Midnight Breed - Book - 01
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her hand out of his loose grip and shoved him away from
her. “No. I can’t let you do this to me, not now. Everything
between us has changed! It’s all different now.”
“The only thing different, Gabrielle, is that you see me
now with your eyes open.”
“Yes.” She forced herself to look at him. “And I don’t
like what I see.”
His smile held no mercy whatsoever. “You only wish
you could say the same about how I make you feel.”
She wasn’t sure how he did it—how he could move so
fast in the time it took for her to blink—but in that same in-
stant, Lucan’s breath was skating close below her ear, his
deep voice rumbling along her neck as he pressed his body
against hers.
It was too much to process: this terrifying new reality,
the questions she didn’t even know how to begin asking.
And then there was the other disorientation brought on by
the exquisite power of Lucan’s touch, his voice, his lips
softly grazing her tender skin.
“Stop it!” She tried to push him, but he was a wall of
muscle and cool, dark purpose. He withstood her anger,
and the futile blows she threw at his massive chest didn’t
seem to faze him in the least. His placid expression re-
mained as unmoving as his body. She backed away from
him in frustration, in anguish. “God, what are you trying
to prove here, Lucan?”
“Only that I am not the monster you want to believe I
am. Your body knows me. Your senses tell you that you are
safe with me. You need only listen to them, Gabrielle. And
listen to me, when I tell you that I did not come here to
frighten you. I will never strike you, nor will I ever take
your blood. On my honor, I will never harm you.”
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She let out a choked laugh, a knee-jerk reaction to the
idea of a vampire possessing anything close to honor, let
alone pledging it to her now. But Lucan was unwavering,
solemn. Maybe she was crazy, because the longer she held
his silver stare, the weaker her grasp on the doubt she
wanted so desperately to cling to.
“I am not your enemy, Gabrielle. For centuries, my
kind and yours have needed each other to survive.”
“You feed on us,” she whispered brokenly, “like para-
sites.”
Something dark moved across his features, but he did
not rise to the contempt in her accusation. “We have pro-
tected you as well. Some of my kind have even cherished
yours, sharing life together as blood-bonded mates. It is the
only way the vampire race continues. Without human fe-
males to bear our young, we would eventually be extinct. It
is how I came to be, and how all those like me came into
being as well.”
“I don’t understand. Why can’t you . . . mix with
women of your own kind?”
“Because there are none. Through a genetic failure,
Breed offspring are solely male, from the very first of the
line, down through hundreds of generations.”
This last revelation, among all the other astonishing
news she was hearing, gave her pause. “So, that means
your mother is human?”
Lucan gave a slight nod. “She was.”
“And your father? He was . . .”
Before she could say the word vampire, Lucan replied.
“My father, and the seven other Ancient Ones like him,
were not of this world. They were the first of my kind, be-
ings from another place, very different from this planet.”
It took her a second to absorb what she had heard, par-
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ticularly on the heels of everything else she was coming to
grips with at the moment. “What are you saying—they
were aliens?”
“They were explorers. Savage, warminded conquerors,
in fact, who crash-landed here a very long time ago.”
Gabrielle stared at him. “Your father was not only a
vampire, but an alien besides? Do you have any idea how
insane that sounds?”
“It is the truth. My father’s people did not call them-
selves vampires but, by human definition, that is what
they were. Their digestive systems were too advanced for
Earth’s crude protein. They could not process the plants or
animals as humans did, so they learned to take their nour-
ishment from blood. They fed without restraint and wiped
out entire populations in the process. You’ve heard of
some of them, no doubt: Atlantis. The Mayan kingdom.
Countless other unnamed, unrecorded civilizations that
vanished seemingly overnight. Many of the mass deaths
historically attributed to plagues and famine were not that
at all.”
Good Lord.
“Assuming you can be taken seriously about any of this,
you’re talking about thousands of years of carnage.” A
chill spread over her limbs when he said nothing to deny it.
“Do they they . . . do you—God, I can’t believe I’m having
this conversation. Do vampires feed on any living thing,
like each other maybe, or are we humans the main
course?”
