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.
Twenty-Three