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The women were pressing close together, frightened sounds seeping past their gags. When another shot split the night, a couple of them jerked with shock. One of the remaining guards lunged at a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve, and I hurled myself forward. He’d barely gotten his hand around her neck before I was stabbing my blade into the side of his. His arms went limp, releasing her.
I pushed her out of the way as gently as I could and whipped toward the last of the guards still standing. Talon got there first. He plunged his blade into the man’s gut and heaved it upward, carving right through the center of his torso. With a gurgled groan, the man collapsed.
Julius loped over to join us, scanning the runway and the girls huddled together on it. They looked as terrified of us as they had of their captors. My heart sank. I quickly sheathed my knives.
“You’re safe now,” I said, letting my voice ring out for the first time since we’d arrived here. “You’ll never have to deal with men like this again. We’re going to get you help. Get you home, if that’s where you want to go. Okay?”
I got cautious nods in response. The first woman I reached for still flinched when my hands grazed her face, but when I untied her gag, she sighed, her shoulders sagging in relief. As Talon, Julius, and Blaze helped me free the others, Garrison came into the cabin doorway.
“Let me know when I should make the calls.”
As much as I hated the thought of leaving these women alone in the dark, we couldn’t take them with us. They’d be in far more danger hanging out with the Chaos Crew than with the proper authorities looking after them and figuring out where they belonged and what could be done for them. I glanced at Julius, who checked the time on his phone.
“Contact the cops now,” he said. “The local police, the FBI, the CIA, and the DC task force for trafficking victims, as discussed.” The more separate departments we had involved, the less chance there was that anyone could manipulate the investigation or the victims into disappearing.
He turned back to the women. “We have to go, but we’ll be keeping an eye on things from a distance. The people who come for you next will want to help you too. We won’t let anyone else who’d use you get to you.”
“Here.” Blaze had brought out the sack of water bottles and prepackaged sandwiches we’d stashed in the car, not knowing how long it’d have been since the trafficked women had gotten anything to eat or drink. They ended up sitting in a cluster on the pavement, gulping water and tearing into the cellophane packages, their stances starting to relax just a little.
Garrison signaled that he’d made the calls. We hurried back to our car, a pang shooting through me at leaving the women behind. But we were still watching over them. We drove a short distance along the lane and then parked there with our lights off, Blaze scanning the radio frequencies and whatever video footage he could access, the rest of us watching the main road to the airfield.
When the first vehicles to arrive were cop cars with lights flashing, I exhaled in a rush. “Everything sounds legit,” Blaze reported.
The Blood Hunter hadn’t found out that we’d meddled with his operations in time to launch a counterattack. The women were in the hands of the proper authorities now. We’d done everything we could for them.
But we were far from done with the Blood Hunter… and as soon as he found out about this, I had no doubt that he’d be gunning for us even harder.
