Midnight Breed - Book - 01
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ness he might do anything to harm Gabrielle. “I need to
hear you swear it. Each of you. Promise me.”
“Shit,” Dante said, gaping at him. Finally, he nodded
gravely. “Yeah. Okay. You’re fucking crazy, but okay.”
Gideon shook his head, then held out his fist and
knocked his knuckles against Lucan’s. “If that’s what you
want, you got it. I swear to you, Lucan.”
Niko voiced his agreement, too. “That day will never
come, but if it does, I know you’d do the same for any one
of us. So, hell yeah, you have my word.”
Which left Tegan, sitting stoically in the backseat.
“What about you, T?” Lucan said, pivoting to meet the
warrior’s flat green stare. “Can I count on you in this?”
Tegan held him in a long, contemplative silence. “Sure,
man. What the fuck, whatever you say. You turn, and I’ll
be first in line to take you out.”
Lucan nodded, satisfied as he looked around at the
sober stares of his brethren.
“Jesus,” Dante interjected when the heavy quiet in the
vehicle seemed endless. “All this touchy feely is making me
itchy to kill something. How about we quit jerking each
other off and go blow the roof off this mutha?”
Lucan returned the vampire’s cocky grin. “Let’s do it.”
The five Breed warriors in head-to-toe black poured
out of the SUV as a unit, then began the stealthy approach
toward the asylum on the other side of the moonlit trees.
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Thirty-one
Come on, come on. Open, damn it!”
Gabrielle sat behind the wheel of a black BMW coupe,
waiting impatiently for the massive gate at the compound’s
estate entrance to slide open and let her out. She hated
that she’d been forced to take the car from the fleet without
permission, but after what had happened with Lucan, she
was desperate to get away. Since the entire grounds were
circled with high-voltage fencing, that left just one alterna-
tive.
She’d figure out some way to return the Beemer once
she was home.
Once she was back where she truly belonged.
She had given all she could to Lucan tonight, but it
wasn’t enough. She had been prepared for him to push
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and resist her attempts to love him, but there was nothing
she could do if he shut her out. As he had tonight.
She had given him her blood, her body, and her heart,
and he had rejected her.
She was all out of energy now.
All out of fight.
If he was so determined to be alone, then who was she
to force him into changing? If he wanted to crash and
burn, she sure as hell didn’t intend to stand around waiting
to see it happen.
She was going home.
The heavy iron gates finally parted wide enough to let
her out. Gabrielle punched the gas and sped out onto the
quiet, unlit street. She had no clear idea of where she was
until she drove a couple of miles and found a familiar in-
tersection. There she took a left onto Charles Street, and
headed for Beacon Hill in an autopilot daze.
Her block seemed so much smaller to her as she parked
the car at the curb outside her apartment. Her neighbors’
lights were on, but despite the ambient yellow glow, the
brick building seemed dreary somehow.
Gabrielle climbed the front steps and fished her key out
of her purse. Her hand knocked against a small dagger
she’d taken out of Lucan’s weapon cabinet—a bit of insur-
ance in case she ran into any trouble on the way home.
The apartment phone was ringing as she came inside
and turned on the foyer light. She let the machine get it,
turning to set all the locks and deadbolts on the door.
From the kitchen, she heard Kendra’s clipped voice
come over the message intercom.
“It’s very rude of you to ignore me like this, Gabby.” Her friend
sounded strangely shrill. Pissed off. “I need to see you. It’s im-
portant. You and I really need to talk.”
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Gabrielle walked through the living room, noting the
blank spaces on her walls where Lucan had removed some
of her framed photographs. It seemed like a year had
passed since the night he’d come to her apartment and told
her the stunning truth about himself and the battle that
was raging among those of his kind.
Vampires, she thought, surprised to find that the word
no longer shocked her.
Probably very little could shock her now.
And she no longer feared that she was losing her mind
like her mother had. Even that tragic history had taken on
new meaning now. Her mother hadn’t been crazy at all.
She’d been a terrified young woman, caught up in a vio-
lence that few human minds could grasp.
Gabrielle was not about to let that same violence de-
stroy her. She was home, such as it was, and she would fig-
ure out some way to make her old life fit again.
She dropped her purse on the counter and walked over
to the answering machine. The message indicator was
blinking the number 18.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she murmured, hitting
the Play button.
