Shades of Midnight: Midnight Breed Series Book Seven

by Lara Adrian

  Kade’s words drifted through her thoughts as Zach watched her expectantly. “So? You’ve got my undivided attention, for the moment at least. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Um …” Alex fumbled for a reply, feeling oddly unsettled by the way Zach seemed to peer at her in speculation, maybe even suspicion. “I just … I was concerned about Big Dave, of course. How is he? How do you, um, think he’s doing?”

  The questions felt clumsy on her tongue, especially when her heart was still banging from everything she’d witnessed in the clinic.

  Zach’s expression turned a bit more scrutinizing. “You saw him yourself, didn’t you?”

  She shook her head, not sure she could deliver a convincing lie.

  “Didn’t I see you go inside—you and your, ah, new friend?” He leaned on the word, unnecessarily hard. “Where is he, anyway? Still inside?”

  “No,” she said, all but blurting it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Kade and I were out here the whole time. He just left.”

  Zach didn’t quite seem to buy it, but before he had a chance to press her further, the clinic door opened and Fran Littlejohn came out onto the stoop. “Officer Tucker! Where’s Zach? Somebody call Officer Tucker right away!”

  Alex stared, weathering a rising feeling of dread as Fran’s head bobbed, searching the crowd.

  “Over here,” Zach called. “What is it?”

  “Oh, Zach!” The clinic technician heaved a sigh, her thick shoulders slumping. “I’m afraid we lost him. I’d just given him another dose of sedative, and I turned away for what couldn’t have been more than a minute at most. When I looked back just now, I saw that he had passed. Big Dave is dead.”

  “Goddamn it,” Zach muttered. Although he spoke to Fran, he shot a tight glance at Alex. “No one else with you in there, Fran?”

  “Just me,” she said. “Poor Dave. And poor Lanny, too. God bless them both.”

  As a wave of soft murmurs and whispered prayers traveled the crowd, Alex cleared her throat. “I have to go, Zach. It’s been a long day, and I’m really tired. So, unless you have any more questions—”

  “No,” he said, but the look he gave her was guarded, filled with a reluctant acceptance of everything he’d just heard. “Go on home, then, Alex. If I need you, I know where to find you.”

  She nodded, unable to dismiss feeling oddly threatened by his comment as she turned and walked away.

  Some five miles out of Harmony, deep in the frozen wilderness, Kade shrugged the burden of Skeeter Arnold’s lifeless body off his shoulders and dropped it down a steep ravine.

  He stood there for a moment, after the Minion’s corpse had tumbled out of sight, letting the bitter cold air fill his lungs and steam his breath as he stared out at the vast nothingness all around him. The sky was dark overhead, the snow-covered ground glowed midnight blue under the afternoon starlight. In the distant woods, a wolf cried, long and lamenting, summoning its pack to run. The wildness of his surroundings called to Kade, and for one sharp instant, he was tempted to give in to it.

  Tempted to ignore the chaos and confusion that he’d left behind him in Harmony. Tempted to run from the fear he’d put in Alex, and the unpleasant business of the truth that he would have to deliver to her when he got back.

  Would she despise him for what he had to tell her?

  Would she recoil in horror when she came to understand his true nature?

  He couldn’t blame her if she did. Knowing what she’d endured as a child, and now, having seen him kill a man before her eyes, how could he possibly hope that she would look at him with anything more than fear or revulsion?

  “Ah, fuck,” he muttered, dropping down into a squat on his haunches at the edge of the ravine. “Fuck!”

  “Problems, brother?”

  The unexpected voice, the unexpected familiarity of it—here, of all places, now, of all times—shot through Kade like a current of raw electricity. He vaulted to his feet and spun around, his hand reaching automatically for one of the blades he wore on his belt.

  “Easy,” Seth drawled slowly, inclining his head to indicate the precarious edge of the ravine directly behind Kade. “Better watch your step.”

  Kade’s fury spiked as he took in his twin’s unkempt, shaggy appearance. “I could say the same thing to you … brother.”

