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“You’ll want to work in padding along with the return trip for your time estimates with those, too, in the event we hit a wall somewhere inside the underground cavern. We may not be able to see how intact the cave is from the outside. We can try sending in a drone first, but that takes time, too, and there’s a good chance the drone will fry up before it can explore the entire cave well enough to return and send us a decent image. I doubt the radiation will allow for a clear signal while the drone’s underground.”

Nick felt his jaw harden more.

Christ. This was sounding more and more like a suicide mission.

He glanced at Kit, then at Charlie.

How could he ask humans to do this? Hybrids were bad enough, but any seer or hybrid would be more resilient than a human, especially an older human like James Morley.

He met James’ eyes at the thought.

“I’ll be fine, Midnight,” the senior detective said firmly, clearly reading some inkling of Nick’s thoughts. “Don’t worry about me.”

Nick only nodded.

The claim that he would be “fine” was ludicrous, of course.

So was the demand that Nick not worry.

But there was nothing else to say about the thing, really.

This was the hand they’d been dealt.

These were the parameters they had to work with.

Nick, like the rest of them, was already committed.

CHAPTER30

THE GRAVEYARD

It turnedout the person they were meeting in Antibes wasn’t some old friend of Walker’s, or someone he’d worked with in Mi6, or another vampire he was close to.

It was his actual, biological mother.

Ruth Quill Walker was a full-blooded seer, and apparently that, along with Walker being her only child, was reason enough for her to agree to come with them on this insane journey, despite not knowing Nick or the rest of them at all.

Forrest assured them he had communicated to his mother all the risks.

Rose Walker been passing as a high-proportion hybrid for over forty years.

She was likely running out of time in this dimension for that reason, alone.

To Nick’s eyes, she looked about thirty, thirty-one in human years, and while hybrids had longer lives than pure-blooded humans, people would definitely start to ask questions when she reached a hundred or even eighty and still looked to be in her late twenties.

Unlike Nick and Jem in their early years, she didn’t have the option of simply moving to a new city or town, or changing her name to side-step inconvenient aging quirks.

That world no longer existed; it hadn’t for a few hundred years.

It was no longer enough to fudge your identity details, or even make yourself your own legal child or grandchild, if you started looking disturbingly young for your age.

Anywhere Rose Walker went in the human civilized worlds would have a record of her that included a comprehensive list of her biometrics, not to mention a blood sample and all legal documents that went with being a registered hybrid.

She could maybe fake her death.

The White Death did that kind of thing, along with other groups involved in organized crime. There were even hybrid groups out there that facilitated those types of identity reboots, not to mention rich, connected people like Lara St. Maarten, who had done that for Tai, Malek, and Wynter.

There was no guarantee she wouldn’t get caught, though, so it was risky.