Page 19 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 19

THE PLAN

Nick dropped stiffly onto the empty wooden chair next to Wynter.

He only gritted his teeth a little as he did.

It didn’t occur to him that he was wrapped in nothing but a sheet until he’d settled his weight, and felt the hard wood of the monk’s chair with only a few millimeters of metallic fabric under his bare ass. He glanced down at himself, and over all his wounds, after he’d gotten over the initial pain of sitting. Everything looked okay, despite the sharp ache in his side, and a duller one along his leg and arm.

The organic sealant and patches appeared to be holding.

He looked at Wynter only after he’d assured himself he hadn’t managed to rip open any of the wounds they’d spent all that time fixing.

“You should have stayed in there until the blood-bag was empty,” Wynter said, quiet, but with a touch of annoyance in her voice. “Why didn’t you?”

“It was empty.”

“It wasn’t when I last checked.”

“Well, it was when I woke up.”

She didn’t answer.

Nick could guess why. She was worried and exhausted and likely had been for days. She wanted a reason to be mad at him, one that didn’t make her feel horribly guilty for yelling at an injured person, and he’d just taken that away from her.

“Are we going after Jordan?” Nick asked, hoping to distract her.

“You aren’t,” she retorted.

From Nick’s other side, Kit snorted a low laugh.

Nick glanced at her, and Kit smiled, patting his arm.

Nick smiled back, but the bulk of his attention remained on Wynter.

He wanted to ask her, with his best sarcasm voice, why she and everyone else in the room had decided to join the White Death, and whether she knew she’d been recruited into an anti-human army already. He wanted to follow that up by asking if she’d decided yet, whether she’d collect teeth for her kill-count, the way a lot of vamps did in the last war, or if she’d simply carve lines in her armor, like many of the hybrids and seers had.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it, though.

There’d be time enough for those discussions later. Right now, he couldn’t help but agree with them on what needed to happen next.

They had to go get Jordan.

They couldn’t leave Jordan where he was. They couldn’t leave Jordan with St. Maarten, not with how everything was escalating, and not only with Archangel.

Moreover, Nick was going with them to get Jordan out.

Whether Wynter liked it or not.

“How far have you gotten?” Nick asked, gruff. “I want to hear it. The plan. Or whatever it is you’ve got so far to break Jordan out of there.”

He glanced at Charlie who was listening from the other side of the table.

He quirked an eyebrow at her.

“How’s the leg?”

“Shitty,” she replied at once. “You look like hell. How do you feel?”

“Not significantly better,” he admitted.

His eyes swiveled back to Kit. “You said there might be a backdoor into Archangel’s security system at the facility where they’ve got Jordan?” he prompted. “Where did you hear that? Have you been able to confirm where the information originated?”

“No,” she said, matter of fact. “To be honest, big guy, I’ve been too busy trying to find the damned thing, so I can see if it’s real on my own.”

“You’re not worried it’s a trap?”

“Well… I wasn’t worried about that,” she said, snorting.

Despite her words, Kit looked strangely relieved to have Nick joining the discussion.

Nick wondered why.

Usually he wasn’t the one everyone pointed to when it came to wanting a measured, logical approach to something like breaking into an Archangel medical facility. Not that he was reckless… exactly. He was just less insistent on having a plan with every single contingency worked out and triplicated in advance.

Remembering who it was in his life who’d been so adamant about having multiple contingencies, Nick glanced at Wynter.

Would she be like Jem in that way?

Jem had been military, through and through.

It had taken being with Jem for years and years before Nick realized that he, himself, meaning Nick, was much more of a cop than he was a military strategist. Jem had been the one who thought in terms of troop movements and supplies and back doors and contingencies. Nick was the one to plunge in and wing it on pure instinct, the one who assumed all situations could quickly spiral out of control, and they’d never have all the information.

They’d been strangely compatible in that way.

Or really, they’d been eerily complementary in their skill sets.

Nick would run into the burning building.

Jem, meanwhile, would be the one standing outside the burning building with the escape vehicle, multiple escape routes mapped out, and a pre-programmed line of explosive charges set up for when someone chased Nick out of that building.

He studied Wynter’s face.

He realized some part of him was evaluating her anew.

Just how much did she remember now?

Did she remember any of it? Some of it? Most of it?

None of it?

Some part of him craved that partnership, that ability to lean on one another’s strengths and abilities and know-how. He knew he couldn’t count on that yet, that it would be foolhardy to even push for it right now, with both of them only remembering bits and pieces of who’d they’d once been. But goddamn it, he wanted it back.

Brick’s words from the other night echoed strangely in Nick’s head.

“We did not all arrive at the same time.”

For some reason, that felt important, too.

Nick shook it off for the time being, and focused on his wife’s face.

Fuck, she was gorgeous.

Something must have reflected in his eyes, because the hardness of her jaw softened somewhat, and she combed her fingers through her hair with a sigh. He heard more than a small amount of defeat in that sigh.

