Darker After Midnight (50 page)

“I can’t,” the human protested. “I won’t do this—”

In the fraction of an instant between those damning words and Dragos’s leap forward like a viper ready to strike, Tavia sprang into action. With superspeed motion, she placed herself between Dragos and his intended victim, the vial of Crimson retrieved from its concealment on her person and uncorked in her hands.

She held a bunch of the red powder in her palm—all the weapon she had in that moment. She exhaled the breath that would blow the massive dose into his face, praying it would be enough to disable him, if not kill him in a blast of writhing agony.

But she never got the chance.

Moving faster than she could track them or react—faster than she could fathom, even though she herself was gifted with similar genes—two of the Hunters protecting Dragos grabbed her.

One wrenched her arms back behind her. The other held the vial of Crimson. With a single command from Dragos, she understood with cold certainty that she would be dead.

His expression was too mild to be trusted, his movements very calm as he took the Crimson away from his guard and held it up to his nose. He gave it a faint sniff, then sneered with cold malice. “Now, this was an incredibly stupid gamble on your part, Tavia. A pity.”

Before she could react, he lunged forward and shoved the open vial into her mouth. She choked on the dry dust of the powder as it hit the back of her throat. Coughing, sputtering, she went down on her knees as a rush filled her head like the buzz of a million stinging bees.

Oh, God
, she thought, desperate with fear as the Crimson hit her bloodstream and agony arrowed through every cell of her body.

She’d failed.

She’d failed Chase and the Order miserably, and now she was certain that Dragos had just killed her.

CHASE’S KNEES BUCKLED
beneath him in the street. A pain racked him, so violent it felt as though his chest were breaking wide open.

“Tavia.”

Ah, Christ.

Her agony was everywhere inside him. Fire and daggers and poison—a suffering so intense it was a wonder his heart didn’t cease beating in his chest.

No, the wounded organ wanted to explode behind his sternum.

The ferocity of what she was feeling in that moment was the most terrible thing he’d ever known. Not only because of the raw anguish of her pain, but because of the fact it was she who felt it.

His female, his mate, hurting—God forbid, dying—and he unable to be at her side.

“Tavia!” Her name ripped out of his mouth on a roar.

“Chase,” Dante shouted, right beside him as he stumbled under the weight of her agony. “Jesus Christ. Talk to me, Harvard. What’s going on?”

“She’s hurt. Ah, fuck … I’ve got to get to her!”

His desperation to reach her after hearing a moment ago that
she was with Dragos now went nuclear. As Niko and Brock rolled up in the Order’s two SUVs with the rest of the warriors, Chase broke for the vehicles. Dante, Lucan, and Archer were right behind him.

Tegan was on the phone with Gideon as Chase and his team piled into the Rover. “We’re moving out right now,” he said, then glanced to Lucan and the others. “Gideon got a bead on the IP address Tavia provided. It’s originating in Maine, a private island off the middle of the coast.”

Chase’s agony worsened, wrenching him from within. He growled with the fury of his helplessness. “Get me to her. Please …”

The vehicles started rolling, tearing through the smoke-wreathed streets of D.C.

“Gideon says he’s got more intel on those detonation sequences for the UV collar codes. He’s trying to grid them to GPS signals, work up some kind of road map to all the active Hunters,” Tegan reported.

Lucan grunted. “Tell him he’d better step on it. We may need those codes when we get to Dragos’s lair.”

As they sped through the chaos and carnage of the dark capital city, the heavy ache in Chase’s chest burrowed deeper. His blood bond to Tavia was throbbing, pumping through his senses like the beat of a drum. It felt near enough for him to touch. “We’re not going to Maine.”

Niko’s questioning gaze met his pained stare in the rearview mirror.

“Stop the car!” Chase rasped, hardly able to speak for the shredding intensity of his realization now. “We gotta turn around. I feel her. She’s here. She’s somewhere in this city.”

S
HE COULD HARDLY
stand the pain.

It swam through her veins, through her mind, draining her of all strength. Chewed away at her sanity with tiny, shredding teeth.

This was death.

This was true agony, a swift and thorough addiction that left her writhing on the floor. Gasping as though she was dying for air.

This was hell unlike any she could have imagined, to feel her body lost to a hunger—a savage, consuming thirst—that no amount of drink could quench.

Through bleary eyes, her face resting heavily on the floor where she writhed in helpless despair, she watched as Dragos’s newest Minion made the call to the man he once served as his loyal second. The vice president’s neck still bled from the twin punctures Dragos had made there, but he no longer felt pain. He knew only to please his Master.

“The president is on the way,” the Minion said, handing the cell phone back to Dragos with a dead man’s smile. “He was suspicious of the request. He will come with heavy military guard, Master. They will be on shoot-to-kill orders if he senses anything amiss.”

Dragos nodded. “We are prepared for that. All I needed was to get him close. Soon I’ll own him too. And with his allegiance will come the rest of the world’s leaders, one by one. You’ve just helped put the last nail in the coffin of the humans’ control over the Breed.”

The Minion inclined his head in a servile bow.

Tavia tried to get up, desperate with the hope that something—anything—would thwart the evil Dragos still intended. She no sooner lifted her head than a heavy boot came down on the back of her neck, pinning her there.

The Hunter’s boot heel promised to crush her throat if she even thought of rising up against his commander.

She sagged back down and felt a new agony bloom to life inside her. It was Chase. Her blood surged with the power of his fury—his fear for her. It shook her to her core, how deeply he longed to be near her now.

And he was coming. She could feel that too. She felt every mile that shrank between them—could almost feel him urging her to hold on, to stay alive, until he could reach her.

It was only then that her tears started to fall.

Chase was coming for her, and Dragos and his army of killers would be waiting for him.

