At least it was another warm body. The Penton Omega Force team might finally get off the ground now. Nik, Robin, Cage, Will, and Mirren himself made a good start. Mirren wanted them all training together in order to earn the kind of trust they’d need in fieldwork. There was one other option. “What about Jeffries?” Mirren asked.
Max was a pain in the ass, but he was a good fighter.
“Gone.” Aidan set his glass down and leaned back in the chair. “He’s taking Rob’s body back to Columbus, where the family buries its dead. I don’t know how the colonel will pull it off, but he wants Rob buried next to his mother and Randa’s twin brother.”
Mirren thought Colonel Rick Thomas could pretty much get around any law that needed circumventing, even explaining away an unofficial death. “When’s he coming back?”
Aidan shook his head. “Don’t know—that’s between him and the colonel. But we don’t want him back until his head’s in the right place.”
Mirren hated to lose anyone at this point. “Things are better now that Reynolds is back, but we still need to get our numbers up.” The restless, itchy feeling between his shoulder blades—the drugged aftermath of the shape-shifter bonding—was long gone, and Mirren got to his feet. “What happened at that job site was no accident.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Aidan took a deep breath. “And while we’re trying to figure out who might be sabotaging us, ponder this: Matthias Ludlam is still alive. He escaped, or was helped to escape. No one knows where he is.”
No one spoke. The crackle of a log in the fireplace reverberated like a gunshot through the room, and Mirren would swear the temperature dropped several degrees. “How the fuck is that possible? We were told—”
Aidan held up a hand. “I know. The Tribunal members who sided with Penton in the standoff this summer all got messages from Frank Greisser’s office in Vienna that Matthias had been executed in Virginia. We all thought it was true.”
Mirren hated Greisser. The man looked like a fucking angel and had the integrity of a pit viper. “Greisser lied.” It was more statement than question.
“That would be my guess, although his people are claiming a miscommunication.” Aidan turned to Nik and Robin and gave them a quick rundown of the vampire political structure and its major players—Greisser, the Tribunal head; Meg Lindstrom, the US representative; and UK rep Edward Simmons—and which countries sided with Penton and which didn’t.
“Edward Simmons found out from an American vampire who applied for a transfer into his territory that someone—he doesn’t know who—hired this American and a colleague to take Matthias from his cell at the Virginia estate and leave him in a wooded area in rural West Virginia, where he was picked up—again, we don’t know by whom.”
Mirren had been in his favorite spot against the wall, but the itchy feeling came back, only worse. Time to pace instead. “What are the chances this guy knows more than he’s saying?”
Aidan shrugged. “I heard it thirdhand from Meg, but she says Edward believes him and that the guy was bothered by his part in Matthias’s escape. He knew if he talked, he’d be dead before he left the States. Edward has given him the equivalent of a witness protection agreement in the UK.”
“Which begs the obvious questions.” Cage’s voice was quiet, but tight with coiled anger. “Where is the bastard? And is Frank Greisser behind it?” He paused. “My vote would be yes on the second question.”
“Mine as well,” Aidan said. “Frank was furious that we one-upped him by going to the colonel and getting humans involved in our affairs. Plus, he and Matthias are longtime allies. But we can’t prove he was behind it, not yet. And wherever Matthias is, he’s staying under the radar for now.”
“We should go after him.” Robin spoke for the first time since the bonding, and Mirren was glad to see the usual fire back in her expression. “They don’t know Nik or me. We could be the main team, and a couple of you guys could be our shadow team. You’ll draw the attention, feed us information, and we can take him out. He has to surface.”
What a perfectly fucked-up idea. “You have no—”
“Wait, Mirren.” Aidan steepled his fingers in front of his face and looked at Robin, his brows drawn down in thought. “That’s not a bad idea.”
Had the man lost his mind? “But—”
Aidan held up a hand. “Mirren, let me finish. I think it’s a good idea, but not until you’ve worked together enough to know each other well. You need to communicate easily. You have to trust each other. Nik and Robin, you have to get used to working around vampires. That means we have to trust you with our secrets—how to kill us, what our weakness are as well as our strengths. And we need to learn more about shifters. Obviously, something happened here tonight that we hadn’t anticipated.”