“What are you? A parrot? Yes, us.”
“We’re a mess?” It was very hard not to smile.
“We were last night.” She ran her gaze over him from head to toe and sighed. “But we’re okay now. When you’re not tel ing me not to worry about you or trying to share your naked body with the world.”
“I share my body with no one but you, my crazy vampress. God. I adore you.”
“She’s coming!” Vash hissed, stepping closer to shield him. “If she sees your family jewels, I’m gonna have to kil her.”
“You’re nuts, you know that? Certifiably insane.” And he was crazy, too. About her. He shifted back and spun away from her.
When Himeko darted out of the house at a ful run, he directed her to scout one side of the yard while he handled the other. He sniffed out a dog buried in the far corner, which was confirmed by a little headstone, but he found nothing out of the ordinary. Himeko, however, whined and began scratching at the dirt.
He joined her, and they dug through fresh sod to find potting soil covering a layer of quicklime. Three feet down they discovered what was left of a child’s body, identifiable as such only by the size of the bones. They both leaped back in horror.
“Oh man,” Vashti breathed, her hand going to her stomach as the stench broke through the disrupted lime. “Fucking wraiths.”
Mindless, my ass, Elijah thought grimly. The burial was proof of intel igence and clear, cold calculation. He looked at Vashti, frustrated that they couldn’t converse while he was in his lycan form, a connection that could exist—if they were a mated pair.
Vash turned away and spoke without raising her voice. “Syre. Raze. Have the lycans check the backyards.”
He heard the quaver in her words and sensed her disquiet. She was horrified and disturbed by the discovery, shaken. He went to her, brushing gently along her hip in a gesture of comfort.
She scratched absently behind his ear. “How many wraiths would it take to wipe out a whole neighborhood? How much time would pass?
Because if it was more than a few hours, they’d have to be cunning to avoid detection and I’ve only seen one wraith who had any working brain cel s.”
Raze’s curse from across the neighborhood caused Elijah’s ears to twitch. “We’ve got a body in the yard. Damn it…it’s a child’s corpse.”
“Here as wel ,” Syre said harshly. “No sign or evidence of the parent—a single mother, I gather, from the mail and photos in the house.”
Elijah returned to the grave and began to dig deeper, growling at Vash when she tried to assist him. He couldn’t protect her from everything, but this, at least, was a grisly task he could spare her from.
In the end, he found three bodies, al children.
“Where are the adults?” Vashti asked, fol owing him over to the coiled-up water hose, which she turned on to spray him off.
Raze’s voice crossed the distance between them. “Nothing found on the next property. No children in the household. Looks like two males lived here. Neither body is in the yard.”
Elijah led the way through the house and back out to the street. He was moving on to the next property when Syre spoke. “I saw movement in a window here in my sector. Drapes are drawn, so I can’t see inside.”
Vash broke into a run. “Hold until we get there.”
Raze met them at the house. Without a word, he led his team to the side-yard gate and they slipped into the back.
Staring at the home from the sidewalk, Elijah watched the upper windows and saw the curtains shift softly, as if with a breeze, but he heard neither the hum of an air-conditioning unit nor a fan. He also didn’t hear breathing or movement, which raised his hackles. What the fuck were they dealing with?
“I don’t like it,” Vash muttered. “I’d rather smoke ’em out than go in. But the flames would bring fire crews, and then we’d have mortals involved.”
Syre surveyed the exterior. “My team wil take the upper windows. Your lycans can enter from the bottom floor. Ready?”
With a nod, Vash leaped onto the side of the house and scrambled up like a spider. Syre did the same. Elijah took one side of the house; Luke took the other. Himeko remained on point at the front, while Thomas waited in the rear.
“On three,” Raze whispered, his voice drifting on the wind. “One, two…”
Elijah lunged through the nearest window, entering the house in a shower of glass. He’d scarcely registered that he’d landed in a smal home office when he slammed into the closet door, unable to gain purchase on carpet slickened by a viscous substance. Shaking off the col ision, he registered what coated the floor—the black, oily residue left behind when wraith bodies decomposed.
Himeko’s frantic barking spurred him into action. He careened out into the hal way, skidding into the wal and denting it before finding traction in the unsoiled carpet. He leaped into a family room, where Himeko and Thomas were covered in wraiths. With a roar of fury, he lunged into the fray, grabbing a wraith by the neck and snapping it as he tossed the body aside like a dol ’s.
The repetitious report of a pistol cracked through the room as one of the vamps emptied his clip into the writhing bodies ringing the edges of the huddle. Raze waded in through the sliding-glass door, yanking wraiths up by the hair and severing heads with his blade. Elijah was tackled from the side. Fangs bit into his flank. Snarling, he kicked with his hind legs, his claws raking into the thigh of his attacker. The wraith lost its grip and fel away. Elijah turned and crouched to retaliate, aiming for the Navy anchor tattoo that decorated the pale-as-milk flesh over the wraith’s heart… “Vashti!”
Syre’s shout pierced Elijah like a silver bul et. Abandoning his attacker, he bounded up the stairs. He reached the second floor and hit a wal of wraiths, the teeming mass of gray bodies clogging the narrow space. A glint of light on a flashing blade drew his attention to the ceiling, where Vash clung upside down with a one-handed grip. Her free arm slashed a katana at the upraised hands that clawed at her, trying to pul her loose.
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 wel , so close to snaring her that he could almost taste her. His jaws were open and his lips pul ed 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 bul ets. The vampress gripped the rol 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 cal ed 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 pul ed 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 hel 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 real y 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 kil ed 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 normal y 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, wel aware of what the hel was going on with these wraiths. She was batshit crazy, but stil . She’s been hunting humans for sport for years now. I doubt Lindsay’s mother was her first or last.”
“Syre.”
Al 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’l want to see it for yourself.”
Syre gestured for Vashti to precede him in fol owing 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 hal , 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 wal 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 al -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.