Fear for her made him frantic, sending him scrambling over shoulders and heads to reach her.
“Not so fast, Alpha,” a voice hissed. His rear leg was caught in a vicelike grip, and he was yanked into a room with the sickening crack of breaking bone.
He howled against the searing pain, his gut churning as the door was kicked shut, blocking him from helping Vash. Favoring the oddly bent limb, he faced
his attacker. She tossed back silken strands of crimson hair and set her hands on black leather-clad hips. For a split second, Elijah thought he faced Vashti; then the differences came into focus through the fog of pain. The woman was too lean. Her features harsh and less refined. And her eyes were lit with a sick, mad light.
She withdrew a gun from the holster strapped to her thigh and grinned, revealing wicked fangs. “Bye-bye, lover,” she crooned.
The door crashed in behind her, the paneled particleboard breaking free at the hinge and slamming into the vampress’s back. The pistol went off, the shot going wide. Vash leaped through the decimated door as Elijah charged the lookalike, catching her by the arm and snapping bone in his jaws, making her drop the gun.
Vash kicked at the wraith who ran into the room behind her, then grabbed the vampress by the hair and yanked her upright. There was a heartbeat of stunned silence as the two women looked at each other.
“Who the fuck are you?” Vash barked.
Laughing, the vampress dug in her heels and leaped out the window, leaving Vash fisting a mass of hair ripped out at the root. Elijah made the jump after their quarry, yelping as his broken limb was jarred by his landing on the lawn. He chased her on three legs, nearly catching her by the ankle the moment before she vaulted over the eight-foot fence that enclosed the backyard.
Shots rang out. He heard a shout from the rooftops as one of the vamps on point joined the pursuit.
Unable to make the same jump in his condition,
Elijah barreled through the wooden planks, breaking through to the backyard of the house on the other side. In the distance, he heard Vashti shouting after him, but he didn’t slow or look back, driven by the memory of tiny child bones scored by fangs.
The vampress jumped over a side-yard gate to reach the front yard, and Elijah rammed through that barrier as well, so close to snaring her that he could almost taste her. His jaws were open and his lips pulled back in a snarl. So close…
She kicked off the ground and landed in the back of a pickup truck idling at the curb. The vehicle took off with squealing tires, choking Elijah with the acrid smoke of burning rubber. From the rooftop, Crash maintained suppressive fire, shattering the windshield with a barrage of bullets. The vampress gripped the roll bar and ducked, laughing.
Elijah continued to give chase, despite the added agony of moving from lawn to unforgiving concrete. The truck slowed to round the corner at the end of the street, and he called on reserves of strength to eke out a fraction more speed.
The vehicle exploded.
The blast was so violent it sent him hurtling backward. He tumbled across the yard, howling in frustration, his ears ringing. Vashti skidded across the grass on her knees and pulled him into her arms.
“What…? What happened?”
Syre stared at the shivering minion who lay on the blood and oil-soaked family-room floor. Around him,
wraiths who’d survived the melee were staked to the floor with silver-coated blades through their palms. They were far from lucid. Hissing and snapping, they writhed for freedom.
Vashti appeared at the shattered rear sliding-glass door, supporting the weight of the limping Alpha who’d shifted into human form and donned his jeans.
“What the hell just happened here?” Syre growled.
Elijah halted abruptly, causing Vash to stumble and curse. He pointed at the confused but sane minion. “That fucker bit me. As a wraith.”
“Who are you people?” the minion sobbed. “Where are my clothes?”
Vashti looked at Syre before helping Elijah to a chair. “My head is going to explode if something doesn’t make sense here really damn quick.”
“Where are Raze and Crash?” Syre asked, having taken a quick head count.
“Putting out a car fire on the street before it attracts attention.” She straightened. “Damn it. I wanted that bitch alive.”
His brow arched in silent inquiry.
“The vampress who killed Lindsay’s mother,” Elijah explained. He looked at Vash. “There’s no way her appearance wasn’t deliberately styled to mimic you.”
“No,” she agreed. “She had roots.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her hair. The roots were brown; I noticed when I ripped out a chunk of it. And I’m pretty sure her tits were silicone. They were like Princess Leia buns glued to her chest.”