“We were trying to work that out,” she admitted. “The plan, that is.” She glared a little at the table full of vampires, and Nick got the impression her anger was aimed mostly at Brick. “We’re having some difference of opinion on strategy. Mostly, some of us are completely anti- strategy and just want to storm the place, guns blazing, and risk getting us all killed.”

Nick winced a little, then glanced at Brick, who was clearly listening.

He turned back to face his wife.

“It might be our best chance,” he said apologetically.

Brick laughed.

Nick could have hit him. Brick being a smug, know-it-all asshole wouldn’t help Nick make the argument with his mate.

“You see, little hybrid?” the elder vampire quipped. “Perhaps you should run along to your school, and make up lesson plans for the children? Let the adults in the room make the plans for war?”

Nick glared at the other vampire for real.

“She’s smarter than you’ll ever be,” he spat in a low snarl. “And normally, I’d agree with her that we need more strategy than fucking none.”

He looked away from the smirking and triumphant Brick, and back to his wife.

“In this particular case, however,” he added, lower, and more apologetic. “I think our only chance might be to go quickly, and hit them hard enough, and fast enough, to catch them by surprise. Time isn’t on our side right now, if what Brick is saying is true.”

He studied Wynter’s face. Her jaw tightened as he watched.

“St. Maarten is smarter than all of us,” she said pointedly, folding her arms.

She looked angry, but Nick got the sense she was listening to him.

He also got the sense her anger was mostly aimed at Brick, not at him.

A willing ear was all Nick really needed, or could ask for.

“She probably is smarter than us,” Nick conceded about the Archangel C.E.O. “But Lara has her own blind spots,” he added. “She would never, ever take such a risky approach herself. Nor would she assume anyone else would be foolhardy enough to do it, particularly not someone like Brick, who’s known for being fucking methodical in his planning…”

Nick heard Brick give an approving grunt.

He didn’t glance over at him.

His eyes remained solely on his mate.

“…Which means her security systems won’t be designed to defend against anything that aggressive,” Nick continued. “Especially not anything that potentially chaotic.”

He studied his wife’s face, watching her think.

“She’d assume we’d try something sneaky,” he went on. “Something from the tech angle, using you and Kit and Morley’s contacts in the I.S.F. and N.Y.P.D. It’s what she would do, particularly with such a small group at her disposal. For the same reason, it’s likely she’d leak information meant to provide a false opening, and hope we took the bait. Possibly about moving Jordan…” He glanced at Charlie. “…Or maybe about some kind of backdoor way into the Archangel security system,” he added, glancing at Kit.

There was a silence after he spoke.

Nick’s eyes returned to Wynter.

“We’ll never get around her that way,” he said, frankly. “She’ll be miles ahead of us, even if she didn’t start the leaks herself, which she very likely did. We couldn’t trust anything that comes out of the facility, directly or indirectly, even if we absolutely trust the source––”

“Exactly,” Brick muttered.

“She will expect us to wait for an opening,” Nick went on, ignoring his sire. “So she’ll try to give us one, Wynter. Preferably one that takes place nowhere near the facility where they actually have Jordan in hand. She’d let it trickle through as a rumor, like what Charlie just said about Damon being moved. She wouldn’t want it to be obvious, so we don’t smell a trap. So she might lay a few false trails, including something that would appeal to Kit.”

Thinking about that, Nick clicked under his breath, seer-style.

“The truth is, anything they might have done to move him would have happened already,” he continued, still thinking. “But my guess is, they haven’t moved him. Lara already had him in a high-security Archangel facility. Why would she want to move him somewhere else? Particularly somewhere controlled primarily by the Racial Authority?”

He shook his head slowly.

“No. She’d want him somewhere she controls… especially with you and the kids here with me, and her probably thinking she’d need leverage to get us all back.”

He grimaced at the thought, but felt even more sure he was right.

“She’d want someplace staffed entirely by her people, where she has the final call, and her people have full access to all security and communication systems. The only way that changes is if she got ordered to give up Damon. And personally, I doubt the H.R.A. issues a lot of orders to the C.E.O. of the company that supplies 90% of their weapons, and probably 100% of their organics and defense tech…”

“Hear, hear,” Brick muttered, a touch louder.

Wynter frowned.

She glanced at Brick, but her eyes didn’t stay on him for long.

Nick could see she was still thinking.

He could tell she heard the logic behind his words, even if she didn’t like it.

Finally, her stunning, blue-green eyes shifted up to his.

“You’re still not going,” she warned.

Nick didn’t answer. He didn’t feign agreement to keep the peace, but he didn’t see the point in antagonizing her, either.

Truthfully, he doubted even she believed her words now.

He could tell from the worry and frustration visible on her face, and obvious in her eyes, that she knew she likely wouldn’t win that argument, either.