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If they’d really taken them, she would have expected more evasion first, more deflection, more bullshit. But she believed him at once.

“Why?” Frank asked from behind them.

Angel glanced behind her. She flinched once she had, realizing a lot had been happening behind her since she first walked toward the men in combat gear.

For one thing, most of her friends had followed her.

A lot of the local New Mexicans stood there in particular, creating a protective shadow in a half-moon behind where she and Cowboy stood. Dog stood to her right. Frank stood directly behind her, his thick, muscular, brown arms folded. Easton, another of the Native Americans Black befriended in that Louisiana Federal Prison, stood next to Frank, and two others from the same rez stood with them. With Javier, Devin, Luce, Manny, Yarli, Miguel, Ace, Mika, Reuben, and Wendell standing withthem,the crowd now looked downright menacing, even to Angel, and these people were her friends.

They were hervery dearfriends.

She even saw Yumi and Lizbeth standing back there, looking pissed.

They looked mightily pissed off, both of them.

Angel couldn’t help but be painfully aware that they wore no armor, though, and that none of her friends currently carried weapons. Hell, some of them were wearing bathing suits. They would get mowed down by the assault rifles the soldiers held.

They’d kill them all, and it would be terrible.

It would be absolutely horrible… the stuff of nightmares.

Angel had been to mass shooting events before, back when she was a cop.

Just thinking about that made her sad.

Next to her, Mika gripped her hand in both of hers, holding Angel tightly.

“We can calm this down,” Mika whispered. “We can do this. All of us.”

Angel nodded.

She realized she would have to calm their own people first.

Not being armed might not cause them to back down, even in the face of those big guns. Angel know that about them. She knew it about some of them especially.

Again, it crossed Angel’s mind that this could go really bad if she wasn’t careful.

The thought sobered her slightly, even with the seer space-cake magic running through her veins. She looked back at the soldier in front of her as he answered Frank.

“We need you to do something for us,” the soldier said. “Just a little favor. No one gets hurt. We return Quentin Black and his wife, Dr. Fox, without a scratch.”

Angel refocused on him, frowning.

“Do somethingfor you?” Putting that together with Frank’s question, with what had been said already before that, Angel stared up at the expressionless face of the black-clad soldier. She looked from one of those blank eyes to the other, her heart pounding in her chest as everything abruptly clicked into place.

“You took Miri and Black.” Angel swallowed. “You took them. You took Black and Miri because you need us todo somethingfor you? You mean youkidnappedthem? You’re holding them hostage? To get us to do something for you?”

“Yes,” the soldier said. “That’s exactly right, Ms. Deveraux.” He glanced at Cowboy. “Errr… Mrs. Graves.”

There was a silence.

Angel felt all of the wedding guests behind her hear what she’d said.

She felt them hear what the soldier said.

Angel could almost feel their thoughts. She could feel herself connected to all of them strangely, maybe even something like a seer’s connection. In any case, Angel realized they were pulling all the threads together just like she had. All of Black’s friends and employees, the New Mexico natives, the military vets who’d worked for him for years in San Francisco and elsewhere, the people they considered their family.

The people who felt like part of Angel’s family now.