Chapter 17 #3
“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, creating room for a table and chairs. Writing on the wall documented the virus’s progression over 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 of the filaments, which vaguely 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. “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 were within his grasp, and he didn’t have any qualms about using them.