  He kept the knife gripped in his fist, pivoting around, cautiously following Seth as he strolled toward him to peer into the ravine. Seth grunted. “Not the most savvy way to dispose of a kill, but I suppose it won’t take long for the scavengers to find it.”

  “Yeah, you know all about that, don’t you?”

  Seth looked at him, Kade’s own silver eyes—his own face—staring back at him as if in a mirror. Except Seth’s short black hair hung limply in dull, matted hanks, his cheeks and jaw sallow, the skin shadowed with grit and grime. His face was leaner than Kade recalled, on the verge of gaunt. He looked strung out, and there was a feral glint in his heavy-lidded gaze.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” he demanded. “How long have you been carrying out your sick killing games?”

  Seth chuckled, dark with amusement. “I’m not the one dumping a human into a snowy grave.”

  “Minion,” Kade corrected him, though why he felt the need to explain was beyond him.

  “Really?” Seth arched a brow. “A Minion, all the way out here in the bush … interesting.”

  “Yeah, I’m all atwitter,” Kade said. “And you didn’t answer my fucking question.”

  Seth’s mouth curved at the corners. “What would be the point, when you already know what I’m going to say?”

  “Maybe I need to hear it from your own lips. Tell me how you’ve been stalking and killing humans ever since I left Alaska last year—hell, it’s been going on for a lot longer than that, hasn’t it?” He ground out a sharp hiss of disgust. “I found something you might recognize. Here—”

  He dug the bear tooth charm out of his pocket and tossed it at his twin.

  “Now you have a matched set,” Kade said. “This one, and the one you took off the Native man when you killed him last winter.”

  Seth glanced into his palm at the braided strip of leather and the long, pale tooth attached to it. He shrugged, unapologetic, curling his fingers around the prize. “You’ve been home to the Darkhaven,” he murmured. “Going through my things. How rude of you. Very devious and underhanded, Kade. That’s always been more my style than yours.”

  “What happened, Seth? Single kills weren’t getting you off anymore, so you’ve had to graduate up to wholesale slaughter?”

  Kade watched the dispassionate mask of his brother’s face quirk with confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Now you’re going to stand there and try to deny it? You’re unbelievable,” Kade scoffed. “I’ve seen the bodies, or what was left of them. You slaughtered an entire family—six lives in one night, you sick son of a bitch. And today you added two more to your fucked-up tally when you attacked those men from Harmony.”

  “No.” Seth was shaking his head. He had the balls, even, to look insulted. “You’re wrong. If there have been kills like that, as you claim, they’re not mine.”

  “Don’t lie to me, damn you.”

  “I’m not lying. I am a killer, Kade. I have a … a problem, you might say. But even my perverted morals have their boundaries.”

  Kade stared, sizing him up. Even after a year away, he knew his twin well enough to see that Seth was telling him the truth.

  “I’ve never taken a whole family, nor am I responsible for the two men you say were attacked today.”

  Kade felt a cold pit opening up in his gut. Twisted though he may be, his brother was being honest about this. He hadn’t killed the Toms family. He hadn’t killed Lanny Ham and left Big Dave Grant for dead.

  If not Seth, then who?

  Kade had long abandoned the idea that Rogues might be responsible—not without reports of missing B
reed males from the region’s Darkhaven populations or some other indicators that there were vampires in the throes of Bloodlust running loose in the area.

  So, what possibility was left?

  Could it be the vampire who’d made Skeeter Arnold his mind slave? And if so, why would a powerful Breed elder prefer to hunt in the remote, sparsely populated wilds of Alaska when he could choose from countless cities teeming with humans instead? It simply didn’t add up.

  But none of that excused Seth’s crimes, or his unrepentance for his actions.

  “What happened to you?” Kade asked him, staring into the face that was so like his own, the brother he still loved, despite everything he’d done. “Why, Seth? How did you allow yourself to lose so much control?”

  “Lose control?” He laughed, shaking his head at Kade. “When else can we feel more in control than during the hunt? We are Breed, my brother. It’s who we are, it’s in our very blood. Killing is what we are born to do.”

