Frustrated and confused, she ran back to the club’s exit.
Maybe she could flag down a motorist, find a cop, any-
thing!
Frigid night air hit her face as she pushed open the
heavy doors and stepped outside. She dashed down the first
set of concrete steps, panting now, uncertain what she
was walking into, a woman alone against six, probably
drugged-out gang members. But she didn’t see them.
They were gone.
A group of young clubbers came strolling up the steps,
one of them playing air guitar while his friends talked
about hitting a rave later that night.
“Hey,” Gabrielle said, half expecting them to walk
right past her. They paused, smiling at her, even though at
twenty-eight she was likely a decade older than any of
them.
The one in the lead nodded his head at her. “ ’Sup?”
“Did any of you—” She hesitated, not certain she
should be relieved that this was not, evidently, a dream af-
ter all. “Did you happen to see the fight that was going on
out here a few minutes ago?”
“There was a fight? Awesome!” said the headbanger of
the group.
“Nah, man,” answered another. “We just got here. We
ain’t seen nothin’.”
They passed by, climbing the rest of the steps while
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Gabrielle could only watch, wondering if she was losing
her mind. She walked down to the curb. There was blood
on the pavement, but the punker and his attackers had
vanished.
Gabrielle stood under a streetlamp and rubbed a chill
from her arms. She pivoted to look down both sides of the
street, searching for any sign of the violence she had wit-
nessed a few minutes before.
Nothing.
But then . . . she heard it.
The sound drifted from a narrow alley to her right.
Flanked by a concrete shoulder-high wall that acted as an
acoustic aid, the almost lightless walkway betrayed its oc-
cupants whose faint animal-like grunts carried out to the
street. Gabrielle could not place the sick, wet sounds that
froze her blood in her veins and tripped off instinctual
alarms in every nerve in her body.
Her feet were moving. Not away from the source of
those disturbing sounds, but toward it. Her cell phone was
like a brick in her hand. She was holding her breath. She
didn’t realize she wasn’t breathing until she had walked a
couple of paces into the alleyway and her gaze had settled
on a group of figures up ahead.
The thugs in leather and sunglasses.
They were crouched down on their hands and knees,
pawing at something, tearing at it. In the scant light from
the street, Gabrielle glimpsed a tattered scrap of fabric ly-
ing near the carnage. It was the punker’s tank top, shred-
ded and stained.
Gabrielle’s finger, poised over the Redial button of her
cell phone, came down silently onto the tiny key. There
was a quiet trill on the other end, then the police dis-
patcher’s voice shattered the night like cannon fire.
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“911. What is your emergency?”
One of the bikers swung his head around at the sudden
disturbance. Feral, hate-filled eyes pinned Gabrielle like
daggers where she stood. His face was bloody, slick with
gore. And his teeth! They were sharp like an animal’s—not
teeth at all, but fangs that he bared to her as he opened his
mouth and hissed a terrible-sounding foreign word.
“911,” said the dispatcher once again. “Please state
your emergency.”
Gabrielle couldn’t speak. She was so shaken, she could
hardly breathe. She brought the cell phone up to her
mouth, but could not make her throat form words.
Her call for help was wasted.
Knowing this with a certain, bone-deep dread,
Gabrielle did the only logical thing that came to her. With
trembling fingers, she turned the device toward the gang of
sadistic bikers and clicked the image-capture button. A
small flash lit up the alley.
They all turned toward her now, raising their hands to
shield their sunglass-shaded eyes.
Oh, God. Maybe she still had a chance of escaping this
hellish night. Gabrielle clicked the picture button again
and again and again, all the while making her retreat back
up the alley to the street. She heard murmured voices,
snarled curses, the movement of feet on pavement, but she
didn’t dare look back. Not even when a sharp hiss of steel
rang out behind her, followed by unearthly shrieks of
agony and rage.
Gabrielle raced into the night on adrenaline and fear,
not stopping until she reached a standing taxi on
Commercial Street. She jumped in and slammed the door.
She was panting, out of her mind with fear.
“Take me to the nearest police station!”
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The cabbie slung his arm over the back of the seat and
turned around to stare at her, frowning. “You okay, lady?”
