Rob saluted the brick wall and grinned at Mark. “Got it. Be back in a half hour or so, unless Glory’s too busy to interpret Mirren’s secret code and I have to wait on her.”
Mark watched him descend the hill into downtown Penton, where a long wooden building had been erected at the site of the old barbecue place that had been bombed earlier in the year by Aidan’s psycho brother. His late psycho brother.
All that mess seemed like a million years ago, not nine months.
The Chow House had been Will’s idea, as had the communal houses that gave them all places to live while rebuilding the rest of the town.
Eventually, if they could get Penton back up and running, they’d all reestablish their own homes. For now, those doing the rebuilding needed places to live and eat. Six communal houses with lighttight spaces beneath them sat at the site of the old mill village.
A block away was the Chow House, where Glory oversaw the preparation of three meals a day for any among the few remaining humans who wanted to stop by—at least until an hour before dusk, when she went to greet her rising vampire. And here, at the site of the former community center, the new Omega Force training facility would overlook it all.
“We taking a break?” Max rounded the corner from the other side of the wall, wiping sweat off his face with the front of his camo-patterned Army Rangers T-shirt.
Mark handed him a bottle of water and took the last one for himself. “Yeah, might as well. We just need to finish this wall, and it’s all ladder work. Going to be a slow go. We need to get Mirren’s instructions deciphered before we work on the back wall.”
Max looked at the red bricks stacked neatly on the concrete pad inside the building’s framework. “Be easier if we could bring some real brick masons in here. One of us could oversee things and they’d never have to know about the”—he fluttered his arms in a poor imitation of bat wings—“big bad vampires.”
“We talked about it.” Mark stepped over a couple of extra two-by-fours and sat on the nearest pile of bricks, stretching his sore back muscles. Old back injuries and construction made unhappy bedfellows.
At least there was shade inside the rectangular framework. “Too risky to bring in brick masons, though. Even if they didn’t find out about the vamps, they might be curious about the town.”
“I guess.” Max took a swig of water. “Now that you mention it, I’m not sure I’d know what to say when they asked why the town looks like an atomic bomb went off on Main Street. Or who lives here in this heap of destruction. Or how it is that a guy named Aidan Murphy, who no one outside Penton has ever seen, owns everything.”
Mark knew that answer; he’d brokered every last real-estate deal. Aidan owned Penton outright, down to the last pinecone and cracked sidewalk.
Max sat on the concrete slab and stretched out six-feet-three-inches of muscle and alpha male. Mark had never considered himself a slouch in the physique department, but Max and Rob both made him feel like an eighth-grader in remedial gym class. Max’s dark hair had grown out a little from the buzz cut he’d had when he and Rob had first arrived in Penton—but not much. He still looked like an Army Ranger.
Three months ago, Max and Rob had slipped into town at night with the colonel, trying to figure out how this combined Ranger-vampire antiterrorism team might work. Max currently sported only one fading bruise, on his left cheek—but with Cage back in Penton their sparring would probably pick up where it had left off.
The thought of Cage Reynolds gave Mark a headache.
“Where are things with the Omega Force?” Mark took a sip of water and screwed the cap back onto the bottle. “I heard there are some new team members coming in. Does that mean you guys will get to do something besides build houses and training facilities? That’s gotta be frustrating.” As frustrating as it was for an investment analyst to be building houses and training facilities.
Max finished off his water and rolled the plastic bottle between his palms. Fidgeting. The guy always needed to be moving. “The colonel was so anxious to get the project rolling he put a team together in Texas back in July. They’ve already handled a case—that bombing last month in Houston. Their team leader and a couple of others are out of commission for a while, so two of them are coming here.”
“How’d they get up and moving so fast?” The whole vampire-Ranger thing had been dreamed up here as a way for the human special-ops people to help the vampires survive the pandemic crisis without outing them to other humans. In return, the Penton vampires would train to help on counterterrorism maneuvers. Only the Houston team had already wrapped up a case while Penton’s team was, well, laying brick.