  “No.” Kade spat the denial as Seth began a slow prowl around him.

  “No?” he asked, cocking his head in question. “Isn’t that why you leapt at the chance to join the Order? Tell me you don’t enjoy your license to kill on behalf of Lucan and your brothers-in-arms in Boston. Say it, and I will be the one standing here calling you a liar.”

  Kade clamped his molars tight, admitting, at least to himself, that there was some truth in Seth’s words. He joined the Order to escape what he was becoming in Alaska, as much as he had joined to feed the wildness inside him with something that had some degree of honor in it. But there was a higher purpose in his work for the Order now. With the enemy they had in Dragos, his work for the Order had never been more vital. And he wouldn’t let Seth cheapen that with the comparison to his own sick games.

  “You know that this cannot continue, Seth. You have to stop.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” His lips peeled back from his teeth, baring the tips of his fangs. “In the beginning, when we were young, I did try to curb my … urges. But the wildness kept calling to me. Doesn’t it call to you anymore?”

  “Every minute that I’m awake,” Kade conceded quietly. “Sometimes even in my sleep.”

  Seth sneered. “But of course, you, the noble one, can resist it.”

  Kade stared at him. “How long have you hated me, brother? What could I have done differently to make you see that it was never a competition between us? I didn’t have anything to prove with you.”

  Seth said nothing, merely stared at him in bleak consideration.

  “You’ve made mistakes, Seth. We all do. But there is still some good in you. I know there is.”

  “No.” Seth shook his head vigorously, the agitated twitch of a festering mind. “You were always the strong one. All the good went into you, not me.”

  Kade scoffed. “How can you say that? How can you think it? You, the favored son, the hope of the family. Father never made a secret of that.”

  “Father,” Seth replied, exhaling sharply. “If he feels anything for me, it’s pity. I have needed him, where you never did. You’re just like him, Kade. Can neither one of you see that the way that I can?”

  “Bullshit,” Kade said, certain in his rejection of the idea.

  “And then you went off and joined the Order,” Seth continued. “You were gone and I sank deeper into your shadow. I wanted to hate you for leaving. Hell, maybe I do.”

  “If you need an excuse for what you’ve done, then so be it,” Kade ground out savagely. “Blame me, but you and I both know you’re only looking for a way to justify what you’re doing.”

  Seth’s answering laughter was little more than a growl, deep in his throat. “Do you really think I’m looking for justification? Or for any kind of absolution? I kill because I can. I won’t stop, because it is part of me now. I enjoy it.”

  Kade’s gut twisted. “If that’s true, then I feel sorry for you. You are sick, Seth. I should put you out of your misery … right here and now.”

  “You should,” Seth replied without inflection. “But you won’t. You can’t, because I am still your brother. Your own rigid morals would never let you harm me and we both know it. That’s a line you would never cross.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  As he said it, the wolf howl he’d heard a few minutes ago sounded once more, from somewhere nearby. Kade glanced over his shoulder, toward the thick knot of pine and spruce in the crouching darkness, feeling the wild summons coursing through his veins. As it must have been for Seth, as well.

  Even though he should hate his brother, he couldn’t.

  And although his threat was well deserved, he knew in his heart that Seth was right. Kade could never bring himself to harm him.

  “We need to sort this shit out, Seth. You have to let me help you—”

  When he swiveled his head back around to face his twin again, all that greeted him was the empty winter landscape … and the bone-deep, bitter understanding that any hope of saving Seth was gone along with him.

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  Each step was agony.

  Every inch of his naked body was blistered and raw from ultraviolet exposure, his normally rapid healing processes impeded by the added damage he’d sustained from the shotgun blast that had ripped into his thigh and abdomen. Fresh blood would speed the required regeneration. Once he fed, his soft tissue and organs would mend in a few hours, as would his skin, but he could not risk another minute without seeking adequate shelter.

