“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.