Beside her, Caleb let out a soft snort as the room began to fill with the murmur of quiet consternation. Brielle couldn’t blame him. McKay was laying it on kind of thick. But then again, she supposed he needed to. Once the people he’d recruited got an idea of what they were walking into, how many of them would want to bail on the mission before it even got started?
“Maybe it’s time you told us who you are and what we’re doing here,” some guy in the back of the room said, pitching his voice to be heard above the background noise. “If you could fill us in on why the hell we had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that promised us five years in a federal supermax prison if we ever reveal any details of this mission, that’d be great, too.”
“While you’re at it,” a woman said from directly behind Brielle, “can you also explain why you brought us here in vehicles with blacked-out windows and why the driver wouldn’t tell us where we were going?”
Brielle had to admit that last part had unsettled her a little bit, too. About an hour ago, five vans with blacked out windows had shown up at the safe house. McKay hadn’t given them any information about who was driving them or where they were going. He’d simply told them all to pair up and get into a vehicle. Twenty minutes later, Brielle and Caleb’s driver had dropped them off at the warehouse where they’d found the rest of the STAT team and Julian and Kiara waiting. Brielle knew she was dealing with covert types, but really?
“My name is McKay,” Caleb’s boss said, his voice calm, clearly not flustered by the group’s rapid-fire questions. “The agency I work for is unimportant. And as far as why you’re here, to put it bluntly, you’re here to help save the world.”
That answer prompted the results Brielle expected. While most of the federal agents and cops grumbled about why he was being so mysterious, a few actually stood up, like they were going to head for the exit.
“As we speak, there are nineteen nuclear warheads set to detonate under New York City,” McKay said, his firm voice cutting through the chatter and stopping everyone in their tracks. “Conservative estimates put the death toll from the underground blast and the subsequent collapse of the city at somewhere around four million people.”
A guy in tactical gear who’d gotten to his feet a moment ago dropped heavily into his chair, his face pale. “You’re joking.”
McKay pinned him with a look. “I assure you I’m not. Unfortunately, it gets worse.”
Everyone else still standing took their seats again, the warehouse falling silent.
“The nukes are being used to power a series of lasers positioned around the city,” McKay continued. “Those laser beams will bounce off a network of satellites that will direct them back down to earth, taking out the majority of the nuclear weapons in the world, along with the ships, planes, submarines, and missile platforms carrying them. We’re looking at as many as three million deaths from the initial attack and another ten million from the long-term effects of the radiation scatter. It will take years—decades even—to clean it all up. On top of that, you can add in the likelihood of multiple countries launching preemptive large-scale conventional attacks against their neighbors in order to take advantage of the suddenly crippled superpowers. We’re looking at generations of war with countless deaths.”
Around Brielle, the federal agents and cops alike looked stunned. She didn’t realize she’d reached out and taken Caleb’s hand until she felt him give hers a reassuring squeeze. A few seats down from them, Julian stared at their joined hands for a moment before meeting her gaze, a surprised expression on his face.
“Can we evacuate the city?” a worried-looking guy with gray seasoning his otherwise dark hair asked quietly. “Get the rest of the NYPD, fire department, and mayor’s office involved? Try to get as many people off the island and out of harm’s way as we can? That will save some lives, right?”
McKay sighed. “As much as I’d like to, we can’t do that. Even if we could come up with a way to evacuate the island without causing widespread panic, we can’t do it without tipping off the people we’re trying to stop. We don’t know when they plan on setting off the nukes, but we can’t risk them doing it sooner if they see us coming. Bottom line, it’s on us to save the city and everyone else.”
“Who the hell are we up against, anyway?” the same older man with the salt-and-pepper hair demanded. “More importantly, how do we stop them?”
When McKay didn’t say anything right away, Brielle glanced at Caleb before doing the same to Kiara and the rest of the STAT team farther down the row. As soon as it became clear they’d have to bring in outsiders, the issue of protecting the team’s supernatural secrets had come up.
Some of them—well, mostly Caleb—thought they should simply let the backup personnel figure things out on their own. Sort of a survival-of-the-fittest kind of thing. But the idea of letting good people get slaughtered when they ran into Uriel Cerano and his nearly indestructible security force—or, even worse, those terrifying ghouls—was more than the rest of the team were willing to accept. So they decided as a group to tell the federal agents and cops as much as feasible, leaving McKay to decide exactly what and how much to reveal.
“The answer to your first question is more complicated than you could possibly imagine, and it’s the reason all of you had to sign those extremely restrictive NDAs,” McKay said, “which is why the answer to your second question is going to end up being less straightforward than I’d like.”
No one complained this time, even though McKay had said a lot without actually saying anything at all.
“The people you’ll be facing today possess supernatural abilities,” McKay said in a flat, no-nonsense tone. “Xavier Harrington, the man behind this nuclear nightmare, can essentially see the future…or at least different possible futures. His personal security force is filled with men and women who will be faster, stronger, and harder to kill than any of you because they cannot only heal from almost any wound but also survive damage that would kill a regular human. On top of that, the head of that security force—a man named Uriel Cerano—possesses telekinetic abilities.”
Everyone stared at McKay, disbelief on their faces.
“You’re telling us this guy can move objects with his mind?” a man said incredulously.
McKay gave him a nod. “Including bullets and anything else you throw at him.”
“That’s impossible,” another man said. “People don’t have supernatural powers.”
McKay let out another sigh. “Jake, could you please give them a demonstration?”
Brielle thought Jake would shift, showing off his fangs, claws, and glowing eyes, but when he stood and walked to the front of the room to join McKay, he took a folding pocketknife from his cargo pocket and flicked it open, then rested his other hand on the table and plunged the blade into it.