A Dark Kiss of Rapture (2 page)

“Disciples,” Syre murmured. “Interesting
word choice.”

“It’s the right word, trust me. What else
would you call the followers of an idiot playacting as a messiah
preaching revolt against you?”

Syre ran a hand through his thick black
hair, the only sign he gave of any disquiet. “Whoever is
responsible, they came directly to you. This is personal.”

“You’re goddamned right it’s personal.” He
looked at the body again, knowing it wasn’t merely a taunt but a
message. “Help me turn this guy over.”

Syre stepped forward, waving Vash back.

It was a gruesome task. The smell emanating
from the open body cavity would torture a human; for a vampire, it
was pure hell. They got as far as getting the corpse onto its side.
Then the loosened entrails slid out with a soft sucking sound, and
they both leaped back and away. Raze had eviscerated his own share
of enemies, but this man was a victim, and that made all the
difference.

“Do you guys need a hand?” Vash asked,
stepping up to them.

“No.” Raze had seen the tattoo on the
corpse’s shoulder blade. Unlike Grimm’s brand, the ink was a mark
the man had voluntarily applied as a show of loyalty, affection,
and team spirit.

“The Cubs,” he muttered. “Guess I’m heading
to Chicago.”

CHAPTER 2

Raze hit the ground running in the Windy
City. Within an hour of his plane landing, he’d swept through the
building that had once housed Grimm’s operation (presently a
printing shop) and checked his way through a quarter of the list of
Grimm’s known haunts. Then, impatient, he took a chance and headed
to Wrigley Field.

Although the ballpark was dark and quiet for
the night, Raze knew wrong when he came across it and he damn well
felt it as he drove by. Parking a few streets away, he slid out
from behind the wheel and opened the back door of his rental to
grab his blades. He strapped them on with the efficiency of long
practice: daggers on each thigh and two katanas crisscrossing his
back. Then he darted over on foot, moving so quickly the mortal eye
couldn’t catch him.

As he approached, he picked up the faint
sound of a melodious male voice coming from the field, followed by
a chorus of murmurs in reply—sounds too slight for anything but a
vampire’s hearing to catch. Grimm had been big on staging, too,
which made Raze wonder just how closely this protégé had been to
Grimm and how long he or she had been working in the shadows.

He rounded the back of the ballpark and
climbed up the rear of the bleachers. Pulling his head up over the
top, he looked down at the darkened field below. A lone man stood
before a group of approximately two hundred robed and kneeling
minions. Segmented into pairs with the men in black and the women
in red, they formed a perfect pattern of stripes in the center of
the field.

Raze listened to a couple lines of bullshit
about the supremacy of the vampire nation, then he tuned it out and
focused on the leader. The man was tall and lean, dark-haired and
dressed in a three-piece suit. He had a mesmerizing cadence to his
speech, a lulling sonorousness that was evident even though Raze
had stopped picking out the words.

He debated his next step, knowing this was
an elaborate trap for him, one that would be designed with the
expectation that he wouldn’t come alone. Which was why he’d done
exactly that.

But he could still take them by
surprise.

Pulling out his phone, he jumped the hoops
necessary to reach Adrian.

“Mitchell,” the Sentinel leader
answered.

“It’s Raze. I’ve got a situation you’ll be
interested in.”

“Where are you?”

“Chicago.”

“Yes, that is interesting. So am I.”

Raze stilled, his hackles rising at the
softness of Adrian’s tone. “That’s not a coincidence.”

“No, it’s not. Location?”

He wasn’t surprised that the angel was so
far from his home base in Anaheim, California. That was Adrian’s
way. While Syre was cerebral in his leadership, using Raze and
Salem to investigate and Vashti as his iron fist, Adrian was the
opposite. The Sentinel leader left the administrative duties to
others so he could remain a hands-on hunter in the field. A vampire
hunter and goaler—those roles being the sole purpose of his
existence.

Raze gave his location, then pointed out, “I
wouldn’t have called you if I just needed a hand or two. If you’re
going to send a couple lycans and call it a night, don’t
bother.”

