Page 155 of Almost Midnight

“How long have you been waiting for them?” Malek asked the human.

His voice, like Nick’s had in the beginning, sounded more curious than hostile.

“Since maybe a hundred years since the last war,” Tai said, speaking for the man with the square jaw. “They haven’t left here in ages. They came down here to protect the portal. To make sure no more hostile beings came through.”

When they all turned to stare at her, the young seer blinked, then seemed to realize how her words sounded.

“Well, nothim,obviously,” Tai explained, pointing at the man with the square jaw. She glanced back at the faces on the other side of the glass. “But they’ve hadsomeoneon the portals since they first began to discover them. For every single door they find, they build one of these stations and stand guard.”

Her brow scrunched as she looked at the red-faced human.

“They found them sort of gradually and haphazardly, I think,” she added. “They saw vampires and seers coming from the same few regions of the world, so they went looking for the source, and found the portals Dimitry Yi and his people had been using to bring seers to this version of Earth.”

She met gazes with the human in the H.R.A. uniform.

“I’m guessing they still gas or shoot whoever comes through.” Tai’s lips pursed as she stared at the human, who Nick now had no doubt whatsoever was having his mind thoroughly read by the young seer. “They experiment on some of them,” she clarified.

She continued to frown lightly as she read the man.

“They believe a lot of crazy stuff,” she said next. “They think the non-human races have embedded agents here, already living on this world, and their only job is to bring in more of their own kind. For conquest. Full-blown extermination of the human population. Rape of human women. Dilution of the human race. Etcetera.”

The male human’s jaw pushed out more as he clenched it.

Tai only stared back at him.

“Thatiswhy you’re here,” the uniformed human declared.

None of them bothered to answer him.

It absolutely wasn’t why they were there, of course, but Nick wasn’t sure which thing he should say, from the strategic point of view. He didn’t know if that was why the others didn’t speak, either, but he guessed it was.

Nick’s eyes roamed instead over the glass wall. It rose all the way up to the rock ceiling above. Nick could feel from the vibrations coming off the glass that it would likely shock him badly if he touched it, and that there was a good chance it would kill the mortals.

“Don’t touch the wall, anyone,” he said mildly. “It’s electrified. Deadly.”

His eyes returned to the H.R.A. guard.

“So what’s the plan here?” He held out his hands in a question, then let them fall to his sides. “We all just hang out here in a holding pattern until more of our friends show up? Is that it?”

“It won’t be long now,” the man retorted. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Still seems like it would make more sense ifwewere the ones on that side of the wall. Not you,” Nick pointed out.

“So you can pass through the portal and signal more of your vamp and glow-eye friends?” the man sneered. “I don’t think so, corpse boy.”

Nick almost smiled.

“Corpse boy” was similar to what Jordan called him a few times when they were first forced to work together on the N.Y.P.D.

Jordan only got openly racist with Nick a handful of times, and generally only when Nick did something to really piss the human off. He’d almost forgotten that particular insult, or how anti-vampire Damon had been when they first crossed paths. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken those words to his face.

He glanced at Tai.

The girl looked unconcerned.

It took Nick a few seconds to remember why.

Then his eyebrow rose.

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