humans.”
Buckley sighed, crossing her arms. “I might be able to swing that, but who will continue to pay for their food and care? It can’t be America. We cannot associate with being soft towards the ghouls. Any type of ghoul. The world is freaked out enough by Kit’s powers. I can’t add another thing on.”
Ouch. But she had a point, dammit. Maybe I didn’t understand politics.
“It won’t be,” Damien assured her as my heart completely and utterly beat for him and him only. I’d never loved him more than in the moment he pledged to use his parents’ lifelong legacy and wealth to give alien refugees a safe place to live. “I will set up a trust fund for them,” he declared, and I couldn’t help the tears that fell down my cheek.
Buckley seemed moved as well; her eyes grew misty and she started to pace the room. “Alright, goddammit! Find and purchase that island and I’ll announce it to the press. Spin it as a private third-party humanitarian thing. But I’ll make it clear the Galadrias have US protection as an ally. Our lawyers will find some refugee legal language to make it legit.”
Damien nodded.
“You…” Buckley pointed to me. “Get with Jeremy and find out how to end this war. We’ve got them by the balls. Let’s strike while the iron is hot. Whatever you need, you have, including the entire United States Army. Deal?”
I’d gotten what I wanted for the Galadrias and now it was my turn to honor my part.
“Deal.”
We shook, and with that she fled the room.
I looked up at the man I’d once been paid to protect, the man who had somehow ended up protecting me.
“Damien…” My lip quivered. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He crossed the room, taking my head into his hands and cradling my chin. “What’s important to you is important to me, and Dawn has saved our lives countless times. It’s the least I can do.”
I realized in that moment that I was so deeply in love with him there was no turning back. I’d crossed that threshold, the point of no return in a relationship where you can’t get out without considerable scars.
“How do we end this?” I asked him. Jeremy was a genius no doubt, but so was Damien.
He looked over at me. “I don’t know yet, but I have over a dozen ideas. Let’s call our team together and start to brainstorm. We don’t sleep until we have a solid plan.”
He was right. So many variables had changed from Jeremy’s original idea to end the Dream Wars. The breeders were locking me out now—but we had the gateway. It was now or never, the time had come. No more nights spent in the Dream War as helpless little humans. The next time I stepped foot in that place would be to end it all. Consequences be dammed.
* * *
“We needto cull the breeder population. That’s step one.” Master Aki was drawing“1. Kill Breeders” on the whiteboard in our military tent that had been given to us to solve this problem. Other than my team, President Buckley and three of her top advisors sat in chairs at the edge of the room, offering advice and taking notes. We’d been at this an hour. Mostly because we’d let Jeremy go first and the poor kid had just launched into a never-ending monologue on parallel dimensions and frequencies and shit that was way over my head. In the end, Damien had gotten him to explain that he could probably create a device, a helmet, for me to wear that would send out a beacon to the entire hive mind of the breeders. This would call them to one location. Here. Where we could hopefully wipe them out.
“We can take care of the breeder culling no problem,” Buckley stated. “You use your… beacon device… to call them here and my army will wipe them out.”
Master Aki looked satisfied in that and sat down.
“Okay, and how do we kill the rest of them, grunts, skids, sentries, hundreds of thousands of them?” one of her advisors asked.
That was going to be my job…
I stood. “I will attempt to use my power to collapse the Dream War, opening a portal so big that it exposes their world to ours and folds it in on itself.”
Theoretically it sounded awesome, and would look really cool in a movie, but, realistically, I was terrified it wasn’t even—
Buckley called me out. “Is that even possible?”
“With a large part of the breeder population dead, yes,” Master Aki said with authority.
Buckley looked like she wasn’t buying it. “And if Kit can’t… what’s our plan B?”