Restlessness forced Syre into the pacing that was normally Vashti’s trait.
The blood you sent is a breakthrough,
Grace had said.
I blended it with samples of wraith-tainted blood and there was a short period of reversal.
Adrian’s blood, filtered through Lindsay and transfused into Elijah, who’d been bitten.
He pointed at the sobbing man who rocked himself on the floor like a child. “This minion was a wraith?”
“When he took a bite of me, yeah,” the Alpha confirmed. “I remember that anchor tattoo. I was going to rip it off of him with my teeth.”
“I remember it, too,” Raze said, coming in from the front door. “I saw it in a framed photo in one of the houses we searched.”
“Fuckin’ A.” Vash stared at the wraiths. “These are the residents? My god…did they eat their own children?”
The minion began to scream and rip out his hair. Syre knocked him out with a fist to the temple.
“You’ve gotta big fucking problem here,” Elijah said. “That Vashti wannabe was one of yours and she was here, well aware of what the hell was going on with these wraiths. She was batshit crazy, but still. She’s been hunting humans for sport for years now. I doubt Lindsay’s mother was her first or last.”
“Syre.”
All heads turned to Lyric, who descended from the second floor. “There are a dozen wraiths upstairs who’ve gone long enough without food that they’re barely capable of blinking.”
“She was feeding them,” Vash said. “She infected them, then fed them their own children. Why?”
“There’s something else,” Lyric went on. “You’ll want to see it for yourself.”
Syre gestured for Vashti to precede him in following Lyric upstairs. They ascended quickly, picking over tarlike puddles that marked the end of wraith lives. Lyric led them to the room at the end of the hall, the master bedroom, which had been ravaged. The furniture had been tossed in the corner, opening room for the placement of a table and chairs. Writing on the wall documented the progression of the virus over a period of seventy-two hours. Handheld radios were plugged into their recharging bases. Duffel bags and a suitcase had been shoved against the closed closet doors.
“Here.” Lyric pointed at the open suitcase. Amid the pile of rumpled clothes was an employee badge.
Crouching, Syre picked up the rectangular laminated badge and stared at the all-too-familiar face in the photo. His blood turned to ice as his thumb brushed over the
MITCHELL AERONAUTICS
winged logo.
“What is it?” Vashti asked behind him, unable to see.
He passed her the badge over his shoulder and riffled through the rest of the contents.
“Phineas,” she said quietly. “But he’s dead.”
“Is he?”
The luggage undoubtedly belonged to Adrian’s original second-in-command, as evidenced by the personal items inside, which included two molted feathers. Syre eyed the robin’s-egg-blue color of the filaments, which so reminded him of the wings he’d once boasted. Each angel’s wings were uniquely colored, leaving no doubt that the feathers he held had once graced Phineas’s.
Elijah’s voice broke the weighted silence. “They were experiments,” he said, reading the writing on the wall. “See how they have them divided up by weight and gender, then again by these letters: A, B, and C.”
“Here.” Raze entered the room with what looked like a makeup case in one hand. He set it down on the table and released the catch, revealing a variety of vials.
“We need to get that to Grace,” Vash said.
Syre pushed to his feet. “Grace needs help.”
Vash walked to Elijah and handed him Phineas’s ID card. “Raze knows a laboratory scientist in Chicago. I bet she could help us narrow down our choices to the best in the field.”
“That’s a dead end,” Raze said vehemently. “I banged her and left. I doubt she’d be too charitable to my coming around again with my hand out. It’d be…messy.”
Syre didn’t point out that banging and leaving lovers was par for the course with Raze. Instead he said, “Go to her with your dick out. You know how to get what we need out of her.”
“There’s got to be another way,” the captain insisted. “We can put out a call to the minions. There are bound to be some who have ties we can pull.”
The strength of Raze’s protests didn’t escape his notice, but Syre chose not to delve into the reason for it now. “We don’t have time to stumble around in the dark, and a recommendation from someone you know personally and intimately is a damn sight more responsible than a fucking Google search. See to it.”
A muscle ticced in Raze’s jaw. “Yes, Commander.”
“Phineas,” Elijah said softly, his attention on the ID card. He looked up and raked the room with a narrowed, searching gaze. “What the hell was that vampress into? Mortals, vampires, Sentinels…nothing was off-limits for her.”
