The Bite Before Christmas

by Jeaniene Frost

  Well, maybe we’d be lucky and he’d sleep so long that we’d have the demon beaten before he woke up and she took over—

  His eyes opened, startling me. They settled on me in what looked like an unfocused manner.

  “Kitten?”

  “Bones?” I replied with the same amount of question in my voice.

  “Mmm.” That was his only response, as if more words were too much for him.

  Was it still him? He might have had his eyes closed for concentration; I’d seen him do that before. But in his current state, I’d be amazed if he could shut his eyes and not sleep. Or had he been asleep and this was the demon pretending to be exhausted so I’d think Bones was still at the forefront?

  I had to be sure. “What was the first thing I said to you when we met?” The demon had infected his body, but Bones had confirmed that she didn’t have access to his memories, just like he knew almost nothing about her.

  He didn’t reply, just kept staring at me with that unfocused look in his eyes. I shook his shoulder roughly, chains rattling under my touch.

  “Come on, Bones! What was the first thing I said to you when we met?”

  Even as I spoke, I drew my gun out of my pants. I kept one on me at all times now, knowing it was only a matter of time until I had to shoot him.

  “Hallo handsome,” he mumbled. “Want to fuck?”

  Relief coursed through me and I put my gun back in its holster. Those were the words I’d said when I was an inexperienced vampire hunter looking to entice Bones outside so I could kill him. What I’d lacked in charm I made up for in bluntness.

  “You have to hang on a little longer,” I told him as I began to unwind the chains that tethered him to several pipes. “We’re moving to another location.”

  “Kitten, I can’t . . . do this anymore.”

  The words sliced through me like a dozen silver blades. He sounded so awful that all I wanted to do was cradle him while he slept for three straight days. This was too much. I wouldn’t have held out half this long. It was horrible to ask anything else of him, but even though it was unfair, I had to push all my tender feelings aside.

  “You need to do this,” I said sharply. “We’re not safe here and we need to leave. Don’t you dare fall asleep and let her attack us now. I thought you loved me.”

  I hated myself for every word. If I were Bones, I’d tell me to fuck off and then I’d start snoring. But he shook his head as if to clear it and then somehow forced himself to stand even with hundreds of pounds of chains coiled around him.

  I’d never loved him more—or been more determined to boot that she-bitch inside him back to hell. “That’s right,” I went on while mentally promising to make this up to him. “Stay alert.”

  I kept up a steady stream of conversation that only a drill sergeant would consider encouraging as I removed most of the chains but kept his arms locked to his chest in a metallic version of a straightjacket. Then I stuck some earphones in his ears and put a black hood over his face with a final brusque admonition for him to stay focused. Heartless bitch, table for one! I thought, but if things went according to plan, he’d be free of the demon tonight. As my last step of preparation, I duct-taped an iPod to his chains and turned it up. Loudly.

  Thus blinded and deafened, I led him up the stairs to the first floor. It would have been quicker if I carried him, but an abrupt “no” from under the hood stopped me when I started to lift him. Male pride survived even a fortnight’s lack of sleep and a demon’s merciless assault, it seemed. That was fine. Bones could be cursing me up one side and down the other as an ungrateful bitch, and if it gave him strength, I’d cheer him on.

  Ian stood next to a bloody series of symbols, Balchezek on the other side of them. Good to know he still responded promptly to his supernatural pages. A plastic container the size of a purse was at the demon’s feet, and he hefted it with a smile.

  “All right, fangers. Let’s put the baby in your friends to bed!”

  My thoughts exactly.

  Very few people were in this derelict section of town, which was good. If anyone saw us leading a hooded, chained man to the car, they’d call the police and report a kidnapping. But, thankfully, no one stopped us as we sped off toward Ocean Isle Beach, where a boat waited for us on the stormy waters of the North Carolina coast.

  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 je
ts 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.

  Twenty-Three

  Even though the symbols Balchezek carved reversed the original ritual and sent the demon splits out of everyone else and back into Wraith, Mencheres and Kira still drank enough salt water to kill a normal person from organ rupture. The goal was to have everyone’s bodies filled with the liquid so they would be inhospitable to demonic repossession, because we weren’t done yet.

  Denise swam over in time to be enveloped in a bear hug from a newly un-possessed Spade. She’d jumped off the boat before detonating it, but her top looked ragged and lacerations crisscrossed her face from being in the blast radius. At least with her nearly immortal status, she’d be healed in hours.

  Ian still held Balchezek aloft. The demon’s skin looked red and irritated from the residual sea spray, but he’d stayed out of the ocean for more reasons than how the salt water would burn him. Balchezek tore away some of the duct tape that had kept the rectangular plastic container secured to his belt and opened the latch, pulling out a large rat. The rodent
’s rapid heartbeat was audible even above the sound of the waves.

  Balchezek grinned at Wraith. “Look at your new home,” he said while holding the rat above the vampire’s stricken face. Mencheres still had Wraith in a punishing squeeze of power, cutting off even his ability to speak.

  “Don’t torment the creature,” I snapped, flying over.

  Balchezek snorted. “Now you feel bad for the demon?”

  “I was talking about the rat,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  Balchezek handed the rodent to me with a muttered comment about misguided feminine sappiness.

  “Will drinking enough salt water force the demon out of him and into that?” Bones asked, nodding at the rat.

  I briefly closed my eyes. I’d hoped to have this part done before Bones resurfaced so it would be too late for him to be involved, but I hadn’t had the chance.

  And now I had to tell him the truth.

  “Wraith can’t be saved.” I wished he could tap into my feelings to know how sorry I was about this, but his emotional connection as the vampire who sired me only went one way. “The demon is in him so deep; she couldn’t pull herself out if she wanted to. The only way to get her out of him is to kill him.”

  Pain brushed over my emotions, mixed with a jaded resignation that I hated because I’d felt it too often from Bones. Life had been cruel to him many times in the past, and it seemed Fate wasn’t done with her tricks yet.

  “I suspected as much, but . . . I’d hoped.”

  Those quiet words broke my heart. I came over, pulling out a silver knife with grim resolve. Better for Bones and the man trapped underneath the demon inhabiting him to make this quick.

  I nodded at Ian. “Now.”

  Ian abruptly plunged into the ocean, forcing Balchezek down with him. Water covered Balchezek up to his waist, and he screamed like he’d been plunged into acid.