by Lara Adrian
“Oh, Jesus!” gasped the human. He made an abrupt stop, staring up into Lucan’s face in horror as one of his knees buckled beneath him. “Shit!”
“Get up.” Lucan gave him the briefest flick of a glance as the young man scrambled to find his feet. “Get out of here.”
He scraped his two blades together before him, filling the darkened street with the harsh metallic grate of steel sliding over hard-edged, lethal steel. Behind the four Rogues, Dante leaped to the asphalt in a crouch, then drew himself up to his six-and-a-half-foot height. He had no sword, but circling his waist was a leather belt studded with a collection of deadly, hand-to-hand weaponry, including a pair of razor-sharp, curved blades that performed as hellish extensions of his dazzlingly fast hands. Malebranche, he called them, and evil claws they were. Dante had them poised in his grasp in an instant, one mean-ass vampire who was always ready for a round of up-close-and-personal combat.
“Oh, my God,” the human cried, his voice wobbling as he took in the danger that surrounded him. Gaping up at Lucan, the man went for his wallet, hands trembling as he pulled the worn billfold out of his back pocket and tossed it to the ground. “Take it, man! You can have it. Just don’t kill me, I’m begging you!”
Lucan kept his eyes trained on the four Rogues, who were checking their positions, going for their own weapons. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”
“He’s ours,” one of the Rogues hissed. Yellow eyes fixed on Lucan in pure hatred, the pupils permanently narrowed to hungered, vertical slits. Long fangs dripped with saliva, further evidence of the vampire’s advanced Bloodlust addiction.
Just like a human could fall dependent on a powerful narcotic, Bloodlust was as destructive for the Breed. The tipping point between the necessary assuaging of hunger and reckless overdose of blood was easily breached. Some vampires went willingly into that abyss, while others succumbed to the disease through inexperience or a lack of personal discipline. Gone too far, and for too long, a vampire would turn Rogue, like these feral beasts snarling before Lucan now.
Eager to smoke them, Lucan slapped his long blades together, smelling the spark of heat as one length of steel crashed against the other.
The human was still standing there, idiotic in his fear, his head swinging between the advancing Rogues and Lucan’s unwavering stance. The hesitation was sure to cost the man, but Lucan shrugged off the knowledge with cold dispassion. The human wasn’t his concern. Eradicating these bloodsuckers, and the rest of their diseased kind, was all that mattered.
One of the Rogues wiped a dirty hand across his slavering mouth. “Back off, asshole. Let us feed.”
“Not tonight,” Lucan growled, “not in my city.”
“Your city?” The rest of them sniggered as the Rogue in the lead spat on the ground at Lucan’s feet. “This city belongs to us. Won’t be long and we’re gonna own it all.”
“That’s right,” added another of the four. “So, looks like you’re the one trespassin’ here.”
Finally, the human had gathered his wits and started to make a break. He didn’t get far. Moving with incredible speed, one of the Rogues lashed out a hand and grabbed the man by the throat. He jerked him off his feet and held him aloft, letting the human’s black hightop sneakers dangle six inches off the ground. The human grunted and squirmed, struggling wildly as the Rogue squeezed harder, slowly strangling him with his bare hand. Lucan stared, unfazed, even as the vampire dropped his twitching prey and tore a hole in the man’s neck with his teeth.
In his periphery, Lucan saw Dante creep up silently behind the Rogues. Fangs bared, the warrior licked his lips, eager to get busy. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Lucan struck first, and then the street erupted with the clash of metal and the crush of breaking bone.
Where Dante fought like a hell-spawned demon, malebranche blades flashing, war cries splitting the night, Lucan maintained a cold control and deadly precision. One by one, the Rogues fell to the warriors’ punishing blows. The kiss of titanium-laced steel sped through the Rogues’ corrupted blood systems as poison, accelerating death and bringing on the swift stages of decomposition characteristic of the Rogues’ demise.
With their enemies dispatched, their corpses reducing from flesh and bone to fine, drifting ash, Lucan and Dante surveyed the other carnage in the street.
The human was unmoving, bleeding profusely from the tattered wound in his throat.
Dante knelt beside the man, sniffing at the savaged form. “He’s dead. Or will be, in another minute.”
The smell of spilled blood reached Lucan’s nostrils like a fist slamming into his gut. His fangs, already extended in rage, now throbbed with the urge to feed. He glared down at the dying human in disgust. Although the taking of blood was necessary to him, Lucan despised the idea of accepting Rogue leavings, in any form. He preferred to draw his sustenance from willing Hosts of his own choosing whenever he could, although those meager tastes only staved off the deeper hunger.
Sooner or later, every vampire had to kill.
Lucan didn’t try to deny his nature, but on the occasions when he killed, it was by his choice, by his own rules. When he sought prey, he took primarily criminals, drug dealers, junkies, and other lowlifes. He was judicious and efficient, never slaughtering simply for the sake of it. All of the Breed adhered to a similar code of honor; it was what separated them from their lawless Rogue brethren.
His gut tightened as another whiff of blood trailed into his nose. Saliva surged into his parched mouth.
