Ares understands what it took out of Roman to watch his wife do what she did. It ripped a piece of his soul apart, and Ares wants to recognize that.
“No problem,” Juliet chuckles as she hugs Ares back. “Just don’t go dying again. What I just did? It’s a one-time thing.”
“I’ll do my best,” Ares chuckles.
Good to know, though.
The look Roman gives Ares as he backs away says something. It’s different between them now. There’s a bond there.
Juliet groans again, rubbing her face. “Okay, well, that sucked. How long was I out?”
“Exactly five minutes,” Roman answers, helping her sit up. “I timed it.”
“You would.” She smirks tiredly and leans into him. He kisses her forehead, his fingers running through her hair like he’s grounding himself.
Sysco climbs to his feet, looking around at the utter carnage—the puddles of blood, the ripped flesh, the broken bodies, and the carnage of what was nearly the end of the damn world.
“Well… now what the fuck do we do?”
Chapter 17
I’ve never seen so much blood in one place.
Once upon a time, the sight of all this blood would have made me pass out. I couldn’t have handled it. But slowly, Ares seemed to heal that. And when I became a vampire? I think that took care of the rest.
But blood is thick in the air. It soaks the floor. Clings to my skin. The tang of it coats the back of my throat as we move slowly through what’s left of the resurrection stage, as if moving any faster would bring it all crashing down again.
Juliet is wiping her face with a cloth that might have once been white but is now saturated in streaks of red and black. She looks like hell. Like we all do.
The bones of the Blood Father—what’s left of them—lie in a heap.
“That’s the last one,” Sysco says, hauling what’s left of James’ brother onto a tarp.
Juliet crosses the floor, careful of the blood pools, and glances down at the body. “We cremate them. All of them.”
Roman wipes blood off his jaw, his shirt soaked through. “Then we scatter the ashes.”
Juliet nods. “That’s what we did with Archer King. No bones. No trace. No way back.”
I don’t know who the hell Archer King is, but I get the willies just from the way Juliet says his name.
Ares’ gaze darkens. “Agreed.”
We gather the remains. Five bodies. James, his two brothers, Markus, and whatever’s left of the Blood Father. Sysco makes a few quick calls, quiet and efficient. He’s got a guy. No questions asked. Doesn’t ask who the bodies are. Doesn’t want to know. Just says he can do it.
We load them into tarps and tape off the ends and cracks so no more blood can escape. The van Sysco arranges is old and beat-up, the kind that looks like it belongs to a band that never made it. We drive in silence to a facility on the edge of the city—a place with no name, no real address. Just a man with dead eyes and a roaring furnace.
Juliet stands beside me as Roman and Sysco dump one of the brothers into the flames. I watch as Ares grabs the bag with the Blood Father’s bones and then drops them into the fire as well.
“I didn’t even really know who that was until a few days ago,” I say as I wrap my arms around my middle. “And he could have ended the world as we know it.”
“Cyrus tried to make the world forget his son,” Juliet says as she stares into the flames. “Too bad immortals have long memories. I wonder if he will ever realize his son’s bones aren’t in Roter Himmel anymore?”
I don’t have an answer to that, so I don’t say anything.
It takes hours to burn every one of these bodies down to ash. I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am, when we have to wait half the night before it’s done. But eventually, it is. We collect every bit of the ash and bag it, and then we drive to the Hudson.
Morning is teasing the horizon, fog curling off the water, the skyline behind us an eerie silhouette of the city we just saved.One by one, we tear open the bags, and dump them into the dark water. The current dissolves them in seconds. Gone.