Lucan’s expression was grave. “Human blood alone
contains the specific combinations of nutrients we need in
order to survive.”
“How often?”
“We must feed every few days, a week sometimes. More
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is required if we are injured and need strength to heal from
wounds.”
“And you . . . kill when you feed?”
“Not always, seldom, in fact. Most of the race feeds
from willing human Hosts.”
“People actually volunteer to let you torture them?” she
asked, incredulous.
“There is no torture involved, unless we will it. When a
human is relaxed, the bite of a vampire can be very plea-
surable. When it’s over, the Host recalls nothing because
we leave no memory of ourselves behind.”
“But you do kill sometimes,” she said, finding it hard
not to sound accusing.
“At times, it is necessary to take a life. The Breed shares
an oath never to prey on the innocent or infirm.”
She scoffed. “How noble of you.”
“It is noble, Gabrielle. If we wanted to—if we gave
ourselves over to that part of us that is still the warring con-
queror of our forebears, we could enslave all of mankind.
We could be kings, with every human existing only to feed
and amuse us. That very idea is at the core of a long,
deadly battle between my kind and our enemy brothers,
the Rogues. You saw some of them yourself, that night out-
side the dance club.”
“You were there?”
As soon as she said it
, she knew he had been. She re-
called the striking face and sunglass-shaded eyes that had
watched her through the crowd. She’d felt a connection to
him even then, in that brief glance that had seemed to
reach out to her through the smoke and darkness of the
club.
“I’d been tracking that group of Rogues for about an
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hour,” Lucan said, “watching for the prime opportunity to
move in and take them out.”
“There were six of them,” she remembered vividly,
seeing in her mind the half-dozen terrible faces, their glow-
ing, feral eyes and snapping fangs. “You were going to con-
front them by yourself ?”
His shrug seemed to say that it was not unusual odds,
him against many. “I had some help that night—you and
your cell phone camera. The flash surprised them, gave
me the chance to strike.”
“You killed them?”
“All but one. I’ll get him, too.”
Looking at his fierce expression, Gabrielle had no
doubt that he would. “The cops sent a squad car out to the
club after I reported the killing. They didn’t find anything.
No evidence at all.”
“I made sure they wouldn’t.”
“You made me look like a fool. The police insisted I was
making all of it up.”
“Better that, than tipping them off to the very real
battles that have been taking place on human streets for
centuries. Can you imagine the wide-scale panic if sub-
stantiated reports of vampire attacks were to start making
news around the world?”
“Is that what’s happening? These kinds of killings are
going on all the time, everywhere?”
“More and more, lately. The Rogues are a faction of
blood addicts that care only about their next fix. At least,
that had been their mode until very recently. Something’s
going on now. They’re preparing. Becoming organized.
They’ve never been more dangerous than they are now.”
“And thanks to the pictures I took outside that club,
these Rogue vampires are coming after me.”
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“The incident you witnessed brought you to their at-
tention, no doubt, and any human makes good sport for
them. But it is the other pictures you’ve taken that have
likely put you in the most jeopardy.”
“What other pictures?”
“That one.”
He indicated a framed photograph hanging on the wall
of her living room. It was an exterior shot of an old ware-
house in one of the sketchier parts of town.
“What made you decide to photograph that building?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, not even sure why she
had decided to frame the picture. Just looking at it now
gave her a little chill down her spine. “I never would have
set foot in that part of town, but I remember I’d taken a
wrong turn that night and ended up lost. Something just
drew my eye to the warehouse—nothing I can really ex-
plain. I was nervous as hell to be there, but I couldn’t leave
without taking a few shots of the place.”
Lucan’s voice was gravely serious. “I, along with several
other Breed warriors who work with me, raided that loca-
tion a month and a half ago. It was a Rogue lair, housing
fifteen of our enemies.”
Gabrielle gaped at him. “There are vampires living in
that building?”
“Not anymore.” He strode past her to the kitchen table,
where a few other shots lay, including some from the aban-
doned asylum, taken just a couple of days ago. He picked
up one of the photographs and held it out to her. “We’ve
been surveilling this location for weeks. We have reason to
believe it might be one of the largest colonies of Rogues in
New England.”
