“What aren’t you telling me, Anita?”

“Dominga’s nephew Max is the bad guy. He’s taken over where Dominga left off on the zombie slaves.”

“Why did he take Connie and Tomas?”

“I think Tomas was incidental, wrong place, wrong time.”

“Oh God, oh God, you think he’s going to do that to Connie.”

“He’s threatening it.”

“Why? Why after all this time?”

“How much time do we have to find her? I need you to think, Manny.”

“My kids are missing.”

“And the more information we have, the better the odds for bringing them back safe and sound.”

“All right, all right, if he has to make a container to house the soul, it will take weeks.”

“Assume he has a container.”

“He’ll have to draw symbols, verve, and if he’s a true believer he’ll have to persuade the loa to ride him, or to ride the victim.”

“I don’t think he’s a true believer,” I said.

“An hour, maybe. You say he had verve all over his altar area like

Dominga did.”

“Yes,” I said.

“He’ll be careful to draw the verve then, because Dominga believed very much that the symbols helped call power and protect her. If he draws all the symbology, then at least an hour, maybe a little more. Does that help?”

“Yes, it does.”

“I’m on my way to the bridal shop now.”

“Go to Rosita, stay with her.”

“No.”

“All right, but I may roll out before you get here if we have a target.”

“Save my kids, Anita.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will.”

What else was there to say? We hung up.

63

THE GPS ON Connie’s phone and Tomas’s phone led us to the same cemetery. I expected that, but what I didn’t expect was that GPS knew which crypt the phones were in. That didn’t guarantee that they were still with their phones, but it was our best bet. If they weren’t with their phones we had to search two acres of graveyard, including about twenty crypts, one at a time, like making entry on a block of apartments. So we assumed they were in the crypt with their phones; it gave us a place to start, and a plan. The “we” wasn’t Zerbrowski and RPIT; it was our local SWAT. A lot of preternatural branch marshals had been forced on SWAT across the country for no-announce warrants, which all warrants of execution were, but a few of us had proven ourselves enough to be invited to train with them, and were allowed to go out with the team. Most of the marshals who had been invited to play with SWAT hadn’t been able to keep the training up. It wasn’t the weapons practice—that was the easy part—it was the physical prerequisites, and gym time, that most of them failed. Honestly, if I hadn’t been more than human I might not have made all of them either.

“This will be my first assault on a crypt,” Killian said, smiling and tense in the dark as we stood behind the Lenco Bear Cat. They could call it an armored rescue vehicle if they wanted to, but it always looked big, black, slightly sinister, and very military. It could take heavy rifle fire and protect the men inside it, or even hiding behind it.

“If this is your first crypt, you haven’t been hanging around with me enough,” I said.

“Yeah, Blake takes you to the best places,” Hill said.

In the movies you can always see everyone’s face on SWAT, but in reality the helmets and gear hide nearly everything. I knew Killian was blond and pale Irish, and that Hill was dark and middle-of-America-not-from-anywhere ethnic, but all I could tell suited up in the spring dark was that Killian was a few inches taller than me, and Hill was much taller. Most of the men standing in the dark with us were taller than average, and then you had Saville, who even towered over these guys. He was darkly African American, but again I only knew that because I knew him. We were all generic in our SWAT gear, except for height and size.

“Will the ram work on a crypt door?” Saville asked. If we’d been doing a normal entry he’d have been using the ram to bust in the door.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

Hermes said, “We brought stuff that will help us knock louder if we need to.” He was tall, dark, and I guess handsome under all the gear. His wife thought so. I knew that from the time she made a point of meeting me, after I helped save his life but broke his leg in the process.

“We have about five minutes to figure out which dynamic entry we’re making,” Montague—Monty—said.

Another thing they get wrong in most movies is how much time you wait before you rush in. And you don’t really “rush” in; you go in with a plan. Our plan was up on the tallest hill they could find with Sergeant Hudson and Sutton, their sniper. They were going to use the tech on Sutton’s gear to see what they thought of the door. There were maps of the cemetery, but not specifics of the crypts and what their doors were constructed of; the way we got to “knock” and enter depended on the kind of door. It might be better to use small explosives on the lock than to blow the door open, because the stone construction of the crypt meant we couldn’t see inside with infrared, so we didn’t know where the hostages were standing. It would suck to blow a hole in Manny’s kids because they were on top of the door we blew. We were waiting for more intel, as in intelligence, so we could go in smart. Slow is steady. Steady is smooth. Smooth is fast. Fast is deadly. I knew it was true, but if I hadn’t had the rest of the team to keep me steady, I might have rushed in, because it was Connie and Tomas. I’d known them since Connie was Tomas’s age and he was a toddler. I didn’t want to go back to Manny with anything other than a win on this one.

“If Blake were the size of Saville the ram would work,” Monty said. He was the same size and build as Hermes, so only Hermes’s slightly broader shoulders let you know who was who, unless you saw the nameplate, or knew how they carried their gear. I knew, because I’d been training with them at least once a month for a year. They’d seen what my more than human speed and strength could do on the tests they had to pass to keep their place on the team.

“I’ve known a few guys Saville’s size that are even faster and stronger than I am.”

“Lycanthropes?” Hermes asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’d like to see what one of your guys would do on the obstacle course,” he said.

“And the weight room,” Saville said.

I grinned. “You’d need specialty bars in the weight room for them to max out.”

“You mean like the bars made for power lifters, so they don’t bend the steel?” Jung asked.

“Something like that.”

Jung was still the only green-eyed Asian American that I’d ever met, but now I knew that he was a Korean/Chinese/Dutch American whose grandparents had met during the Korean War, and his mother had married a Chinese American man whose family had been in the country generations longer.

The radios in our ears came to life, and it was Hudson. “Crypt door just opened, but one of the hostages is tied up in it.”