Page 46 of Monster Queen Rising

The trees go by. I keep the names the whole way. Mary Wylie, dead. Sarah Klein, still waiting where we couldn't reach her.

We pull into the yard. The porch light's still on. Fen's at the railing. Harek in the doorway. Dean and Daron lean against house. Crull on the top step.

Nobody speaks.

I climb out of the truck. The gravel crunches under my boots. Every one of them watches me cross the yard.

Crull opens his arms before I reach the porch. I go into them. His hand settles between my shoulder blades, steady and warm. The mark on his chest rests against mine, quiet now instead of burning.

He doesn't ask how I am.

He already knows.

Chapter seventeen

Jen

Dean's had the floor plan on the table since before dawn, but he's not looking at it anymore. He's looking at the calendar in his head.

"Ten days," he says when I sit down. "That's the window."

"For what?"

"Madison." He doesn't soften it. "She's two weeks of pregnancy out, maybe less, and it isn't slowing. We hit Allison inside ten days, or we hit it with a newborn in this house and a mother who can't move." His pen taps the plan once. "After that it only gets worse. So it's ten days."

Nobody argues.

Thaw slides the floor plan around to face me—Vance's draft, the one she drew cuffed, redrawn clean on a bigger sheet, Dean's red marks on the access points. Main building. Two wings.Barracks. The residence set back. And a box on the second story, west face, that Thaw taps with two fingers.

"That's the tank."

"Tank of what?"

"They built it for the gargoyles. Forty-one gargoyle guards on that site, and a gargoyle doesn't go down for a rifle. So they made something that does."

I stare at him.

"Their own guards."

Thaw nods once.

"Fen opens the tank, west face, into the ventilation intake. It floods the building. Every gargoyle on the site goes down inside a couple of minutes." His finger stays on the plan. "That's the good part."

"What's the bad part?"

"We don't get a bell when it wears off. The first one to get his legs back under him, the window's already closing." He looks up. "So we move like it's closing from the second that tank opens. In. Through. Out. No stopping to be thorough."

I look at the box on the second story.

"Who's on the tank."

"Fen."

My eyes find the roof again. Alone.

I hate it.

Thaw gives me another second before moving his finger to the north side of the map.