He used Lightning to point out another snarling creature about to hit the pier, so she could shoot it. “The initial group of reborn was most probably a small, manageable number, kept alive and sated with the flesh of living victims brought on board at the same time.”
“With the plan to unleash them on the other passengers once they’d docked in New York,” Elena completed, seeing the gruesome logic of what he was saying. “Each person they feed off, but leave relatively whole, then rises to become another weapon.”
Illium nodded. “I assume their handler was alive until an hour ago, since he kept them from rampaging till the ship docked, but either he’s dead now or he didn’t get the order not to attack.”
Down!
Dropping at Raphael’s order, Elena covered her ears as he blasted the cruise ship with a bolt of power from above. The massive piece of machinery simply disintegrated, taking the majority of those inside with it—Elena knew the friends and relatives who’d come to meet the ship were distraught, believing their loved ones might somehow have survived the monsters, but Elena knew that was a false hope.
The reborn scrambling off the ship had had mouths rimmed with blood.
No way would they seek to abandon a buffet of trapped humans unless that buffet was now empty. Especially given the report that had come in from Nimra’s territory stating the creatures could scent living prey from meters away and would gang up to break through any impediment to that prey, their focus so absolute, it could be utilized to set up an ambush.
Today, however, it wasn’t about drawing the creatures to a certain point but making sure none left the pier alive.
“Go! Go! Go!” she yelled to the ground fighters around her as the dust cleared to show some of the reborn had managed to jump free of the ship before it blew and were now swimming to shore.
Raphael dropped down to join her, unsheathing dual swords rather than expending more power on creatures that could be killed by being beheaded. And so began the grim task of cleaning up the mess Charisemnon had dumped on their doorstep. The absolute worst moment of the entire operation came when Elena found herself face-to-face with a twelve-year-old girl in a drenched sundress, her exposed skin bearing vicious scratches . . . and her teeth stained with blood.
Claws out, the girl screamed and ran at Elena, feral hunger in her face.
37
Hot blood splashing against Elena’s combat gear, that small, blonde head rolling off into the water, Raphael’s hand cupping the side of her jaw. “Elena.” It was a snapped command.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She’d just frozen there for a second, unable to raise her hand against a child. “I forgot there must’ve been kids on board.”
Ten minutes later and the mobile reborn were all dead. “How many in the water?” she asked Illium, who’d been talking to the teams of vampires in watercraft on the river, their spotlights sweeping the water.
“Two or three dozen at most. The Sire’s strike incinerated the majority, but we need to make certain none of the drowned are given the chance to rise.” Wiping the back of his hand over his mouth, he walked over to the drowned bodies laid out on the pier and began to behead them one after the other.
He hesitated at the tiny body of another child, this one a boy of barely four or five.
“Illium?” she asked when he went down on one knee beside the body, not knowing what answer would be worse—evidence that the child had been alive when Raphael blew up the ship or that he’d joined the monsters.
The blue-winged angel’s eyes were bleak as he rose and brought down his sword across that fragile neck. “There was flesh caught between his teeth, under his fingernails.”
Rage and sadness burning in her gut, she got a lift from Raphael into the sky and began to sweep the river to make certain none of the bodies had washed downstream. All it would take to spark a deadly infestation was for one reborn to come back to the mockery of “life” that was Lijuan’s gift to her people.
• • •
After the unrelenting horror of the past few hours, Elena was in no mood to see stunning wings of silken copper in Raphael’s office. Needing to deal with an urgent situation in another part of the territory, he’d returned to the Tower thirty minutes earlier, while she’d remained behind with the team doing the final checks to make absolutely certain the reborn threat had been neutralized.
Tired and dirty, she wanted a shower, the arms of her consort, food, then sleep, in that order. Instead, she saw Tasha of the warrior’s blade and faux friendliness put her hand on Raphael’s arm as she leaned in close to Elena’s man, who was still in his bloodied combat leathers. Face uptilted and that glorious scarlet hair tumbling down her back, the other woman hung on Raphael’s every word.