Page 94 of Almost Midnight

The two women looked at one another, and giggled.

The older one giggled louder, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Six minutes, Nick,” a voice murmured in his ear. “Not a second more.”

It was Kit.

She was monitoring how long it would take the front desk camera feeds to get to someone who actually mattered back at Archangel. She’d told him she’d do her best to slow down that occurrence, but if she tried to stop it altogether, it would trigger the general alarm, and then the other sites would immediately know there’d been a breach.

It was a part of the system she’d warned them about, back in the Cauldron.

There was no way around it.

“I’m supposed to visit a friend of mine here,” Nick continued in that lulling, pulling voice. “Could you tell me, do you have a Damon Jordon on the premises? He’s a police officer, like me. Only he was racially injured in the line of duty…”

The euphemism might have made Nick snort on a different day.

“Racially injured,” the older woman said, her cheeks now bright red.

Her eyes flinched as a scrap of relevant information seemed to reach her mind.

“Right!” she said, responding to Nick’s gentle nudge via the thrall. “Right! Mr. Jordan… I remember. But I think he was moved from his original room. They have him in the lower levels now for security reasons…”

“Can he still get visitors?” Nick pushed a little more coercion into the question.

“He’s not supposed to,” the younger woman blurted, apologetic.

Nick’s eyes swiveled to hers, and he saw her thinking, trying to find some way to help him, to give Nick what he was asking for.

“Could you make an exception, love?” he asked sweetly.

“I… I’m sure we can. I don’t… I mean, I really want to… for such a kind, thoughtful friend.” She blushed even darker. “I just don’t know how.”

“Oh, brother,” Wynter muttered into the comm.

He’d nearly forgotten she could see all of this, too.

The four of them, Wynter, Morley, Forrest, and Kit, had parked the van by an access hole in the ground, where the fiber-optic cables ran underground to reach the main building. The three of them were likely all crouched down in that tunnel in the dark, Kit with her terminal open while Morley and Wynter watched from two other terminals nearby.

He fought back his reaction to Wynter watching him do this.

“Maybe you could come back tomorrow?” the blue-eyed nurse said hopefully. “I’m working a double, so I’ll be here in the morning, too… and so will our manager. She could call the Archangel people, maybe? See if they would grant you special permission to go down there to see your friend?”

Nick smiled wider.

“You can’t just sneak me down there tonight?” he coaxed. “I really only need a few minutes. I need to see for myself that he’s all right.”

The two nurses exchanged looks again. The younger of the two, with the thick braid of black hair, shook her head, dismay in her eyes.

“We don’t have clearance to go down there,” she said sadly.

“Which floor is it?” Nick asked pleasantly.

“Sub-basement four,” the blue-eyed one said, her voice also sad. “But the elevators will lock down if you don’t have the right access card, and you’d have to wait until the security team gets sent over, and those are the H.R.A. guys…”

The women exchanged looks again, and the blue-eyed one shuddered.

“They’re not… very nice,” the woman said, hesitant, as if afraid to say that much. “They really hate the vamps, too. I think they’re the ones who moved him down there.”

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