The Countdown (The Taking #3)(15)

Griffin threw a towel at me. “Cover up. No one wants to see your blue balls.”

“That’s not what I said—” I sputtered.

But Griffin cut me off. “Relax. After all these years running a camp, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Besides, that’s not what I came to talk about.”

Water still dripped from my head and chest as I cinched the towel around my waist. “What, then? Something happen?” Suddenly the cold-ass water wasn’t my number one concern. “You hear something, from Kyra . . . or Thom?”

I didn’t want Griffin to know how badly I wanted her to say yes. Or how much more I wanted it to be about Kyra than Thom. It had been days since the Blackwater attack, since I’d had to leave Kyra with her dad and Tyler, but I hadn’t stopped regretting that decision, not once.

At least when she was with me, I’d known she was safe. I’d seen to that myself.

Now they were out there, on their own, and I had no way of knowing where they were or what might be happening to them.

That shit was eating me alive.

All because of Thom. Thom, who I might not have liked, but at least I’d trusted. Thom who’d turned us in to the Daylighters before running off to save his own ass. Now we were stuck here in hiding. I had people out there, some of them still at Silent Creek, Thom’s old camp. What if Thom went back there? What if he decided to turn on them too?

Prick!

My fingers curled into fists as I imagined wrapping them around Thom’s throat, something I wanted to do almost as badly as I wanted to wrap my arms around Kyra, just one more time.

Now who was the prick? I thought. I shouldn’t be thinking about Kyra, not in that way. She’d made her feelings more than clear—she had a guy . . . and it wasn’t me.

I stomped after Griffin who was already halfway down the hill. “Tell me. What do you know?”

“Nothing yet. But there was an incident at a diner in Wyoming, not far from a town called Sheridan,” Griffin explained as she trudged ahead of me.

We’d blown out of Blackwater after the attack, knowing the No-Suchers would never just leave it at that. They’d come after us. And when they did, they’d bring an army and enough weapons to annihilate us.

The mess at Blackwater had been bad enough, a massacre—the body count on both sides was inconceivable. As prepared as Griffin had been, it hadn’t been enough. Agent Truman’s Daylight squadron had come suited up in combat grade hazmat gear and bore an arsenal that far outmatched our own.

In Returned alone, we’d lost over two hundred. Good people destroyed beyond their ability to repair. So many victims . . . so many sacrifices.

Griffin still hadn’t forgiven herself for letting Agent Truman—who’d turned out to be her long-lost father—slip through her fingers after Willow had knocked him unconscious. She’d only left him unattended for a minute . . . maybe two, while her camp was being overrun. But by the time she’d come back he’d vanished, either lugged away by his own men . . . or healed enough to walk away on his own, since he was a Returned as well.

Eventually, Griffin had finally realized her soldiers couldn’t win the battle against the NSA’s Daylighters and she’d given the signal . . . a signal Agent Truman’s troops had been unaware of, and the Blackwater survivors had disbanded. Griffin’s strategy had been simple: scatter far and wide into the Utah desert and wait a full forty-eight hours—an inside joke for the Returned, since that was the amount of time aliens had kept us—before meeting at the designated rendezvous points.

It had been almost unbearable to just scatter the way we had. To up and leave the bodies of our fallen soldiers. But the promise of a second wave of attacks by the Daylighters left us no alternative. We couldn’t even stay and give our people the burials they’d deserved.

But that’s the way it always was with the Returned—we didn’t get the lives we should; why should our deaths be any different?

Still, some of those soldiers had been mine. Some I’d even called friends.

When all was said and done, only twenty-three surviving Returned had showed up at the rendezvous sites.

Twenty-three out of two hundred forty-nine. That was the official count we’d come up with between the two of us.

That’s one in eleven, according to Jett who was one of the twenty-three to make it out. As had Nyla.

Willow . . .

Christ, I could hardly stand to think it, but Willow was still unaccounted for. Griffin chalked her up to the over two hundred dead, but because there was no body, until we could go back to search for remains, her death could neither be confirmed nor denied, which left me in this strange sort of limbo where I couldn’t quite let myself accept it. Acceptance was too damned final.

I also couldn’t stand the idea that some douche bag Daylighter had gotten his hands on her.

So I let myself hope she was out there, working her way back to us. Same way a man gives himself just enough rope to hang himself. Eventually I’d probably end up on the wrong end of that noose.

It had been the right thing, sending Kyra away. She would have been a distraction if she’d been around during the massacre. Then maybe I wouldn’t be here either.

“What kind of incident? Did you get word about them or not?” I pushed away memories of the battlefield, of the dead Returned, as Griffin came to a stop in front of her new command tent, which was really just an ordinary canvas tent where she’d set up shop.