“Don’t tell me how to respond to a request
for a favor.” The lack of inflection in the angel’s voice was more
disconcerting than an outright threat would have been.

“If you’d let us establish some cabals and
covens in the major cities, I wouldn’t need to call you at all.”
The Sentinels used their lycans to keep vampires contained in
rural, lower population areas. They said the policy was to protect
mortals, but the side effect was the hindering of the Fallen’s
ability to police their own minions. And every transgression was
another mark against them, another smudge barring them from any
possibility of redemption.

“How many more rogue minions would there be
if vampires were allowed access to such a smorgasbord of food? The
spread would become uncontainable. It’s already out of control as
it is or you wouldn’t be calling me.”

The line died, leaving Raze cursing at his
cell phone. One of these days, he and the angel were going to have
it out. But not tonight.

As the couples swayed like hypnotized king
cobras, Raze leaped over onto the uppermost bench, then started
taking the stairs down, applauding as he went. “Man, you’ve really
got your delivery down. I mean, I could almost buy it... if I was a
whacked out moron.”

The man lifted his head and looked at Raze,
his eyes glowing in the darkness. “Raze, how nice of you to join
us. We’ve been expecting you. You are, after all, the guest of
honor.”

Although the distance between them was
great, neither of them needed to raise their voices to be heard.
“I’d say I was more of a bouncer. One who’s going to bounce all
your nutty asses into Hell.”

“Where are your friends? Surely you didn’t
come to such an occasion alone?”

“Yeah, it’s just me. I tried to round up
more of a party, but everyone said it’d be a dud. They were right.”
Although he kept his descent easy and casual, Raze was hyperaware
of new participants to the game as black-clad minions crawled
toward him like ants. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Nope. You don’t ring any bells.” He could
tell being forgotten really chafed and that made him smile. In the
back of his mind, he considered the possibility that Adrian might
leave him hanging in the wind—the Sentinel hadn’t actually agreed
to show up. But Raze had no choice but to proceed as if
reinforcements were on the way. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“That’s my goal.” The man walked closer, his
arms extended in dramatic fashion. “The Fallen are so busy wishing
to be the angels you once were that you never enjoy being what you
are.”

Raze pulled one katana out of its sheath,
the moonlight glinting off the silver-plated blade. “The only thing
I don’t like about what I am now is how much time I have to waste
hunting dickheads like you.”

“Ah... you’d prefer to continue your quest
to fuck everything willing to sate your lust. Of all the Fallen,
you’re one of the most pitiable. At least the others fell for love.
You fell only because you can’t keep you dick out of warm, wet
holes.”

Pivoting, Raze sliced the head off the
minion who’d attempted to come at him from behind. He took out two
more who lunged from the sides, his speed and strength fueled by
the bitter truth that had been thrown in his face. Grimm’s eternal
love bullshit was why Raze had volunteered to hunt him down to
begin with. The twisting of love to achieve an even more twisted
end stirred violence and fury inside him. He’d watched his fellow
Watchers give up their wings for it, and Grimm’s doctrine made a
mockery of that terrible, heartrending sacrifice.

“See how he slays the bravest of us?” the
idiot prophet asked his minions. “His own people. Weakening us from
within. This is who we’ve elected to follow and yet they lead us
nowhere! We remain in the shadows, hidden from the world,
while—”

“Are you going to shut him up,” Adrian
asked, landing gracefully on a bench and swatting away the incoming
surge of minions with an impatient swat of his massive wings, “or
is that what you needed me for?”

The vampires on the field had staggered to
their feet when Adrian appeared and now they scrambled in every
direction. It was a natural, instinctive urge to run from an apex
predator, but the Sentinel leader himself inspired a unique awe and
fear. Like Syre, Adrian had been blessed by the Creator, gifted
with a face and form that was the height of angelic perfection. The
thirty-foot expanse of his alabaster wings glimmered in the
moonlight, the pure pristine white of the feathers framed by
crimson tips, as if he’d trailed the edges through freshly spilled
blood. That band of red was a vivid reminder of what he was—a
weapon tasked with punishing the Fallen and containing their
minions.