“Yeah,” she replied automatically. Then, “No. I need to
report a—”
Jesus. What did she intend to report? A cannibalistic
feeding frenzy by a pack of rabid bikers? Or the only other
possible explanation, which wasn’t any more believable?
Gabrielle met the cabbie’s anxious eyes. “Please hurry.
I just witnessed a murder.”
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Vampires.
The night was thick with them. He had counted
more than a dozen in the dance club, most of them
trolling the half-dressed, undulating crowds, selecting—
and seducing—the women who would Host their thirst
that night. It was a symbiotic arrangement that had served
the Breed well for more than two millennia, a peaceful co-
habitation that depended on the vampires’ ability to scrub
the memories of the humans on whom they fed. Before the
sun came up, a good deal of blood would be spilled but
in the morning, the Breed would be returned to their
Darkhavens in and around the city, and the humans they
had enjoyed tonight would be none the wiser.
But that was not the case in the alley outside the night-
club.
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For the six blood-gorged predators there, their un-
sanctioned kill would be their last. They were careless in
their hunger; they hadn’t detected that they were being
watched. Not when he was observing them in the club, nor
when he had trailed them outside, surveilling them from
the ledge of a second-story window of the converted
church.
They were lost to the high of Bloodlust, the disease of
addiction that had once been epidemic among the Breed,
causing so many of their kind to turn Rogue. Like these,
who fed openly and indiscriminately from the humans
who lived among them.
Lucan Thorne had no particular affinity for hu-
mankind, but what he felt for the Rogue vampires before
him was even less. To see one or two feral vampires in a
single night’s patrol of a city the size of Boston was not un-
common. To find several working in tandem, feeding in
the open as these did, was more than a little troubling. The
Rogues were growing in numbers again, becoming more
bold.
Something had to be done.
For Lucan and several others of the Breed, every night
was a hunting expedition aimed at routing out the diseased
few who would jeopardize all that the vampire race had
worked so hard to achieve. Tonight, Lucan tracked his
prey alone, not caring that he was outnumbered. He had
waited until the opportunity to strike was prime: once the
Rogues had greedily fed the addiction that ruled their
minds.
Drunk on more blood than they could safely consume,
they had continued to savage and fight over the body of
the young man from the club, snarling and snapping like
a pack of wild dogs. Lucan had been poised to dispatch
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quick justice—and would have, if it hadn’t been for the
sudden appearance of a ginger-haired female in the dark-
ened corridor. In an instant, she had thrown the entire
night off course: following the Rogues to the alley, then un-
wittingly drawing their attention away from their kill.
As the light from her cell phone’s flash exploded in the
dark, Lucan descended from the shadowed ledge of the
window and landed on the pavement without a sound.
Like the Rogues, Lucan’s sensitive eyes were partially
blinded from that sudden spark of light amid the dark.
The woman fired a series of piercing flashes as she fled the
carnage, those few panicked clicks likely all that spared her
from the wrath of his savage kin.
But where the other vampires’ senses were clouded and
sluggish with Bloodlust, Lucan’s were ruthlessly clear. From
beneath his dark trenchcoat, he drew his weapons—twin
blades wrought of titanium-edged steel—and swung to
claim the head of the nearest Rogue.
Two more followed, the bodies of the dead thrashing as
they began their swift cellular decomposition from oozing
acidic pulp to incinerated ash. Animal shrieks filled the al-
leyway as Lucan severed the head of one more, then
swung around to impale another Rogue through the torso.
The Rogue hissed through bared, bloody teeth, its fangs
dripping gore. Pale-gold eyes held Lucan in contempt, the
huge irises swelled in hunger, swallowing up pupils that
were narrowed to thin vertical slits. The creature spasmed,
long arms reaching for him, its mouth stretched into a
hideous, alien sneer as the specially forged steel poisoned
its Rogue blood and reduced the vampire to smoldering
stain on the street.
Only one remained. Lucan whirled to meet the large
male, both blades raised to strike.
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But the vampire was gone—fled into the night before
he could slay it.
Damn.