“YOU’RE SURE THIS IS IT?”
Nikolai asked from behind the wheel as they sped toward the sprawling United States Naval Observatory compound.

Chase’s blood thrummed hard with the answer. “I’m sure. She’s in there somewhere.”

“The vice president’s house is on these grounds,” Dante said from next to him in the Rover’s backseat. “This place should be swarming with military.”

“Not if Dragos is here too.” Lucan’s reply was an ominous mix of foreboding and thinly leashed menace. “Good God. Tavia’s brought us right to the son of a bitch.”

Lucan’s cell phone hummed with an incoming call and he pressed the button to put it on speaker. It was Gideon again. He’d
been keeping a pulse on the situation since they’d set out a few minutes ago. Now his voice was tight with an eager intensity.

“We got pay dirt on those collar signals at last,” he reported. “I’ve got a map online and I’m seeing a whole lot of signals coming out of the D.C. area right now.”

“Where at?” Lucan asked as Niko took a fast corner and gunned it onto the circle, Brock keeping close behind.

“I’ve got literally dozens of blips a couple miles northwest of the White House. The area’s lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree.”

Lucan glanced to Chase and the other warriors, dark brows low over his steely gray eyes. “We know exactly where that is. We’re rolling up to it now.”

“Holy shit, this can’t be good,” Gideon murmured, running his hand over his disheveled blond hair as he slumped back in his seat in the tech lab. “It could be a trap, guys. You could be walking right into Dragos’s hands.”

A muscle ticked in Lucan’s jaw as he met Chase’s determined gaze. “Guess we’re gonna find that out soon enough. Chase’s female is inside. We’re not leaving without her.”

A look to Niko dropped the warrior’s foot hard on the gas.

With a screeching wail of rubber on asphalt, both of the Order’s Rovers surged up onto the parklike lawn of the vice president’s compound.

Chase leapt out halfway up the yard and raced toward the mansion with all the preternatural speed he possessed.

DRAGOS HEARD
the sudden shriek of tires on the grounds outside the house. He wheeled toward the noise, knowing that the president and his security detail would not come barreling into the place hell-bent for leather.

It was the Order.

He threw a glance at Tavia, recalling her admission that she’d taken blood from Sterling Chase. He might have guessed the half-Rogue former Agent might’ve also sampled her blood. They were
bonded, and when Dragos saw the tears streaking the female’s contorted face, he understood that Chase and she were bonded by more than blood. She loved him.

And Dragos was betting by the cacophony of gunfire and combat rising up in the yard outside that Sterling Chase loved her too.

“You led them here.” He let his laughter boom out of him as he clapped his hands in mock applause. “Congratulations, Tavia. You’ve done what I’ve been unable to accomplish all this time. You brought the Order to me, right to their certain deaths.”

He swung a hard look on one of the Hunters who stood nearby in the living room. “No survivors. Understand me? Tell the others to do whatever they must to see it done. I want Lucan and his warriors dead right now, goddamn it!”

As the assassin pivoted to carry out the command, a window at the front of the residence shattered. Rapid gunfire and a massive bulk of roaring fury crashed inside, taking the Gen One down to the floor in a blurred confusion of motion and savagery.

Dragos gaped at the unexpected invasion. He dived for a weapon as his Hunter took the brunt of a punishing assault by Sterling Chase. The warrior was crazed with violence, purely animal. Almost magnificent in his lethality.

Another warrior vaulted in behind Chase, then another, the mad exchange of incoming gunfire and deadly force taking on two more assassins by what seemed to be sheer bloody-mindedness alone. The battle was brutal, and Dragos knew a pang of uncertainty when he saw his highly trained killing machines taking a beating from Chase, Dante, and Rio of the Order.

Behind him, Dragos saw Tavia using the moment of inattention to push herself up from the floor. The bitch was in bad shape, but she wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Her amber eyes skewered him from across the room. Her fangs were sharp white daggers, dripping with the red foam of Crimson that would eventually consume her sanity and her life.

But not soon enough.

She came out of her crouch and sprang off her toes toward him. Dragos went down beneath her, his pistol skittering out of his
grasp as the seething female vampire perched on his chest like a she-dragon about to eviscerate him.

She didn’t get the chance.

Before she could do her worst, his last remaining Hunter in the house plucked her off him and threw her against the wall. She crashed to the floor in a broken, moaning heap. Dragos was right there as she tried to lift herself for another round.

“Not so fast,” he warned her, the butt of a semiauto 9 mm pushed up hard against her temple. A nod to his Hunter saw her yanked to her feet. Dragos kept his pistol leveled on her, ready to blast her brains all over the wall if she so much as blinked in a way that displeased him.

Across the room, Chase and the others had finished his two assassins. In the yard beyond, the combat raged on, gunfire blasting, sirens wailing in the distance as the rest of the city remained under siege at Dragos’s command.

Dragos grinned as Chase realized he’d taken his battle as far as he could.

The warrior’s eyes flashed hot amber as he glared at the pistol that could end his female’s life at any second. “You have lost,” Dragos told him. “You and the Order were never going to win this.”

“Let her go.” Chase lifted his own weapon now, training it on Dragos’s head.

“Let her go?” Dragos scoffed at the tight command and the threat of the bullet he knew the male would never risk. Not when his woman’s temple could so easily eat a bullet at the same time. Not that it would take a bullet to kill Tavia Fairchild now. “She’s already gone, warrior. Look at her. Foaming and panting like a rabid dog. Put down your weapon.”

“Tavia,” Chase said now, his gaze pitiful with love and concern. “Tell me you’re okay. Ah, Christ … tell me I haven’t lost you.”

Dragos chuckled, enjoying the wasted sentiment like the villain he truly was. “I said put down your—”