As the machine did its thing, Gabrielle went into the
bathroom to inspect her neck. Lucan’s bite glowed dark
red below her ear, right near the teardrop and crescent
moon that marked her as a Breedmate. She probed the
twin punctures and vivid bruise that Lucan had left on her,
but found it didn’t hurt at all. The dull, empty ache be-
tween her legs was the worse pain, but even that paled next
to the cold rawness that settled in her chest when she
thought of Lucan recoiling from her tonight as if she were
poison. Stumbling out of the room like he couldn’t get
away from her fast enough.
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Gabrielle ran the water and washed up, vaguely aware
of the messages playing in the kitchen. As the machine ad-
vanced to the fourth or fifth one, she realized something
odd.
All of the messages were from Kendra, all within that
past twenty-four hours. One after the other, some with less
than five minutes between them.
And Kendra’s tone had soured significantly from her
first message when she had been playfully casual, offering
to take Gabrielle out to lunch or drinks or anything else
that sounded good. Then the tone of the invitation had
gotten a bit more insistent: Kendra saying that she had a
problem and
needed Gabrielle’s advice.
The last couple of messages were strident demands
that Kendra expected to hear from her soon.
When Gabrielle ran to her purse and checked her cell
phone’s voicemail, she found more of the same.
Kendra’s repeated calls.
Her weirdly acid tone of voice.
A chill crept along her limbs when she thought of
Lucan’s warning about Kendra. That if she’d fallen victim
to the Rogues, she was no friend of hers anymore. That
she was as good as dead.
The phone started ringing again in the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” she gasped, gripped in a mounting
terror.
She had to get out of there.
Hotel, she thought. Somewhere remote. Somewhere
she could hide for a while, decide what to do.
Gabrielle grabbed her purse and the keys to the BMW,
practically running for her front door. She threw the locks
free and twisted the knob. As the door swung open, she
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found herself staring at a familiar face that had once been
friendly.
Now she was certain it belonged to a Minion.
“Going somewhere, Gabby?” Kendra brought her cell
phone away from her ear and closed it. The ringing in the
apartment ceased. Kendra smiled thinly, her head cocked
at an odd angle. “You’re awfully hard to catch lately.”
Gabrielle winced at the lost, vacant look in those un-
blinking eyes. “Let me past you, Kendra. Please.”
The brunette laughed, a loud, open-mouthed chortle
that faded into an airless hiss. “Sorry, sweetie. No can do.”
“You’re with them, aren’t you?” Gabrielle said, sick
with the understanding. “You’re with the Rogues. My
God, Kendra, what have they done to you?”
“Hush,” she said, her finger to her lip as she shook her
head. “No more talking. We have to go now.”
When the Minion reached for her, Gabrielle pulled
away. She thought of the dagger in her purse, and won-
dered if she could retrieve the blade without Kendra’s no-
tice. If she could, would she be able to use it on her friend?
“Don’t touch me,” she said, inching her fingers under
the leather flap of her bag. “I’m not going anywhere with
you.”
Kendra bared her teeth, a terrible parody of a smile.
“Oh, I think you should, Gabby. After all, Jamie’s life de-
pends on it.”
Cold dread pierced her heart. “What?”
Kendra nodded her head toward the waiting sedan. A
tinted window eased down, and there was Jamie, sitting in
the backseat beside an enormous thug.
“Gabrielle?” Jamie called out, a panicked look in his
eyes.
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“Oh, no. Not Jamie. Kendra, please don’t let anyone
hurt him.”
“That’ll be entirely up to you,” Kendra said politely.
She grabbed Gabrielle’s purse out of her hands. “You
won’t be needing anything in here.”
She motioned for Gabrielle to walk ahead of her
toward the idling car. “Shall we?”
Lucan set two bars of C4 under the huge water heaters in
the asylum’s boiler room. Crouched down behind the util-
ity equipment, he flipped up the transmitter antennas,
then spoke into his mic to report his progress.
“Boiler room is a check,” he told Niko on the other
end. “I’ve got three more units to set and then I’m out—”
He froze, hearing the scuff of footsteps outside the
closed door.
“Lucan?”
“Shit. Company coming,” he murmured quietly as he
rose from his position and crept near the door to prepare
to strike.
He wrapped his gloved hand around the hilt of a nasty
serrated blade sheathed across his chest. He had a gun on
him, too, but they’d all agreed no firearms on this mission.
