As his name was spoken, he looked at the two other males. They were standing back at a discreet distance, watching him as one might a caged, dangerous animal—as if they were assessing whether he was going to attack them.
“That is not who I am.” He put his hand over his heart. “I am… not this.”
“Okay… I know.” Apex glanced around. “We’ve got to get moving. And I’m going down there.”
There was a pause, as if each one of them was recalibrating themselves and returning to the mission, stepping away from whatever tipping point had been narrowly avoided.
Apex cleared his throat, and his voice got stronger. “I still have my prison uniform on, maybe they’ll think I wasn’t part of the escape.”
“Really?” the wolven drawled. “In those clothes, you look like you slaughtered a cow in the basement before you went on your little walk.”
Apex talked over the male. “I go out into the corridor, hit the stairs at the far end, and get down to the clinic at the lowest underground level. I isolate her and remove her out the back through the body chute. That’s where you meet me. Go down the hill from the parking lot. It’ll be about two hundred yards. You’ll see the train tracks and the chute’s entrance.”
The male’s face was composed to the point of being a mask.
“All right,” Kane said. “Go, and be safe.”
Apex stayed where he was for a moment, as if he’d seen a ghost. And then he turned away to the panel that was set into the wall and lifted it up.
Kane went to ask the wolven if they could stay for a little bit to make sure—
“Shit.” Apex leaned into an internal chamber. “Steel. I can smell the fresh metal.” The male retracted his upper body out of the tight space. “They’ve wrapped the dumbwaiter with all sorts of mesh. No dematerializing down there.”
Apex stood with his hands on his hips and his eyes staring into the dark hole in the wall like he was hoping for some kind of magic solution.
“We’ve got a real problem if I have to go a more direct route,” he muttered.
“The wolven and I can be your backup,” Kane pointed out.
“No, you need to take care of the nurse when I evac her and he’s no help.”
The wolven popped his brows. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t know the layout of this place.”
“Fine, but I have skills, and by the way, your tone was objectionable.”
“So the next time I point out the obvious I’ll give you flowers.”
“I prefer white roses to red.” Callum leaned in, his eyes becoming hooded. “Write that down, will you. I don’t like repeating myself—”
Lights pierced the window and flared across the wall, the icy white glow split into squares by the panes, the swing of the illumination from a vehicle turning down the lane.
Kane moved silently across the dusty floor to look out. Down below, a guard parked and got out of a big, boxy vehicle with darkened windows. The male was twitchy, glancing around the broad open area and the cars parked grille-first into the building.
All at once, everything changed for Kane.
“He has no one with him,” he heard himself say.
Closing his eyes, he gathered himself to dematerialize through the glass—
The hard grip on his arm took him out of the trance he needed to briefly shed his physical form, and he pulled at the wolven’s hold. “I’m going down there, and getting keys to this place—”
“Bite him.” The look in the male’s eyes was strange. “Don’t use a gun. Bite him.”
The male did have a point. No sound that way, although Kane wasn’t a fighter.
He couldn’t worry about that, though. Hewouldn’tworry about that—