Page 93 of Shadow Blind

The puzzled inquiry came from Samuel, who was often baffled by Rawlings’s idioms. But the query didn’t come over the comm, or through the mouth. It came through the Neealaho, the neural web that linked all his warriors’ thoughts. All except for the former SEALs.

The four woohanta had not been invited to submit to the merging ceremony. They would not have survived. Thus, they were not bound to the Neealaho, and unable to communicate telepathically with the rest of his warriors. This put them at a distinct disadvantage, although they were unaware of it. The headsets he and his men reluctantly wore were for the benefit of the former SEALs, since there was no way to communicate with them outside of modern technology.

Wolf absently listened to the woohanta’s complaints as he scanned the compound again. He almost told them to hold their tongues, but it was unnecessary. His scope held no one in sight. Between the wind and whispering voices, the guards would hear nothing spoken here.

Samuel. Fence. Wolf instinctively sent the order through the Neealaho, but on Samuel’s neural path.

It was easy to send an overall message through the neural web. But it took concentration to identify and follow an individual warrior’s mental pathway and link with them privately. Of all his warriors, Samuel was the easiest to reach. They’d been hee-javaanee since grade school, joined Shadow Mountain together, even been linked to the Neealaho through Jude at the same time. Touching Samuel’s mind was akin to touching his own. His second eased up to the chain-link fence and started cutting the links.

“Once through the fence, spread out. Stay low. Strike on my command,” Wolf said softly into the comm and through the Neealaho.

“Don’t seem right without Aiden beside us.” The southern twang gave the speaker away.

A grunt of agreement came through the comm. It sounded tense. Worried. Probably Cosky, then. Kait, Cosky’s anistino, was waiting in front of Aiden’s isolation chamber, desperate to heal him. Wolf had forbidden this until the final medical results came in. She had not been pleased, but they could not have their strongest healer compromised when they might have need of her gift.

Wolf agreed with Rawlings, though. It felt wrong not to have his javaanee beside him. But the elder gods had reasons for the paths their chosen’s feet took. In Aiden’s case, to the ER instead of Petropavlovsk.

It was not for Wolf to question the path taken.

Samuel cut the last link, stuffed the bolt cutters into his kit, and pulled it back on. Crouching, Wolf shuffled to the hole and shimmied through as Samuel peeled the chain link to the side. The snow was thigh deep on the other side. He waded through it alongside the chain-link until he was out of the way. Dropping belly-flat again, he scanned the compound through his rifle scope as the rest of his warriors wiggled through the hole and spread out across the snow. The north end of the compound was higher than the south, so even with the berm of ice and snow fifty feet ahead, he still had an excellent view of the compound and the houses it contained. The wind was gentler this close to the ground, stroking instead of buffeting. He scanned again. Still no movement.

With the weight of his body spread across the snowpack and the top layer beneath him more ice than snow, Wolf didn’t sink far into the layers below him. But that wouldn’t hold true once he moved.

Finally, the last man crawled through the hole in the fence—which must be Mackenzie because of all the motherfucker this and motherfucker that’s.

“Aggress Two, countdown?” he asked into the comm as he continued scanning the compound with his scope.

One minute. The update came through the Neealaho.

“One minute to strike,” Wolf said into the comm for the woohantas’ sake.

A flicker of movement at the guard’s shack froze his scope in place. The door opened, and a parka clad guard with his hood pulled up, stepped out the door with his rifle hanging.

“Aggress Two, we have movement at mark three. Repeat. Movement at M3. Guard turning south.”

“Understood.” The affirmative was cool, almost casual.

Mark one was the electricity. Mark two, Kuznetsov and the weapon. Three, the guards.

Wolf watched the guard, the edges of his parka flapping, stagger directly into the savage wind. The door opened again. A second guard, dressed like the first, stepped onto the house’s porch. This one turned north, away from the wind.

“Second guard headed north,” Wolf whispered.

“Understood,” Tomas said with his habitual calmness. “Thirty seconds to strike. Repeat. Thirty to strike.”

One…two…three…

Wolf counted the seconds off in his head while monitoring their mark’s house through the scope pressed to his right eye.

When the electricity went down, the guards might return to their shelter. Eight…nine…ten… Or they might not. Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen. Professionals would immediately head toward their betanei, their boss, determined to protect their paycheck.

He shifted his scope in the direction the first guard had taken. Nothing. Twenty-five…twenty-six…twenty-seven…

The compound went dark.

“Aggress!” Wolf said through the comm and the Neealaho.

With his men beside him, he bolted up. The thigh deep snow sucked at his legs, turning the charge across the snow into a slog. It only took seconds to force their way through the boot sucking snow to the berm of ice and snow that separated them from the plowed parking lot.

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