“Oh, my God.” Gabrielle stared at the image of the
asylum, a slight tremble in her fingers as she set it back
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down on the table. “When I took these pictures the other
morning, a man found me there. He chased me off the
property. You don’t think he was—”
Lucan shook his head. “Minion, not a vampire, if you
saw him after dawn. Sunlight is poison to us. That much of
the old folklore is true. Our skin burns quickly, like yours
would if you held it under a very powerful magnifying
glass at the height of morning.”
“Which is why I’ve only seen you in the evening,” she
murmured, thinking back on each of Lucan’s visits, from
that very first time when he began his deception with her.
“How could I have been so blind when all the clues were
right in front of me?”
“Maybe you didn’t want to see them, but you knew,
Gabrielle. You suspected that the slaying you witnessed
was something more than what your human experiences
could explain. You nearly said as much to me, the first time
we met. On some level of your consciousness, you knew it
was a vampire attack.”
She did know, even then. But she had not suspected
that Lucan was a part of it. Part of her still wanted to re-
ject the idea.
“How can this be real?” she moaned, dropping into the
nearest chair. She stared at the pictures scattered on the
table in front of her, then looked back up at Lucan’s grim
face. Tears threatened, burning in her eyes, a knot of des-
perate denial forming in her throat. “This can’t be real.
God, please tell me that this is not really happening.”
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He had laid a lot on her to deal with—not everything,
but more than enough for one night.
Lucan had to give Gabrielle credit. Aside from a bit of
irrationality with the garlic and holy water, she had main-
tained an amazingly level head through a conversation
that was, no doubt, pretty hard to swallow. Vampires, an-
cient alien arrivals, the rising war with the Rogues, who, by
the way, were gunning for her now, too.
She had taken it all in with a stalwartness that most hu-
man men would not possess.
Lucan watched her struggling to process the informa-
tion as she sat at the table with her head in her hands, stray
tears only just beginning to stream down her cheeks. He
wished there was a way to make her path easier. There
wasn’t. And things were going to go from bad to worse
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for her, once she learned the full truth of what lay ahead
<
br /> of her.
For her own safety and that of the Breed, she was going
to have to leave her apartment, her friends, her career.
Leave behind everything that had been a part of her life
so far.
And she was going to have to do it tonight.
“If you have any other photographs like these,
Gabrielle, I need to see them.”
She nodded, lifting her head. “I have everything on my
computer,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face.
“What about the ones in the darkroom?”
“They’re on disk, too, along with every image I’ve sold
through the gallery.”
“Good.” Her mention of art sales tripped an alarm in
his memory. “When I was here a few nights ago, you men-
tioned having sold an entire collection to someone. Who
was it?”
“I don’t know. It was an anonymous purchase. The
buyer arranged a private showing in a rented penthouse
suite downtown. They looked at a few images, then paid
cash for all of them.”
He swore and Gabrielle’s already stressed expression
slipped toward true terror.
“Oh, my God. Are you thinking it was the Rogues who
bought them?”
What Lucan was thinking was that if he were the one
standing at the helm of the Rogues’ current operation, he
would be most interested in acquiring a weapon that could
home in on his opponents’ locations. To say nothing of
crippling his enemies’ ability to use said weapon for their
own gain.
Gabrielle would be an extraordinary asset in Rogue
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hands, for many reasons. And once they had her in their
possession, it wouldn’t take them long to discover her
Breedmate mark. She would be abused like the meanest
brood mare, forced to take their blood and bear their
spawn until her body simply gave out and died. It could
take years, decades, centuries.
“Lucan, my best friend took those photographs into the
showing that night, by himself. It would have killed me if
anything had happened to him. Jamie walked in there
without knowing anything about the danger he was in.”
“Be glad for that, because it’s probably the only reason
he walked out alive.”
She recoiled as if he’d slapped her. “I don’t want my
friends getting hurt because of what’s happening to me.”
“You’re in more danger than anyone right now. And we