Chapter 273
I was glad Jamie was the one to explain all of that to us. He really seemed to know what he was talking about, and he wasn’t at all braggadocios.
The quiet confidence ended as soon as Christian opened his mouth. Shane asked if they’d encountered any other sort of monsters we needed to know about when they were in Wallachia, and Christian said, “Sirens.”
“You mean like Eliza?” Elliott asked, sitting up straight in his chair. Eliza was kicked off of the KC team before I joined it, but she was the one on the bridge in Philly who was ready to shoot Giovani even though he threatened to kill me if she didn’t put her weapon down. I couldn’t imagine encountering anyone as heartless as her, even in the form of a Vampire. But I also wasn’t quite sure what Elliott was getting at. I knew what a siren was from mythology. Is that what Eliza was?
Christian’s voice sounded a bit haunted, though just as confident and cocky as always as he said, “Sort of—but much more deadly. A lot more powerful, too.” He shifted his eyes to look at Aaron, but the Leader wasn’t looking at him at all. His arms were folded and he was looking at the ground, which made me think he knew exactly what Christian was talking about.
“Do we not have any newer weapons we can try that might destroy them more quickly? Like the grenade we used against Gibbon?” Aurora asked.
“Because that worked so well,” Elliott muttered. I wanted to tell him I thought it worked just fine, but I was keeping my mouth shut. I’d already sworn to it.
“Slowed him down,” Christian replied, clearly annoyed that Elliott was questioning his new weapon.
“No thanks to you,” Elliott snapped back.
But thanks to me, I thought. I didn’t say it though. Still not talking.
Aaron cut them off before they got into an argument. “The quick answer is no. But now that we have a better idea what we are up against, we can look into it.”
Shane let out a really loud huff and asked, “This is all related to that stupid portal, then, right?”
I looked at my sister, thinking she might come unglued and shoot across the room at the Guardian. She didn’t like Shane at all. But oddly enough, her eyes narrowed, and she said snidely, “Yep.”
My body betrayed me then as I reached out and put my hand on Elliott’s knee. I had felt him tense up beside me and images of him ripping Shane’s head from his shoulders filled my mind. I might welcome that, but I didn’t think it was the best way to end our night. As soon as I touched him, he relaxed a little bit and took my hand in his. Oddly, that helped me calm down, too, even though I was ready to scream at him only a few moments ago.
“It really doesn’t matter what the cause is,” Aaron said, his voice as tranquil and reasonable as ever. “The bottom line is, we need to deal with it.”
There was a brief discussion about weaponry that I tuned out of since it had nothing to do with me. I’d tried to convince them a dozen times that I was their best weapon, but so far they seemed to think I was just a little girl who hitched a ride on some of the hunts.
When Aaron switched the topic of conversation to a map of red and blue Xs, I tried not to let my eyes glaze over.
I tuned back in when Aaron said only one Vampire had checked in in three days, and my sister said, “That was Bonnie.” It made me lose my stream of thought again, though, as I imagined what she was doing right now. I vaguely registered the idea that the Xs were Vampires and locations, that basically they all seemed to be moving in the same direction, but we were having trouble tracking them. Maybe the trackers weren’t working. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to go to bed.
“They are planning something big,” Hannah was saying. I heard her, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Their voices were growing fuzzy, and for a minute, I thought maybe I was falling asleep.
“Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before,” she continued from somewhere a mile or so away.
“Yes, they are.” That was Aaron, and he was also a great distance from where I sat.
When Elliott spoke, the boom of his voice vibrated through our hands somehow, and it jarred me a little, but I was still floating around in the cosmos somewhere. “We need to stop it.”
“Destruction.”
The sound of my own voice sounded foreign to me, and I snapped back to my own body as I realized I had just spoken. All eyes were on me now, and I continued with my train of thought, though I wasn’t exactly sure why I had spoken up or where the ideas were coming from. “We know what they’re planning. They’re planning total destruction.” My voice was stronger by the end of the last sentence, and I was certain of what I was saying.
Christian’s tone was condescending. “But what does that mean?”
I turned and looked at him, glad that he was all the way across the room from me. I pulled my hand away from Elliott and folded both of them on the table in front of me as I tried to explain. “It means—they’re going to change as many people into Vampires as they can. And then….” I couldn’t quite find the words. Or maybe I didn’t want to say them.
I didn’t have to. “They’re going to come for us,” Brandon said.
I turned my head to look at him, wondering how he knew exactly what I was trying to say, and he nodded at me, like he would always have my back. I wanted to believe that was the case, but I wasn’t ready to not be mad at him anymore.
My sister’s question brought my eyes from his face. “So how do we stop it?”
I realized everyone was looking at me for an answer, and as much as I wanted to start blurting out ideas, I was too tired and too morose to come up with a strategic answer. So I put it off. “I don’t know. Yet.”
That wasn’t what they wanted to hear, but then I assumed none of them actually expected me to have a solid answer anyway.
Shane showed his brilliance as he blurted out, “Look, if you ask me, all we need to do is figure out what came through the portal, and then we can find it, kill it, and then get back to operations as usual.”
I assumed Elliott would be the first to put him in his place for saying the most obvious, stupidest comment possible, but it was Aurora who spoke first. “Oh, okay. That should be easy,” she said, each word dripping with sarcasm. “We can just Google it.”
“Or call information like we did back in the day!” Elliott backed her up.
“Do you have a better idea?” Shane was clearly on the defense now, and then they all began to shoot sarcastic comments back and forth. I looked at my sister, whose eyes were heavy, and then at Aaron, who seemed to have just given up. I couldn’t blame him. I would hate to be in charge of this group right now.
But since I wasn’t, I did speak up. “Listen,” I said, but when no one did, not even the burly Guardian sitting right next to me, I shouted it a few more times. “Listen!” Every eye was on me again, most mouths hanging open in shock. “I know who came through the portal. I know where they are. I just have to… remember.”
