resigned calm that had fallen over me on the plane was chased away by uncertainty.
In place of a reply, Alec clasped the man’s hand, and they patted each other on the back. He repeated the gesture with the other three, and I had a feeling they’d known each other a long time.
We parted ways, and a short golf buggy ride later, we walked into the terminal building.
I sighed, glad to be in air conditioning after the oppressive heat. Or maybe it was the situation itself that was oppressive.
Walking through an abandoned airport was kind of surreal, like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. Stores were still lit up and wide open while plates with half-eaten meals and still steaming mugs of coffee littered the tables of restaurants.
We settled in near a wall of windows overlooking the tarmac. Ty and Alec sat calmly on either side of me at one end of a heavy wooden table. Ethan leaned against the window, his feet crossed at the ankles. Josh paced slowly, looking down the wide corridor every once in a while. Really, we had no idea where any potential threat could come from. It could crash through the ceiling for all we knew.
None of us spoke.
Should I be more nervous? I was waiting to face head-on the threat my mother had been running from my entire childhood. But I was eerily calm, as calm as the abandoned airport. I’d made peace with whatever happened next. If I was to die, I was taking him down with me.
The sharp sound of glass shattering in the distance was the first sign we were no longer alone.
We all rose to our feet, and the guys positioned themselves in front of me. Tyler and Alec pulled their guns, and Ethan conjured an angry blue fireball. I’d already transferred all the extra Light I could to them. We were as prepared as we could be, so I just planted my feet wide and waited, craning my neck to see through the gap between Alec and Tyler’s broad shoulders.
Davis’s men barely made a sound as they approached. The breaking glass had likely been a distraction to get us all looking down the wide corridor, because when they appeared, they converged on us from all directions.
A shadow caught my eye, dancing jerkily on the concrete floor to my left, and I turned just in time to see several masked men rappel down the tall windows and shoot the glass. It all happened so fast, their movements so precise and practiced that I barely had time to blink before one of them landed mere feet from me.
The guys tightened their position around me, boxing me in, as the masked men approached. Despite the assailants’ dramatic entrance, they weren’t shooting or moving to attack. They just surrounded us, guns pointed.
One of them stepped forward and spoke, his voice muffled through the mask. “Hand over the girl, and we’ll kill you quickly.”
For a moment, no one spoke. My heart battered against my chest, and my breathing sounded obnoxiously loud.
I couldn’t see Tyler’s face, but I could see the way his cotton shirt pulled taut over his tense muscles; I could imagine the way his gray eyes narrowed on the piece of shit threatening to kill them. When he spoke, his voice was firm and loud. “No.”
As soon as the word left his lips, Tyler and Alec both fired in rapid succession, taking out two men each with clean headshots before anyone else could react. Ethan threw the fireball, the blue flames engulfing his victim faster than any fire I’d ever seen; he threw more as fast as he could conjure them.
Josh simply backed up, his back connecting with my right arm, and watched everything with a look of intense concentration.
Davis’s men started firing.
Every bullet came within a foot of us and then dropped to the ground. The tinkling sound of ammo piling up at our feet mingled with the deafening gunfire.
“Take out the blond one!” someone shouted.
So far, only bullets had been flying at us, but when more assailants started running up, it became apparent Davis had sent in his Variants too.
Unnaturally fierce wind started to lift anything in the area that wasn’t tied down. At the same time, several machines—transport buggies, vacuum cleaners, anything electronic and on wheels—started careening straight for Josh.
Alec isolated the Variant with the wind ability and the one with the tech ability and took them both out, their screams of pain audible even over the rest of the