When was the last time he’d fed?
He couldn’t recall. It had been a while. Several days, at least, and not enough to last him. He’d thought to curb some of his hunger—both the carnal and the systemic—with Gabrielle Maxwell last night, but that idea had taken a quick turn south. Now he was shaking with the urge to feed, and too far gone to consider anything but the necessity of his body’s basic needs.
“Lucan.” Dante pressed his fingers to the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. The vampire’s fangs were extruded, sharp from the battle and the physiological reaction to the scent of pooling crimson life. “If we wait much longer, the blood will be dead, too.”
And no use to them, for it was only fresh blood, pumping through human veins, that could quench the vampires’ hunger. Dante waited, even though it was obvious he wanted nothing more than to drop his head and take his fill of the human who had been too stupid to flee when he had the chance.
But Dante would wait, even to the point of wasting prey, for it was an unwritten protocol that later generation vampires did not feed in the presence of an elder, particularly when that elder was Gen One Breed and starving.
Unlike Dante, Lucan’s sire was one of the Ancients, one of eight alien warriors who came from a distant, dark planet only to crash-land thousands of years ago on unforgiving, inhospitable Earth. To survive, they had fed on the blood of humans, decimating entire populations with their hunger and savagery. In rare instances, these foreign conquerors had successfully bred with human females—the first Breedmates—who spawned a new generation of the vampire race.
Those savage, otherworldly forebears were all gone now, but their progeny lived on, in Lucan and a few scattered others. They were the closest things to royalty in vampire society—respected, and not a little feared. The vast majority of the Breed were younger, born of second, third, and some countless dozens later generations.
The hunger was strongest in Gen Ones. So was the propensity to give in to Bloodlust and turn Rogue. The Breed had learned to live with the danger. Most had learned to manage it, taking blood only when needed, and in the smallest quantities required to sustain. They had to, for once lost to Bloodlust, there was no coming back.
Lucan’s slitted eyes fell to the twitching, shallowly breathing human on the pavement. The animal snarl he heard came from his own dry throat. As Lucan strode toward the scent of spilled, life-giving blood, Dante gave a slight but deferential bow of his dark head and backed off to let his elder feed.
>
CHAPTER
Five
He hadn’t even bothered to call and leave her a message last night.
Typical.
Probably had a big date with his remote control and ESPN, or maybe after he left her place the other evening, he’d met someone else and gotten a more interesting offer than schlepping Gabrielle’s cell phone back out to Beacon Hill. Hell, he might even be married, or involved with someone. Not that she’d asked, and not that asking would have guaranteed he’d have told her the truth. Lucan Thorne probably wasn’t any different than any other guy.
Except he was … different.
He struck her as being very different from anyone she had ever met before. A very private man, almost secretive. Definitely dangerous. She could no more see him sitting in a recliner in front of the television than she could envision him tied down with a serious girlfriend, let alone a wife and family. Which brought her back to the idea that he must have gotten a better offer elsewhere and decided to blow her off, an idea that stung a lot more than it should have.
“Forget about him,” Gabrielle scolded herself under her breath as she edged her black Cooper Mini to the side of the quiet rural road and cut the ignition. Her camera bag and gear sat beside her in the passenger seat. She gathered it up, grabbed a small flashlight from the glove compartment, pocketed her keys in her jacket, and got out of the car.
She closed the door quietly and cast a quick look around. Not a soul in sight, not surprising given that it was just nearing 6 A.M. and the building she was about to enter illegally and photograph had been shut down for about twenty years. She walked along the empty stretch of cracked pavement and cut a sharp right, heading down through a ditch then up into a pine-and-oak wooded lot that stood like a thick curtain wall around the old asylum.
Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon. The lighting was eerie and ethereal, a misty haze of pink and lavender shrouding the Gothic structures with an otherworldly glow. Even bathed in soft pastels, the place held an air of menace.
The contrast was what had brought her out to the location this morning. Shooting it at dusk would have been the more natural choice, capitalizing on the haunted quality of the abandoned structures. But it was the juxtaposition of warm dawn light against a cold, sinister subject that appealed to Gabrielle as she paused to retrieve her camera from the bag slung over her shoulder. She snapped off a half-dozen shots, then clapped the lens cap back on, and continued her trek toward the ghostly buildings.
A tall wire security fence loomed in front of her, barricading the property against nosy explorers like herself. But Gabrielle knew its hidden weakness. She had found it the first time she had come to the place to take exterior pictures. She hurried along the line of the fence until she reached the southwest corner, then squatted down near the ground. Here, someone had discreetly severed the links with a wire cutter, creating a breach just large enough for a curious adolescent to wriggle through—or a determined female photographer who tended to view No Trespassing and Authorized Personnel Only signs more as friendly suggestions rather than enforceable laws.
Gabrielle pushed open the flap of snipped fence, shoved her gear inside, and scrambled spiderlike on her belly through the low opening. A shiver of apprehension coursed along her limbs as she came up on the other side of the fence. She should be used to this type of covert, solitary exploration; her art often depended on her courage to seek out desolate, some might argue dangerous, places. This creepy asylum could certainly classify as the latter, she thought, her gaze drifting to graffiti spray-painted next to an exterior door that read, BAd VIBeS.
