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killed
all of Agony's guards then Isaac and the rest could have snuck back
to their normal territory and probably been fine. Instead, Brandon
and a few others had made it away, which meant that Isaac and likely
most of the rest of his people had been recognized. Dominic had kept
a low enough profile that the Coun'hij probably didn't know anything
about her, but the rest of Isaac's people were all known quantities.
If they went back to the territory that they'd been calling home for
the last few years then they wouldn't survive the month.
    The Coun'hij
didn't exactly have a reputation for being forgiving and after losing
so many they would make killing everyone who had helped us their top
priority. Even if the Coun'hij was too busy to slap us down, I was
pretty sure that Brandon would take it upon himself to kill everyone
who had seen him nearly defeated and he was more than capable of
killing Isaac's people off three or four at a time.
    Alec, Carson
and Agony had come very close to fighting him to a standstill, but
two of them had been wielding massive swords at the time. Even Heath,
the most deadly out of all of Isaac's people, couldn't hope to beat
Brandon, so instead they'd all agreed to come back to the bunker that
Taggart and I had commandeered from the vampires who had tried to
kill us just days before.
    The bunker
itself was mostly just concrete and steel, but the interior had
suffered some significant fire damage from the fight between Taggart
and the vampire pyromancer that had been running the show before we'd
arrived.
    There hadn't
been time for Taggart and I to get the bunker cleaned up before we'd
left, but Isaac's people hadn't complained. Instead they'd just set
about cleaning up the wreckage with a determination that not even the
last few vampire corpses had been able to quench.
    I had a
sneaking suspicion that Isaac was keeping everyone busy at least
partially to keep them all from fighting, but I wasn't going to
complain about that, not when the results were so spectacular.
    By now,
anything that had been damaged by the fire had been pulled out and
some of the gold that we'd found in the armory had been cashed in to
replace most of the damaged fixtures. Now that his people had run out
of other things to do, Isaac had started working them in shifts to
excavate a large area that would eventually end up serving as a
second, attached bunker.
    It was the kind
of massive undertaking that I wouldn't have even known how to start,
but Isaac acted like it was no big deal. One morning he came out of
his tiny private room with several rolls of paper containing the
beginnings of a plan that he'd no doubt spent days researching
online.
    Conventional
wisdom would have said that construction on this scale was impossible
without heavy machinery which would have revealed the existence of
the bunker. Conventional wisdom hadn't seen what even a single hybrid
was capable of.
    It was still
relatively slow going, but once they had the camouflage netting in
place to hide the dig site from any kind of overhead observation, it
was amazing what a few hybrids could do. Their claws were harder and
sharper than any tool we could have purchased and their enormous
strength meant that they were easily able to move around gigantic
loads of rock and dirt.
    Taggart hadn't
been especially happy about the cash outlay involved or the frequent
trips that were made into town the first few days of the project, but
the results so far were nothing less than astonishing. Isaac had
found a machine shop to build several custom wheelbarrows that were
so large that no normal human could have hoped to move them around
once they were full of dirt, but which were perfectly sized for use
by hybrids.
    Isaac and the
other hybrids used their claws to break up the hard-packed dirt, and
then they would move to another spot while the wolves shoveled the
loose dirt and rock into the wheelbarrows. Once a wheelbarrow was
full, one of the hybrids would take it out from