He’d never let one of the bastards escape his justice be-
fore this. He shouldn’t now. He considered chasing the
Rogue down, but it would mean leaving the scene of the
attack unsecured. That was the greater risk here, letting
the humans know the full measure of the danger that lived
among them. Because of the savagery of the Rogues,
Lucan’s kind had been persecuted and hunted by humans
throughout the Old Times; the race might not survive a
new age of retribution, now that man had technology on
his side.
Until the Rogues were suppressed—better yet, elimi-
nated entirely—humankind could know nothing of the ex-
istence of the vampires living all around them.
As he set about cleaning the area of all traces of the
killing, Lucan’s thoughts kept returning to the woman with
the sunlit hair and sweet, alabaster beauty.
How was it she had been able to find the Rogues in the
alley?
Although it was widely held among human folklore
that vampires could disappear at will, the truth was only
slightly less remarkable. Gifted with great agility and
speed, they could simply move faster than human eyes
could register, an ability that was augmented by the vam-
pires’ advanced hypnotic power over the minds of lesser
beings. Oddly, this woman seemed immune to both.
Lucan had seen her in the club, he realized now. His
gaze had been drawn away from his quarry by a pair of
soulful eyes and a spirit that seemed nearly as lost as his
own. She had noticed him, too, staring at him from where
she sat with her friends. Even through the crowd and the
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stale odor of the club, Lucan had scented the trace notes of
perfume on her skin—something exotic, rare.
He smelled it now as well, a delicate note that clung to
the night, teasing his senses and calling to something
primitive within him. His gums ached with the sudden
stretching of his fangs, a physical reaction to need—
carnal, or otherwise—that he was powerless to curb. He
scented her, and he hungered, little better than his Rogue
brethren.
Lucan tipped his head back and dragged the essence
of the woman deeper into his lungs, tracking her across
the city with his keen sense of smell. The sole witness to
the Rogues’ attack, it was more than unwise to let her
keep the memory of what she had seen. Lucan would find
the female and take whatever measures were necessary to
ensure the protection of the Breed.
And in the back of his mind, an ancient conscience
whispered that whoever she was, she already belonged to
him.
“I’m telling you, I saw the whole thing. There were six of
them, and they were tearing at the guy with their hands
and teeth—like animals. They killed him!”
“Miss Maxwell, we’ve been over this numerous times
already tonight. Now, we’re all tired and the night is only
getting longer.”
Gabrielle had been at the police
station for more than
three hours, trying to give her account of the horror she
witnessed outside La Notte. The two officers she spoke
with had been skeptical at first, but now they were getting
impatient, almost adversarial. Soon after she had arrived,
the cops had sent a squad car around to the club to check
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out the situation and recover the body Gabrielle had re-
ported seeing. The call had come up empty. No reports of
a gang altercation and no evidence whatsoever of anyone
having met with foul play. It was as if the entire incident
had never happened—or had been miraculously swept
clean.
“If you would just listen to me . . . if you would just look
at the pictures I took—”
“We’ve seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times al-
ready. Frankly, nothing you’ve said tonight checks out—
not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable
images from your cell phone.”
“I’m sorry if the quality is lacking,” Gabrielle replied,
acidly. “The next time I’m witnessing a bloody slaughter
by a gang of psychos, I’ll have to remember to bring my
Leica and a few extra lenses.”
“Maybe you want to rethink your statement,” sug-
gested the elder of the two officers, his Boston accent
tinged with the Irish brogue of a youth spent in Southie.
He stroked a chubby hand over his thinning brow, then
slid her cell phone back across the desk. “You should be
aware that filing a false police report is a crime, Miss
Maxwell.”
“This is not a false report,” she insisted, frustrated and
not a little angry that she was being treated like the crimi-
nal here. “I stand by everything I’ve said tonight. Why
would I make this up?”
“That’s something only you can answer, Miss
Maxwell.”
“This is unbelievable. You have my 911 call.”
“Yes,” agreed the officer. “You did, indeed, make a call
to emergency dispatch. Unfortunately, all we have is static
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on the recording. You didn’t say anything, and you didn’t
respond to the dispatcher’s requests for information.”
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to find the words to describe see-
ing someone get their throat ripped out.”
He gave her another dubious look. “This club—La
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