“You can say that again,” she whispered under her breath. As she brushed the dirt and dried pine needles off her clothes, her hand drifted automatically to the front pocket of her jeans for her cell phone. It wasn’t there, of course, still in the possession of Detective Thorne. Just one more reason to be pissed at him for standing her up last night.
Maybe she should cut the guy a little slack, she thought, suddenly eager to focus on something other than the ominous feeling that pressed down on her now that she was inside the asylum grounds. Maybe Thorne had been a no-show because something bad happened to him on the job.
What if he’d been injured in the line of duty and didn’t come by as promised because he was incapacitated in some way? Maybe he hadn’t called to apologize or to explain his absence because he physically couldn’t.
Right. And maybe she had checked her brain into her panties from the second she first laid eyes on the man.
Scoffing at herself, Gabrielle picked up her things and walked toward the soaring architecture of the main building. Pale limestone climbed skyward in a steep central tower, capped by peaks and spires worthy of the finest gothic cathedral. Surrounding this was a sprawling compound of red-brick walled and tile-roofed outbuildings arranged in a batwing layout, connected by covered walk-ways and cloisterlike arches.
But as awe-inspiring as the structure was, there was no dismissing its air of slumbering menace, as if a thousand sins and secrets loomed behind the chipped walls and smashed mullioned-glass windows. Gabrielle strode to where the light was best and took a few pictures. There was no current point of entry here; the main door had been bolted shut and boarded up tight. If she wanted to get inside to take interior shots—and she definitely did—she had to go around to the back and try her luck with a ground-level window or basement door.
She skirted down a sloping embankment, toward the anterior of the building and found what she was looking for: wooden shutters concealed three windows that likely opened into a service area or crawl space of the structure. The shutter’s rusty latches were corroded but not locked, and they broke away easily with a little encouragement from a rock Gabrielle found nearby. She pulled the wooden covering away from the window, lifted the heavy glass panel, and propped it open with the window brace.
After a perfunctory sweep of her flashlight to make sure the place was empty and not about to cave in on her head, she shimmied through the opening. As she hopped down from the window casement, the soles of her boots crunched broken glass and years of accumulated dust and debris. The foundation of gray cinderblock bricks ran about four yards in, disappearing into the gloom of the unlit basement. Gabrielle shot the thin beam of her flashlight into the shadows at the other end of the space. She ran it back along the wall, holding the light steady when she came across a battered old service door bearing the stenciled words No General Access.
“Wanna bet?” she whispered as she approached the door and found it unlocked.
She opened it and shone some light around the other side into a long, tunnel-like corridor. Broken fluorescent light fixtures hung down from the ceiling; some of the panel coverings had fallen to the industrial-grade linoleum floor, where they lay shattered and dust-coated. Gabrielle stepped into the dark space, not certain what she was looking for, and a bit apprehensive of what she might find in the deserted bowels of the asylum.
She passed an open room off the corridor and her flashlight skimmed across a red vinyl dentist’s chair, a little worse for wear, and poised in the center of the room as if awaiting its next patient. Gabrielle removed her camera from its case and took a couple of quick shots. She moved on, passing more examination and treatment rooms in what must have been the medical wing of the building. She found a stairwell and climbed two flights, pleased to find herself in the central tower where tall windows brought in generous amounts of soft morning light.
Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and limestone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow. It was strange looking out from the confines of a building that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie silence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the patients, people who had not been able to simply walk away like she could now.
People like her birt
h mother, a woman Gabrielle had never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through hushed conversations between social workers and the foster families who would, eventually, one by one, return her into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places she’d been sent to live, but the complaints against her when she was bounced back were always the same: restless and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunctional with self-destructive tendencies. She’d heard the same labels applied to her mother, along with the added distinctions of paranoid and delusional.
By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervision of a state-appointed psychologist. She’d had zero expectations and even less hope that she might actually make another foster situation stick. Frankly, she’d been past the point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emotional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a handful of court documents pertaining to her mother.
The young woman had been a teenage Jane Doe, presumably homeless, with no ID, and no known family or acquaintances, except for the newborn baby girl she had left, squalling and distressed, in a city garbage bin late one August night. Gabrielle’s mother had been brutalized, bleeding from deep puncture wounds in her neck that had been made worse by her hysteria and panicked clawing at the injury. While she was being treated at the emergency room, she slipped into a catatonic state and never recovered.
Rather than prosecute her for the crime of abandoning her infant, the courts had deemed the woman incompetent and sent her away to a facility probably not much different from this one. Not a month into her institutionalization, she had hanged herself with a knotted bedsheet, leaving behind countless questions that would never have answers.
Gabrielle tried to shake off the weight of those old hurts but standing there, looking out the hazy glass windows, brought her past into tighter focus. She didn’t want to think about her mother, or the misfortune of her birth, and the dark, lonely years that had followed. She needed to concentrate on her work. That’s what always got her through, after all. It was the one constant in her life, sometimes all she truly had in this world.