There was also a lot of not-so-basic equipment: silver-laced rope, blades, kukri knives, bullets. For a week, Mirren had pulled his best human workers off debris cleanup and had them shoring up the walls and ceiling of the mill, the only space big enough to convert into training space until they got the training center finished. If they got it finished. The mill wasn’t luxurious or high-tech, but it would work.
If they only knew who they were fighting.
“What strategy can we have if we don’t know what the fuck we’re up against?” Mirren scrubbed his hands over his face, hating the helpless feeling.
“Everybody coming tonight needs to know everything. We need any and all ideas. Agreed?” Aidan’s phone buzzed and he sent a quick text. “Cage and Nik are on their way. Robin’s AWOL.”
“Figures. She’ll be here if it suits her, and if it doesn’t, she’ll be gone. We can’t count on that damned shifter.”
“Then it’s your loss.” Robin stood in the open doorway, wearing impossibly tight jeans, an impossibly tight black-and-white-striped shirt (or at least Mirren thought it was black), and a navel ring.
“Seriously?” He climbed to his feet and stalked around her. God, the woman was built like a matchstick. “You thought you could train in that getup? On a dance floor, maybe.”
“Oh, stick a fork in it.” Robin punched Mirren in the stomach on her way to sit next to Aidan on the wooden spool, and he’d be damned before he let on that it hurt. He kept underestimating her strength.
Mark and Melissa came in next, together for a change, and Mirren looked at Aidan, brows raised. They hadn’t been invited; maybe Melissa had misunderstood that her training would be separate.
Aidan shook his head. “You guys aren’t supposed to train with us tonight. Or is something wrong?”
Mirren would place bets on the latter. Mark walked with the stiff gait of a man trying to coddle an injured back, but Melissa looked ready to spit nails.
“We needed to talk to the lieutenants,” Mark said, looking around and finally spotting a folding chair off to one side of the sparring mats. Melissa saw it, too, dragged it over, and massaged his shoulders when he sat down.
“You two back together?” Robin asked. “Looks like it. Good.”
“That’s none of your business,” Melissa snapped.
Mirren closed his eyes and shook his head. They had no time for a Cage Reynolds–induced catfight. “Whoever’s fucking which person and whoever isn’t fucking anybody—put a lid on it, all of you. We’ve got bigger problems.”
“We have at least one you don’t know about,” Melissa said.
Well, wasn’t that just fucking good news?
“Nik and I do as well,” Robin said. “He’s on his way, but he’s been talking to Hannah.”
Better and better. Mirren felt the beginnings of another table-smashing itch.
“Wait until the others get here before we start sharing news.” Aidan said. “No point in having to repeat it.”
But when Nik and Cage arrived, Hannah wasn’t with them.
“She wouldn’t leave the house,” Cage said, going to lean on the wooden spool next to Robin. “But at least she’s talking—well, she’s talking to Nik. We’ll fill her in afterward.”
“I’ll do it when I go back so she can feed,” Nik said. “I promised to stay with her until daysleep.”
Hannah talking was at least one piece of good news. Mirren had been afraid she was spiraling into some dark place they might never get her out of. If Zorba could get her back, he’d more than earned his keep.
“That’s all of us then.” Aidan went to close the door and lock it. “Mirren and I will fill in Glory and Krys afterward. I put Fen, Shawn, and Britta on patrol tonight, along with some of the other scathe members. But we lost five more today—four vampires, one human.”
“The only good news about that is that it puts us at twenty-one vamps and, thanks to the new human that got in yesterday, ten feeders,” Mirren added. “So we can cut all but one of the feeders back to two each. I’ll work out the schedule before daysleep.”
Robin cleared her throat. “I can take the leftover. I’m not poisonous.”
“You are poisonous.” Mirren was getting tired of everything being a production with this shifter. She took too much work. “Stay away from fangs. Period.”
“If we need you we’ll try it, and I appreciate your willingness to be a feeder,” Aidan told her. It softened the fury she’d been directing at Mirren. “Two isn’t bad, and the new guy has offered to take the spare.”