The Bite Before Christmas

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS Chapter Twenty-Two

Waves bounced our boat like a stone skipping across a pond as we made our way toward the small craft bobbing in the distance. With my enhanced vision, I made out Denise's dark head at the helm, the wind whipping her hair into Medusa-like tendrils. I slowed our craft to idle speed, letting the current direct us instead of the speedboat's powerful engines. We didn't want to get too close. Denise made no move to approach us, either. She kept her craft where it was, staying as still as a statue in her position by the wheel.
Less than an hour later, I heard the roar of another engine coming from the direction of the harbor. With darkness approaching, the frigid temperatures, and small-craft advisory warnings, I didn't think it was a family out for a pleasure cruise. A sleek white craft cleaved through the water toward Denise's boat, the sun's dying rays illuminating the pale hair of the vampire at that helm.
A vampire who bore a striking resemblance to Bones.
"If you wanted to escape me, you should have paid in cash instead of using your credit card to rent your boat!" Wraith shouted at Denise. His voice carried over the waters to us, sounding feminine and bearing no trace of an English accent. He barely glanced in our direction, though he had to notice us drifting less than a quarter-mile away. For Wraith to be so unconcerned, he must not be alone in the boat.
To prove my guess, I next saw a blond head appear, then three brunets, and finally, a strawberry blonde. Looked like Wraith brought the whole crew with him. I didn't think he'd risk leaving them unattended after we'd snatched Bones out from under him. But when the Egyptian vampire turned in our direction, I tensed. With the distance and the way both our crafts rocked on the waves, I'd never get a clear head shot on him, but Mencheres's powers didn't need a calm surface or closer proximity to be effective.
"Now," I barked into my cell phone.
Three things happened at once. Ghosts shot out of the bottom of my boat, winding through me, Ian, and Bones in such great number that our bodies were engulfed in their diaphanous forms. At that same time, the instant crushing pressure I'd felt on my neck muted to only a strangling sensation that was unpleasant but not lethal, since I didn't need to breathe.
And Denise's boat blew up with a spectacular explosion.
The boom followed by debris shooting out in every direction claimed Wraith's full attention. He tried to turn his boat around, but he'd been too close to Denise's craft when it blew. Flaming pieces of wreckage showered down onto him and the other vampires, some bits pelting through the side of Wrath's craft from their velocity. That pressure around my neck lessened even more.
"Kitten!" Bones shouted, his aura surging with what felt like a shot of adrenaline.
Ian yanked the hood off him and began to undo his chains.
"Get ready. It's time to reclaim our mates," Ian said with vicious satisfaction.
With an equally ruthless grin, I gunned the throttle on the speedboat and headed straight toward Wraith's vessel. He continued to try to clear the dangerous pieces of wreckage from his boat, cursing at the damage the nearby explosion had done. We were a hundred yards away before Wraith seemed to realize that we weren't slowing down.
Through the hazy layer of ghosts still twining all over me, making my whole body feel electrified, I saw realization dawn on Wraith's face.
"Stop them! Kill them!" he screamed at Mencheres. Then he abandoned his attempts at clean-up and swung the boat around, gunning his engine.
It sputtered, sounding like something was caught in the jets or they'd been damaged from the explosion. Our craft also began to shake, but Fabian and Elisabeth had brought a lot of their kind with them. More ghosts appeared, gloving the craft with their bodies and acting as a supernatural buffer against Mencheres's power.
The former pharaoh's abilities were staggering, but they didn't work on anything from the grave. Silly me had needed a demon to remind me of that. Balchezek and others might mock me for my affinity for ghosts, but with their bodies acting as a force field to deflect Mencheres's formidable power, it was good to have friends in dead places.
Ian got the last of the chains off Bones and threw them aside. "When you hit the water, swallow enough to rupture your stomach, and then keep swallowing," I said urgently, glancing at him. "All that salt water will make it easier to purge the bitch out of you."
Bones reached out and pulled me to him for a fierce kiss. Ghosts still swirled around and through us, but it was the touch of his hands-the first I'd felt of them in weeks-that made my body vibrate.
Balchezek shoved himself between us, muttering, "No time." I glanced at how close we were to Wraith's boat. He was right.
"We're coming for you, motherfucker!" I shouted at the demon inhabiting my husband and friends. Our speedboat struck Wraith's craft before my words had died away.
The impact catapulted us out of the boat. Bones sank immediately beneath the waves, but Ian flew straight up, taking Balchezek with him. I had a different agenda. I dove through the raining pieces of two decimated boats, ghosts still clinging to me, to snatch a blond vampire up before she hit the water.
