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“You understand your part?” The deeper, more masculine voice was uncompromising, hard. His eyes filled with so much light, they were nearly glowing as he stared at her from the dark. “We don’t have much time.”

She blinked at his face.

It made her vision blur, that face.

It shone like a pool of mercury, like a mirror turned to water. Whenever she tried to focus on it, though, it rippled, as if a large stone had been thrown in.

He seemed almost invisible this close. He looked like a ghost, a mirage.

She wanted to touch him, see if he was real.

She tore her eyes off him, instead.

She looked down at the long gun that lay in the case at his feet.

The gun was real, concrete. It was something solid, something she could wrap her hands around. She almost wished that washerpart in all of this. She almost wished she could see the whites of their eyes from further away, where they couldn’t hurt her.

“That’s not possible.” His voice remained flat, uncompromising, unwilling to indulge her whims. “You know it’s not. This is better. This is better, to look them in the face. I’ll get anyone you miss.”

“Promise?” she asked softly.

“I promise.”

She exhaled, and nodded slowly.

The words he’d spoken echoed in her, inside and out.

“You understand your part?” he repeated.

She stared at the gun in fascination, her throat tight, but the emotions there were difficult to define, to pin down in any way. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t grief. It felt like a profusion of things she couldn’t feel because there were simply too many of them. She didn’t want to label them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel them, either. They were too much.

It was all too much.

This would silence it, though.

This would finally silence it, forever.

She wanted it to be over.

She wanted the screaming to finally stop.

“You’re sure?” Black growled to his tech expert. “How far?”

“Maybe twenty-five yards,” Alisha said. “Forty max, and that’s assuming there’s a lag between the cameras picking up their faces and the confirmed ID. I’m not familiar enough with this software to give you exact numbers.”

Black’s strides lengthened over the pavement, and I fought to keep up.

Alisha walked to my left.

Angel and Cowboy walked to my right.

Dexter was just in front of us, matching strides with Black.

Nick walked on their other side, probably restraining himself from moving a lot faster than all of us. He wore a long black coat that swirled around his legs, making him look even more vampiric than usual. A midnight-black umbrella hung over his head, shielding him from the sun, along with a hat, dark sunglasses, and leather gloves. He walked with a ghost-like glide that got him stares even apart from the odd getup he wore, and his bone-white skin.

Every now and then I glimpsed his eyes behind those shades and saw them glow a dark, deep, scarlet red.

For once, he didn’t seem to notice the stares.