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It was an ugly, unnerving, somehow improbable sound.

He’d never heard the Archangel C.E.O. scream before. If asked, Nick might have said she didn’t scream, and likely wouldn’t scream, or evencouldn’tscream, even if faced with her own imminent death.

But in the end, everyone screamed.

Everyone screamed when they faced the abyss, when they saw the darkness about to swallow them.

Nick knew that, but sometimes, like now, it still managed to surprise him.

The scream didn’t last long, in any case.

Nick disarmed a third soldier who’d aimed a rifle at Malek. He tossed the weapon behind him, grasped the man’s wrists, and broke both of his arms with a hard twist of each hand.

The man screamed, too.

Nick kicked out one of his knees next.

The Archangel soldier fell to the tile floor, now screaming so loudly Nick could no longer hear anything else. He bit the man and venomed him, mostly to shut him up, then did the same to a second human for pretty much the same reason, one of those Mal had shot but not killed, and who lay in the opening of the staircase doorway, groaning and crying out in agony from a hole in the upper part of his chest.

The one Mal shot probably wouldn’t make it.

Nick’s victim probably would.

While Nick’s vampire senses noted both things, none of that mattered to Nick in the moment. He was in shock, truthfully, at what he’d just witnessed.

He couldn’t quite believe it was real, even now.

He dragged a second body into the doorway next to the now-docile, venomed gunshot victim. He stacked another body on top of that one, mostly make sure the door remained open.

Then he looked around, and realized the gunshots had stopped.

He rapidly assessed their current situation.

There had been eleven guards in total with St. Maarten.

Nick had taken out two. Malek had taken out four, and downed two more, including the guy with the sucking wound in his chest.

Nick checked to make sure the other three soldiers were downed and no longer in danger of killing one of them. Zoe had killed one by leaping on her and snapping her neck. Another was quickly taken out by Thorn’s gun, the guy with the green mohawk. The big mohawk vampire shot him, then leapt on him and snapped his spine after he tried to make a run for it.

Nick now aimed a pointing hand down the corridor, his voice a snarl.

“Go stand lookout!” he said to Thorn and Zoe. “And get on the fucking comm! Tell Tai and the other vamps they need to get their asses here,now.We should expect the whole building to lock down in the next fifteen minutes. We have to get Jordan, and get the fuck out of here before they send the entire H.R.A. and the goddamned military…”

He switched on his comm.

“Kit?” he bellowed. “You need to slow down every piece of surveillance that caught that. Buy us as much time as you possibly can!”

“Working on it.”

“Work fast,” he snapped.

Only then did he dart to the balcony and look down.

The sight below was what he expected to see.

It still managed to stun him, even to knock him off-balance. It also managed to bring the reality of what had just happened crashing down on him in a way that it hadn’t.

It also, less explicably, made him feel sick.