  He had barely survived the daylight, having been forced to flee the cave after the humans had stumbled upon him there. He’d run, bleeding and wounded, into the surrounding woods, into the lethal rays of the sun outside the cave. He’d had only enough time to dig a hole in a deep bank of hard-packed snow and bury himself within before the severity of his combined injuries had shut his body down and rendered him unconscious.

  Now, a short while after he’d roused to find welcome darkness, he knew only that he needed to seek new shelter before the next sunrise. Needed to find somewhere secure to recuperate further, so he would be strong enough to hunt again and feed his damaged cells.

  His feet dragged in the moonlit snow, his pace slow and halting. He despised his physical weakness. Hated that it reminded him of the torture he had endured while in captivity. But animosity drove him now, forced the shredded muscles of his legs to move.

  He didn’t know how long or how far he had walked. Easily miles from the cave and his makeshift shelter in the snow.

  Ahead of him, he saw a dim orange glow through the veil of silhouetted evergreen trunks. A human residence, apparently occupied, and far removed from any other signs of civilization.

  Yes, it would do.

  He stalked forward, ignoring his pain as he locked all focus on the remote little cabin and the unsuspecting prey within it.

  As he neared, his ears pricked with the low, mournful sounds of human suffering. It was faint, muffled by logs and plank-shuttered glass. But the anguish was clear. A female was weeping inside the cabin.

  The predator crept up to the side of the domicile and pressed his eye to a crack in the wooden shutter that covered the window to bar the cold.

  She was seated on the floor in front of a dying fire, drinking from a half-consumed bottle of dark amber liquid. Before her was an emptied box of printed images, scattered in disarray all around her. A large black pistol lay on the floor next to her bent knee. She was sobbing, incredible sorrow pouring out of her.

  He could feel the overwhelming weight of her grief, and he knew that the weapon was not beside her as a means of protection. Not tonight.

  The scene gave him pause, but only for a moment.

  She must have sensed his eyes on her. Her head snapped to the side, her reddened eyes fixed on the very spot where he stood, concealed by the closed shutter and the darkness of the night outside.

  But she knew.

  She rose, picking up the gun as she wobbled to her feet.
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  He backed away, only to move on silent feet toward the front door of the cabin. It wasn’t locked, not that it would have barred him if it had been. He squeezed the latch with his mind, pushed the door open.

  He was inside the cabin and had his hands wrapped around the woman’s throat before she realized he was there.

  Before she could open her mouth to scream, before she could command her drink-impeded reflexes to pull the pistol’s trigger in defense of the sudden attack, he bent his head and sank his fangs into the soft flesh of her slender neck.

  Alex sat at the table in her kitchen with Luna resting at her feet. Every light in the house was turned on, every door and window locked up tight.

  It had been nearly two hours.

  She didn’t know how much more waiting she could take. While Luna slept calmly, blissfully oblivious, across her toes under the table, Alex’s mind had been spinning. Churning over questions she hardly dared to ask, and worrying for a man who had left her wondering just who—or what—he truly was.

  But the small voice inside her that so often urged her to run from the things that scared her was silent when she thought of Kade. Yes, she was uncertain after what she witnessed today. Frightened that the path ahead of her might be even more unsteady than the past she’d left behind her. But running was the last thing she intended to do—not now. Not ever again.

  Idly, she wondered how Jenna was holding up. It couldn’t be easy on her, hearing about the deaths in town when she was nearing the anniversary of her own personal grief. Alex reached for her cell phone, wanting to hear her friend’s voice. She was just about to punch in Jenna’s number when there was a soft rap on the back door.

  Kade.

  Alex put down the phone and stood up, dislodging her canine foot warmer, who groaned in protest before dropping her head back down to sleep some more. Alex drifted toward the door where Kade waited. Now that he was there, looking so dark and immense and dangerous through the glass window, some of her courage faltered.

  He didn’t demand or force his way inside, even though she knew without the slightest doubt that there was little she could do to bar him from entering if that’s what he intended to do. But he merely stood there, leaving the decision entirely up to her. And because he didn’t force her, because she could see a shadowed torment in the piercing depths of his silver eyes that hadn’t been there before, Alex opened the door and let him in.