Chapter 17
Raze studied the baroness’s slumped head with icy detachment.
She remained upright courtesy of the ingeniously heinous chair he’d found in her home—a chair with silver-plated spiked manacles at the wrists and throat and a bottom and back with blades that protruded or retracted via a handle on the backside.
Turning away, he looked around the warehouse loft and considered what she’d left behind.
There was an entire bookcase of recorded atrocities stored in jeweled cases.
It was a collection that could never fall into a Sentinel’s or a lycan’s hands, or questions would be raised that had no good answers.
Some of what he’d seen would haunt him for years to come, minions who’d succumbed so wholly to bloodlust that they were little more than ravening beasts.
Raze wasn’t certain there was anything—even the Creator’s command that the Fallen live endlessly with their vampiric curse—that could prevent war if Adrian believed vampires were a threat requiring complete eradication.
After all, Adrian had broken other commandments without punishment.
“This place is a house of horrors,” Crash muttered behind him, tossing the disks into a crate to be destroyed. “And they were proud of it. They could’ve kept all this shit in a cloud or on a hard drive, but they wanted to see how many kills they had under their belt.”
Raze’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he pulled it out. “Raze.”
“How extensive is the infestation in Chicago?” Adrian asked without preamble.
His back stiffened. “I’m taking care of it.”
“If you think that’s going to be enough to put me off, you haven’t learned anything about me in the last several eons.
” The smoothly modulated tone of the Sentinel’s voice only made his words more disturbing.
“Discovering a few hundred armed minions in a heavily populated metropolis is a big fucking problem. Tell Syre if he can’t get a handle on his ranks, I’ll take the necessary steps to manage it myself. ”
“Why don’t—”
“You and the six minions who arrived today have forty-eight hours to wrap it up and clear out.”
The line died, leaving Raze cursing at an angel who couldn’t hear him.
There were times when he thought there was no way to clean up the mess the Fallen had made, and even damage control was out of their reach.
There were tens of thousands of vampires policed by less than four hundred combined Fallen and Sentinels, plus a few thousand lycans.
The odds were against them in every way.
He’d felt helpless before, but now he had something he couldn’t bear to lose. He would hunt down the ones whose names he found here in Baron’s safe house, but that wouldn’t make Kim any safer. As long as they were connected in any way, she would be a target.