“He’s mine.” Raze raced down the steps and
vaulted onto the field at the same moment a dozen lycans in lupine
form hit the grass, converging on the panicked mass. He went after
the leader, who surprisingly stood his ground and faced off with a
pistol in hand.

“I could change your life, Raze.”

“Gimme your name.”

“Does it matter?”

Raze shrugged and twirled his blade with
practiced ease. “Always good to have a name to go with a kill.”

The man smiled. “You won’t kill me. You need
me to tell you if there are more of us, and if so, how many more
and where they are. And I won’t kill you because I need you, too.
If you’d think outside the box, you’d realize that you could be the
cornerstone of massive, sweeping advancement. You could have the
mate you deserve. You could—”

“You don’t know what I deserve.”

“Don’t make me hurt you, Raze.” He looked
over Raze’s shoulder and his smile widened. “You surprised me by
bringing in the Sentinels and their dogs, but we had to get rid of
them at some point. Now is as good a time as any.”

Using the man’s distraction, Raze whipped
out the blade strapped to his left thigh and threw it, striking the
prophet in the throat. The gun discharged. Pain ripped through Raze
along with the bullet that shot clear through his shoulder and out
the other side. The wound healed almost instantly, proving the
man’s words to be true: he didn’t want Raze dead or he’d have used
a silver-laced bullet.

Behind him, the field erupted with the
sounds of gunfire and the yelps of wounded lycans. Raze dropped to
the ground. As the robe-clad minions utilized the weapons they’d
hidden beneath their robes, his mind quickly assessed his options.
Adrian and a female Sentinel took to the field, their wings
deflecting bullets and slashing like blades. Screams rent the air.
Bodies were severed into pieces.

Most minions never knew what it was like to
face a Sentinel. They could never prepare for the lethality of
those magnificent wings that sliced like blades and were impervious
to all mortal implements of destruction. Unique to each angel, the
patterns and colors said much about the angel’s soul if you knew
how to read them, and their average thirty-foot span meant it was
nearly impossible to get close enough to inflict any damage.

Raze took out a minion with his other knife,
then crawled to the body of the prophet and took his gun. Lying on
his back, he emptied the clip into the converging mass of robe-clad
figures, slowing them down so that he could join the fray with his
swords. Leaping to his feet, he did just that, cutting a swathe
through the chaos.

Blood spurted and flowed like a river,
soaking the grass and splattering Raze until he dripped with it. It
was over in moments, leaving a battlefield upon which two Sentinels
stood inviolate, surrounded by snarling lycans and a sea of dead
bodies.

Raze pointed the tip of his blade at the two
minions he’d managed to spare. “For you two,” he murmured, “the fun
is just beginning.”

* * *

Raze made it back to his hotel just before
dawn. He showered again, finishing the job he’d started with a
hosing down at the field. Restlessness gnawed at him. The hunt
wasn’t over. What troubled him was that he had no idea what it
would take to end it. How many more of Grimm’s devotees were out
there?

Tugging on a pair of black sweats, he
propped up his iPad and placed a call to Vashti.

“Hey,” he greeted her, when her face came on
screen.

“Hey yourself.” Her gaze narrowed. “You’re
looking rough. What’s up?”

It was hard for a vampire to look rough. He
was surprised that she said he did, but he brushed past it and
caught her up on the night’s events.

“You killed him?” She leaned back into her
sofa cushions. It was rare for her to indulge in any downtime, so
rare that it took him a moment to pinpoint her location as her home
in Raceport. “Just like that?”

“Just like that. After what they did to the
man they left on my porch, he got off easy. I made it quick and
painless.”

Her brow rose. “O-kay... But who’s going to
give you intel now that the two minions you captured gave up a
whole lotta nada?”

“I got his name. Eventually, I’ll have his
mate.” His mouth curved without humor. “Baron has to have one, if
only to practice what he preaches.”

“Maybe you killed her tonight. Surely she
would have been there.”

“She wasn’t on the field. Trust me, if you’d
have seen the way they were dressed and lined up, you’d know that
everyone was paired except for him. I agree she was probably there
somewhere, but she kept out of sight.”