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I HAD TO keep my face uncovered so the bomber would be certain I was actually one of the heavily armed people about to come through the door, but other than that I geared up as if it were any other monster hunt. In a way it was, it was just part of an ongoing vampire hunt. I let myself fall into the rhythm of moving with the men in that shuffling movement that looked like it should be slow and awkward, but was anything but.

We were almost there, almost at the door I'd gone through a hundred times, a thousand times. I dropped my shields just enough to let Nathaniel "see" me above him. I was careful to stay further away psychically than I had before, because he needed to be as fast and smooth as only he could be, and I needed to move with precision with the men around me. We both had our jobs, our strengths, and we needed them now. I let Nathaniel know we were coming through the door, and then I cut ties, so everyone was alone in their heads. So, when Derry pushed the door open, and we slipped through in a wedge, the only way I knew Nathaniel hadn't fumbled the first grab was that nothing blew up. In fact, it took a second for our eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior, to find that all the men were in a pile on the far side of the room. They had dog-piled the bomber.Advertisement

I ran, I ran the way I had in the warehouse, except this time I wasn't moving to save some stranger from getting hit. I was moving to get to the men I loved, before the man they were struggling with could blow them up. I was across the room, above the pile of them before I'd had time to think. It was like magic, even to me, that I was just suddenly looking down at Nicky's broad back, his one big hand wrapped around everyone else's, like a desperate game of top-of-the-baseball-bat, Dev wrapping himself around the bomber, pinning him to the wall, his hand underneath Nicky's, Sin with his arms around the man's waist like he'd tried to tackle him, and Nathaniel with his hands around the man's one hand, his hair in its braid and the muscles of his shoulders showing through the edges of the cut tank top, and the man's face that I'd seen only through their eyes until that moment, as he looked wide-eyed at me. He had time to yell, "No!" Then I shot him through the forehead, just above his eyebrows. Blood and thicker things exploded out the back of his head, but the entry hole was small, neat even. I put another bullet beside the first one, and the back of his head was just not there anymore. His eyes rolled upward, and now all we had to do was hold on until the bomb techs got inside and told us we could let go. pqdm.com