Or she had been smart, anyway. Who knew what she was like now? Destroyer. Godkiller. Did that kind of thing even have a thought process? I could see Tempie destroying the world, that bitch. But not Desty. The worst thing Desty had going for her was that big brain getting in her way and making her think she knew that I would’ve picked Scout over her. Tempie I could see setting the world on fire and not giving a shit who burned—her and me had something in common there—but Desty would’ve cared. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to get hurt.
Lonely elbowed me and I snapped out of it.
“—just get back to our plan of attack,” Naomi was saying. “My teams have never faced a Destroyer. Never even heard of one. What are their weaknesses? How do you kill one?”
Clarion shook his head. “As far as we’ve been able to tell, the only way to take her out of the game is with the Sword of Judgment. I think our best bet right now is to focus in on Kathan and his legions. If the Destroyer is on his side, there won’t be anything we can do once he points her toward Halo. But if she’s not on his side yet—which our expert thinks is the case—then maybe we can get the Sword of Judgment from his foot soldier and use it to take down as many of them as possible before she is on his side.”
“So we’re on a timetable,” Naomi said.
“We have to assume so,” Clare said. “Lonely and I talked it over. We think the best plan is to hit them again while their fortress is down. Flyover reports say the only thing that survived the blast was the basement, so they’ll either use that or move to somewhere more fortified. I don’t think they’ll abandon the mansion, though. It’s got significance for them. There’s something really poetic about the way angels operate. Danny drove Kathan off the property and out of the house after he and Shannon first settled down back here, then Kathan took the property back and burned the house to the ground. I don’t think he’ll give it up. That would seem too much like a concession.”
I nodded. I wouldn’t give something up I wanted to keep, either. Not if it had taken everything I’d had to get it and sure as hell not if somebody I hated wanted to take it away from me.
“We’ll have to work out a pattern of attack that utilizes your teams,” Clarion said to Naomi. “But the main objective is going to be the same—trying to get the sword. How many bodies did you bring?”
“Nikki’s team couldn’t make it back in time, so I just brought the three teams,” Naomi said.
“It’s three more teams than we had,” Clare said.
She nodded. “If one of you draws up a map of the attack point, I can bring my team leaders in and we can talk strategy.”
I looked around the room at the guys and girls I’d gone to high school with, and the kids from Scout’s class and younger, coyotes I’d never met, crows I’d never really liked, and humans I’d never seen before tonight. The way Clare had said it sounded about right—bodies. By tomorrow night there was a pretty good chance everybody in the tattoo parlor would be bodies. I might be looking at the next generation of the Dark Mansion foundation.
Godkiller
Tough.
I saw every moment of his life and thoughts. I saw a little boy full of love and joy and music grow into a man from whom everything had been taken. I watched his heart get crushed. I watched him pick himself up and love again only to have his heart crushed again. I watched him backed into every corner imaginable, forced to do things he never wanted to think about again to survive. I watched him make the wrong decisions trying to do the right things, watched him chase the wrong things trying to stop the pain—his, others’—only to end up hurting himself more.
Everything he had done and been and hoped. Everything he’d gone through. He never stopped fighting. Even when things were at their worst, he never gave up. He tried. He failed. He tried again. He failed again. There was no one to lead him, no one to help him, no hope left, but he never quit trying.
No matter what, Tough never quit trying.
Tough
Naomi and her team leaders—an older guy with a flattop haircut and claw-mark scars all over his scalp, a guy about my age who had to be a crow with as much metal as he had in his face, and a woman I probably couldn’t take in a fight—leaned over the map Lonely had drawn of the Dark Mansion and the roads surrounding it.
“Barrick and Gause, your teams will come in along this old highway, then follow the path across this no man’s land Tough marked out—” Naomi stopped and looked at me. “You’re pretty sure they didn’t retrace your steps after that foot soldier discovered you outside the mansion? It’s still a viable entry point?”
I nodded even though I wasn’t sure.
This whole night was getting to be a blur. I’d never thought before that I would miss standing around the kitchen at the cabin talking strategy with Sissy and Ryder and Colt, but sitting up in the attic, listening to Clarion, Lonely, and Naomi’s team leaders made me wish I was back with my sister and my brothers. I didn’t want to lead an army and I couldn’t be the holy champion. But if I was going to make Kathan pay for all the shit he’d done and get any of the Halo lifers through tonight alive, I had to suck it up and