No need to alert the Rogues of their presence, and with
Niko throwing the gas main outside, pumping fumes into
the building, the spark of a bullet firing was liable to set the
whole works off prematurely.
The latch on the boiler room door began to twist.
Lucan smelled the stench of a Rogue, and the unmis-
takable coppery scent of human blood. Muffled animal
grunts mingled with wet smacking and the faint whine of a
victim being bled dry. The door opened, letting in a huge
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gust of putrid air as the Rogue started to drag its dying
plaything into the dark alcove.
Lucan waited to the side of the door until the Rogue’s
big head came into full view. The suckhead was too in-
volved in its prey to notice the threat. Lucan brought his
hand up, burying the blade in the Rogue’s rib cage. It
roared, huge jaws gaping, yellow eyes bulging as the tita-
nium sped through its blood system.
The human fell to the floor in a slump, boneless, spas-
ming in the throes of death while the Rogue who’d been
feeding off of him began to sizzle and shake, blisters rising
like it had been doused with acid.
No sooner did the Rogue collapse into swift decompo-
sition than another came pounding up the corridor. Lucan
leaped to meet the new attack, but before he could deliver
the first blow, the suckhead came up short, yanked off its
feet from behind by a black-clad arm.
A blade flashed, as crisp and quietly as lightning, across
the Rogue’s throat, severing the big head in one clean
strike.
The huge body was dropped to the floor like rubbish.
Tegan stood there, blade dripping gore, green eyes steady.
He was a killing machine, and the grim set of his mouth
seemed to reiterate his earlier promise to Lucan that if
Bloodlust ever got the better of him, Tegan was going to
make sure Lucan got his own taste of titanium fury.
Looking at the warrior now, Lucan had no doubt that if
Tegan ever came for him, it would be over before he even
knew the vampire was in the room.
He met that cool, lethal look and gave a nod of ac-
knowledgment.
“Talk to me,” Niko said over Lucan’s earpiece. “You
good in there?”
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“Yeah. All clear.” He cleaned his dagger on the hu-
man’s shirt, then sheathed it. When he glanced up, Tegan
was already gone, vanished like the specter of death that
he was.
“Heading to the north entry points now to place the
rest of these party cakes,” he told Nikolai as he ducked out
of the boiler room and crept down an empty stretch of
corridor.
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Thirty-two
Gabrielle, what’s happening? What’s wrong with
Kendra? She came to the gallery and told me you were in
an accident and that I had to come with her right away.
Why would she lie about that?”
She didn’t know how to answer Jamie’s anxious, whis-
pered questions from beside her in the backseat of the
sedan. They were speeding away from Beacon Hill,
toward downtown. Financial District skyscrapers loomed
ahead in the dark, office lights twinkling like Christmas
bulbs. Kendra sat in the front seat next to the driver, a
thick-necked bouncer type in a thug’s dark suit and sun-
glasses.
Gabrielle and Jamie had a similar companion in back
with them crowding them onto one side of the slick leather
bench seat. She didn’t think they were Rogues; they didn’t
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appear to be hiding huge fangs behind their tense lips, and
from what little she knew of the Breed’s deadly enemies,
she didn’t expect that she or Jamie would have gone so
much as a minute without getting their throats ripped out
if the two men were, in fact, blood-addicted Rogues.
Minions, then, she reasoned. Human mind slaves of a
powerful vampire Master.
Like Kendra was.
“What are they going to do with us, Gabby?”
“I’m not sure.” She reached over and squeezed Jamie’s
hand. She kept her voice low, too, but she knew their cap-
tors were listening to every word. “It’ll be okay, though. I
promise.”
They had to get out of the car before they reached their
destination, that much she did know. It was the most basic
rule of self-defense: never let yourself be taken to a secondary loca-
tion. Then you were on your attacker’s turf.
Odds of survival would go from poor to nil.
She glanced at the sliding lock on the door next to
Jamie. He watched her eyes, brow pinching in question as
she stared at him then back to the lock. Then he got it. He
gave her a nearly imperceptible nod.
But when he started to shift his hands into place to un-
lock the door, Kendra chose that moment to turn around
and taunt them from the front seat. “Almost there now,
kiddies. Are you excited? I know I am. I can’t wait for my
Master to finally meet you in the flesh, Gabby. Mm, mmm!