Syre’s arms crossed. “What are the chances that Phineas isn’t dead?”
Elijah barked out a humorless laugh. “No way. He and Adrian were like this.” He crossed his fingers, then glanced at the suitcase on the floor. “Phineas was coming back from a trip to the Navajo Lake outpost. He stopped in Hurricane, Utah, to feed his lycans and was ambushed by a nest of wraiths. Whoever the hell that Vashti-wannabe was, she must’ve had a setup there, too. And after Phineas was taken out, she grabbed his shit and bailed.”
“Perhaps. At this point we can’t rule anything out.”
“Right.” The Alpha’s gaze was hard. “Because it’s more believable that Sentinels and vampires are working together than it is for a group of minions to fall off the deep end.”
Syre conceded the point. The majority of minions succumbed to madness—mortals weren’t designed to live without their souls.
A piercing, inhuman scream shattered the moment. Everyone charged downstairs, reaching the first floor as a series of gunshots reverberated through the house.
Crash stood over the sprawled body of the wraith-turned-minion. His gun was in one hand and his other was pressed over a bloody wound on his biceps. “He went nuts and lunged for me.”
The minion who’d briefly recovered lay dead on the floor, his features reverted to the haunted, sunken look of a wraith. Even as they watched, the man disintegrated into an oil slick.
Rage burned through Syre, igniting a vicious bloodlust. It was quite clear now why Adrian had risked Lindsay the way he had—he couldn’t afford to give up even a drop of his blood, not when all evidence pointed to it being a component of a cure for the Wraith Virus.
Syre glanced at the Alpha. Lindsay was the key to Adrian, Elijah was the key to Lindsay, and Vashti was the key to Elijah. The means he required to save his people was within his grasp, and he didn’t have any qualms about using it.
A
drian exited his private plane first, then held out a hand to assist Lindsay down the short steps.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s definitely cooler here in Ontario.”
Soon she wouldn’t notice such things. Every day the vampirism in her blood took greater and greater hold, and every day he was relieved to find her soul pure and intact. It seemed Shadoe’s soul had indeed been enough of a sacrifice, leaving Lindsay’s unmarred by the curse of the Fallen. Although he had doubts that the Creator paid any attention to him anymore, Adrian still offered up his gratitude for the miracle of her.
With his hand at her back, he steered her toward the Mitchell Aeronautics hangar Siobhán was using as her home base. They stepped through a slender parting between the massive hangar doors, then headed to the stairs that led down into the subterranean storage areas. The eerie quiet they descended into was very much
at odds with his last visit. Then, the screams of the maddened infected minions had been damn near deafening. He’d since had the rooms soundproofed to preserve the sanity of the Sentinels who worked there.
“Captain.”
He turned to face a doorway he’d just passed. “Siobhán. It’s good to see you.”
The petite brunette stepped out with a smile for Lindsay and a quick nod of greeting for him, but her eyes went immediately to the carrier in his hand. “What have you brought for me?”
“What you asked for.” He passed it over.
“Come with me,” she said, running a hand through her cropped hair, which was still damp and fresh smelling from a recent shower. As was her usual, she wore urban camouflage pants with Army-issue jungle boots and a plain black T-shirt. The hard-edged attire did little to toughen her appearance. She was tiny and appeared delicate, a ruse that had blindsided too many of her opponents to count.
He followed her and Lindsay down the hall and into a laboratory outfitted with the best equipment his considerable fortune could buy. Freezers and glass-fronted refrigeration units lined the walls, while microscopes, notepads, and laptops covered the metal tables in the center.
Siobhán cleared space on the nearest tabletop with a sweep of her hand and set the cooler down. She smiled when she opened it and read the label on the blood bag. “Wish I could’ve been there when Raguel gave this up. And you got a sample from Vashti, too! You’ll have to tell me all about that.”
“Certainly, although I expect you have information to share with me as well.” Adrian pulled out a metal stool for Lindsay and stood behind her. “Where’s everyone else?”
“The others are in the infirmary or out in the field.” The Sentinel moved to the closest refrigerator and put the two bags inside. “I wanted us to have some privacy when I talked to you about my latest discoveries.”