"Mencheres!" I roared, holding a struggling Kira in my grip. "Pull yourself on top of that demon inside you or I swear I'll kill her!"
So saying, I rammed a silver knife into Kira's chest, careful to be close to her heart without actually piercing it. Kira stilled as though she'd been flash-frozen, emitting a hoarse noise of pain that I more sensed than heard above the hissing and sputtering from the two sinking crafts.
A black head breached the waves, bright green gaze leveled on me with a look that was truly frightening.
"If you let that bitch even splash me with your power, she dies," I warned him again, staring right back at Mencheres.
Come on, I silently urged. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wraith scrabble onto an overturned piece of hull, but he didn't try to interfere. Not with his body, anyway. I could almost feel the demonic energy roiling off him toward Mencheres. The demon didn't want to lose his most powerful puppet.
Another vampire vaulted out of the water at me, but before Spade reached me, Ian caught him in a midair tackle that tumbled them both out of my range of vision.
"Watch the water!" Balchezek snapped, not being shielded from its damaging effects because he was a corporeal demon. Not wearing someone else's body like Wraith.
I didn't dare turn my attention from Mencheres. Currents of energy crackled around him, and if not for the thick blanket of ghosts cocooning me, I knew I'd be missing my head.
I yanked the knife a little higher, causing Kira to cry out again, and something snapped in Mencheres's expression. For a split-second, I thought that not even the myriad of ghosts could save me, but then I felt him drawing in those deadly currents of energy instead of snapping them outward at me. Wraith let out a howl that sounded pained.
"Cat." Mencheres's voice was ragged. "It is I. Let her go."
"Prove it. Force Spade and Annette underwater and make them drink salt water until it's flooding them," I said.
"No!" Wraith shouted, surging toward me.
A wall of power swatted him back into the upturned remains of the hull hard enough to crack its surface-and Wraith's skull. Blood poured out onto the white underside before disappearing into the ocean. Wraith groaned in a higher-pitched, feminine voice.
Then I heard a splash. Heard Ian's muttered, "Drink up, mates," and guessed that Spade and Annette had just been shoved underwater. All these were promising signs, but I still kept that knife jammed into Kira's chest. The demon had to be fighting Mencheres tooth and nail, and nothing would motivate the vampire to keep control like fear for his lover's life.
Of course, when this was all over, Mencheres might still kill me for stabbing Kira.
"Bring me to him . . . carefully!" Balchezek snapped.
Ian descended to where Wraith was with the demon still tucked under his arm like a large football. When Wraith saw them, he tried to slip back into the ocean to get away.
"Hold him still," I told Mencheres curtly.
Power lashed out, pinning Wraith to the upturned hull. Ian adjusted his grip on Balchezek, holding him by the waist so the demon dangled above the trapped vampire with his arms free. Balchezek gave Wraith a cheery smile before ripping his shirt open, exposing the vampire's pale, firm chest.
Wraith screamed something in a language I didn't understand when Balchezek plucked a knife from his belt and began carving symbols onto Wraith's chest. Instead of those symbols vanishing from instant healing, the waves seemed to set them in place, emblazoning the symbols on his skin. The demon was so deeply lodged inside Wraith that his open wounds reacted to the salt water the same way a vampire's did to liquid silver.
"Burns, doesn't it?" Balchezek remarked over the feminine-sounding shrieks that were like music to my ears. Take that, bitch! I felt like crowing.
"How dare you betray one of your own for them?" Wraith snarled, in English this time.
Balchezek didn't pause in his carving. "Easy. I'm getting a lot of money. Imagine that; a demon without a conscience."
His knife flashed again, and Kira shuddered in my arms. I would've thought it was pain from the knife I still had lodged in her, except I saw Mencheres do the same thing.
"Almost done," Balchezek muttered, carving faster. Kira's shuddering increased until I worried that the tremors would edge the knife too close to her heart. Mencheres continued to be affected the same way, too. The waters around him began to froth.
"Almost," Balchezek said again, the knife now flashing so fast that it was nearly a blur. "There!" he announced.
That single word was accompanied by a blast that felt stronger than when the boat detonated, only this didn't shoot off in several directions. All that invisible trajectory was aimed at Wraith, interrupting even Mencheres's iron hold to briefly bow Wraith's body under the weight of its onslaught. For a second, I thought it might blow him to pieces.
But then that energy abruptly dissipated. Wraith slumped before Mencheres's grip immobilized him again. In between the various floating pieces of boat debris around us, Bones's head broke the surface. Though he still looked exhausted, the smile he flashed me was filled with immeasurable satisfaction.
"She's gone," he said simply.