Cadence thought of the titanium bullets and wondered if they would be any more useful, but since Aaron had forbidden anyone from using them after their first trip to Philadelphia, she didn’t ask in front of the rest of the team.
The room was quiet for a second before Shane asked, “Did you guys encounter any other kinds of monsters at Wallachia that we didn’t see tonight, besides Dracula himself?”
The answer came quickly from a haunted voice. “Sirens.”
Everyone shifted their attention to Christian. He was staring at the wall in front of him, like he’d just seen a ghost. Jamie put his hand on the tech guy’s arm, seeming to snap him out of it, but he still looked uncomfortable.
“Sirens?” Elliott repeated, his tone a mixture of surprise and confusion. “You mean like that bitch Eliza?”
Christian didn’t answer though, and it was Aaron who responded. “Sort of—but much more deadly. A lot more powerful, too.” Whatever it was that Christian had seen in Wallachia, Cadence realized Aaron had also seen it. She felt uneasy; the shadow the discussion had cast over his countenance lingered too long.
“Do we not have any newer weapons we can try that might destroy them more quickly?” Aurora asked. “Like the grenade we used against Gibbon?”
“Because that works so well,” Elliott muttered.
“Slowed him down.” Christian seemed to snap out of it now, turning to glare at Elliott. They had never gotten along.
“No thanks to you,” Elliott countered.
“The quick answer is no,” Aaron said, speaking over them. “But now that we have a better idea what we are up against, we can look into it.”
“This is all related to that stupid portal then, right?” Shane asked.
Cadence shifted her eyes to him and glared for a moment, and she felt like the entire room was alternating between staring at her and then Elliott. When she finally spoke, she decided that biting her tongue was probably the best choice. “Yep.” A glance at Elliott told her he was going to lose it in about five seconds, but she noticed her sister’s arms were not folded anymore, and she couldn’t see the hand closest to Elliott. She imagined Cassidy was doing her best to keep him from ripping Shane’s or Christian’s heads off of their bodies and playing hacky sack with them.
“It really doesn’t matter what the cause is,” Aaron, the voice of reason, offered. “The bottom line is, we need to deal with it.”
“Do you want Christian and I to work on weaponry then?” Jamie asked.
Aaron nodded. “You might need to contact Dr. Morrow, too.” Cadence recognized that name. He was the scientist working on the Retransformation serum that had almost killed Aaron when Christian told him it was okay to use, and it really wasn’t. She had never met him, but an idea began to burn in the back of her head at the mention of his name. She pushed it aside, thinking she’d come back to it later if need be.
“All right, let’s move on to the second topic.” Aaron pulled up a similar map of the US as the one they’d looked at a few days ago in a smaller team meeting. Only, this one had more red Xs. “This is a map of the attacks we know of in the last three weeks. And this,” he changed it so that there were overlapping blue Xs, “shows our missing persons reports.” While the amount was not staggering, it did look like there were more people disappearing recently, and the different colored Xs seemed to coincide.
“This is dually alarming because we have not had a lot of Vampires come in for tagging recently. In fact, according to Intake, we’ve had exactly one in the last three days.” He looked at Cadence who swallowed hard.
“And that was Bonnie,” Cadence offered.
A hush fell over the team. Aaron didn’t let it linger. He shifted the visual so that it was a map of the world, and then added in the appropriate Xs. The numbers looked the same across nearly every continent. There did seem to be more blue Xs in Australia, however, Cadence noted, and while she thought that might be something, it wasn’t enough to make any alarms go off.
“They’re planning something big,” Hannah muttered. “Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before.”
“Yes, they are,” Aaron agreed. “We just need to figure out what it is.”
“And stop it,” Elliott added.
The room grew quiet, solemn.
“Destruction.”
Cassidy’s soft voice broke through the silence and every head turned to look at her. “We know what they’re planning. They’re planning total destruction.” Her voice sounded stronger the more she spoke.
“But what does that mean?” Christian reasoned.
Cassidy turned to look at him. He was all the way on the other side of the room from her so she had to peer around most of the rest of the team to see him. “It means—they’re going to change as many people into Vampires as they can. And then…”
“They’re going to come for us,” Brandon concluded.
The grownups in the room stared at the two youngest faces in contemplation. Cadence had a feeling her sister was right, but she still didn’t know what that meant. Rather than question how Cassidy knew this or what it might look like, she asked the only obvious question that came to mind. “So how do we stop it?”
Her little sister sunk back against her chair. “I don’t know. Yet.”
“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,” Shane offered.
“Oh, okay. That should be easy,” Aurora added, rolling her eyes. “We’ll just Google it.”
“Or call information like we did back in the day!” Elliott suggested, equally as sarcastic.
“Do you have a better idea?” Shane asked, which broke into a discussion of a better idea for what? Calling information or figuring out what had come through the portal? Cadence turned to look at Aaron, who appeared to be almost as exhausted as she felt, and saw he didn’t have the patience to move to hush them. Neither did she.
They didn’t have to.
