5
Gideon
Wylder pacedby the chess table as I delved deeper into the files the Long Night had sent us this afternoon. A lot of the information I hadn’t been able to examine thoroughly via my phone on the trip back, and we’d hurried to Roland’s funeral right after. This was my first real deep dive, but Wylder wasn’t exactly patient. Especially after the attack we’d just faced.
“We have to strike back,” he muttered. “Hit them where it hurts, give them no time to recover. Just keep hitting them again and again, until they’re forced to leave.”
Kaige looked up from where he’d been watching the fish cruise by in my aquarium. “Well, obviously. But we don’t know how, do we?”
“I’m working on it,” I said shortly. “There’s a lot to sort through here. Information on the Storm’s business activities, his strongholds, the drug trade… And I have to cross-reference it with what’s actually happening around the county right now. Finding out about some arrangement they’ve got in Timbuktu isn’t going to help us.”
I grabbed a company name and fed it into my usual search app. The results turned up nothing remotely inspiring. I sighed and went back to the files.
“Has the Long Night said anything about manpower?” Rowan asked. “I got the impression we’re on our own as far as putting people on the streets.”
I nodded. “It sounded like the whole reason he brought us on is to avoid putting his own men in the line of fire. We have Mercy and the Claws who’ve stuck around, and at least some of the Nobles…”
I glanced at Wylder sideways, but he just kept pacing without saying a word. He hadn’t talked to his dad about the Long Night’s proposal and the deal we’d made with him yet. I didn’t see how we had a hope in hell of pulling off a victory without the full power of the Noble forces behind us, and we weren’t getting that without Ezra’s go-ahead, but I wasn’t going to question my best friend right now. Not when he’d just watched our enemies tear apart his brother’s funeral.
Not when I was at least partly to blame for that funeral being necessary in the first place.
I ran another search, and my spirits lifted slightly. My fingers sped over the keys as I homed in on the bit of data that’d shown a little promise. After a few minutes, a smile stretched across my face.
“What?” Wylder asked, coming over to lean against the desk. He’d picked up on my good mood.
“I think I’ve got something. The Long Night has this company listed as the Storm’s main weapons supplier in the States. I’m seeing evidence that they’ve got a major shipment headed toward Paradise Bend—it should arrive around late evening tomorrow.”
“More weapons,” Kaige grumbled. “Perfect.”
I searched through the records I’d dug up, and my heart started to sink again. “Maybe not just that. The truck they’re using is outfitted with seating as well. From the looks of it, the Storm is bringing in a contingent of new men too.”
Wylder spat out a curse. “Over my dead body.”
I very much hoped it didn’t come to that.
“We won’t let them get far,” I said, checking my maps for possible routes. “I think we can hit them on their way into the county. They won’t expect us to have figured out the shipment is coming, considering we only realized thanks to the Long Night’s inside information. We’ll take them by surprise, mow down all their new soldiers, and confiscate the weapons for ourselves.”
Rowan hummed. “The first step to pushing them out of the Bend is not letting them get any more of a foothold than they already have.”
“I like it,” Kaige said with a jerk of a nod. He cracked his knuckles. “I just wish we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow.”
“We work with what we’ve got,” Wylder said. “It’s a good plan. You can figure out where we’d need to ambush them, Gideon?”
“I think so. It should be easy to track the truck through street cams and other footage now that I know what to look for. We’ll stay ready to course-correct if they deviate from the most obvious route. And I’ll…”
I hesitated, trailing off. I’d been going to say that I’d be right there with the others, directing them on the ground. But the image had flashed through my head of Xavier looming over me, a knife flashing in his hand and a cruel grin stretched across his scarred face. Even though I wasn’t facing the slightest bit of exertion, my lungs started to constrict.
“You can give us instructions from here just fine,” Wylder said. “That’s what you’ve always done before. Or you can come along—it was your idea. Whatever you think would work best.”
The fact that he was letting me decide what I was most comfortable with only made me feel more guilty.
I couldn’t say I’d been wrong to get more involved in the hands-on fight against the Storm and his men, but my last major plan had backfired on us. I’d gotten a good ally killed, I’d nearly been killed by Xavier, and my friends and my woman had needed to risk their lives to rescue me. The one victory I’d scored during my capture, the tracker I’d managed to stick to one of Xavier’s boots, hadn’t turned up any useful intel yet.
Some good had come out of the initial plan, at least. I’d been able to pass on all kinds of data from the computer I’d hacked in the Storm’s local headquarters, some of which had helped me put together the pieces for our current plan alongside the Long Night’s data. But ultimately, I’d been a liability. I wanted to destroy Xavier and the Storm any way I could, with bullets and fists as well as my computers if need be, but what if I only screwed things up again?
I set the question of whether I’d join the ambush in person aside and focused on another matter we could no longer ignore. “We’ll need a lot of people. The Storm could be bringing in as many as twenty, maybe even thirty men on this truck. They’ll be well-armed. We want to outnumber them enough that we can deal with them easily without many—if any—casualties on our side.”
Rowan frowned. “Between the Claws and us, we’d only have a small advantage in numbers.”