Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (185 page)

“You mean, other than walking around all the time with that Agency-installed stick shoved up his ass?” Kade drawled, looking at the big warrior who’d been recruited into the Order out of Detroit around the same time he’d come in from Alaska.

It wasn’t that Kade didn’t like Sterling Chase—or Harvard, as he was sometimes referred to, on account of his fancy Ivy League pedigree. Chase was a competent enough warrior, one of the best, in fact. He was a crack shot and one hell of a man to have at your back in combat, but on the personal side, he was as cold as a glacier.

“I don’t know what his deal is,” Brock said. “But he’d better watch his step, is all I’m saying. He strikes me as the kind who’s got one foot in the grave and the other one eager to follow. He just doesn’t give a shit about anything, and that is dangerous. Not only to himself, but to anyone who needs to count on him.”

Kade considered that as he glanced out across the bar and dance floor.

A couple of young females were heading over from a table nearby. Brock gave them his knockout grin, the one that never failed to net him the hottest woman in any gathering. The guy had moves, no doubt about it. Not that Kade was any kind of slouch. He eyed the pair of lovelies as they sauntered through the crowd, locked on to the two vampires like laser-guided missiles.

“You can have the blonde,” he murmured, setting his own sights on the brunette with the legs that went on forever under her short red leather miniskirt.

It took all of three seconds for Brock and him to talk the ladies into stepping outside with them. Unfortunately, once they were out in the parking lot, it only took another three for Kade’s nose to twitch with the prickling of his Breed senses coming online with a vengeance.

He smelled blood.

Fresh blood, and a lot of it, coming from somewhere around the rear of the club.

A glance to Brock told him that the other vampire hadn’t missed the coppery tang of spilled human red cells, either. They broke into a tandem jog, leaving the women complaining in their wake as the two of them hauled ass to the back of the building.

Nothing there.

The lone working security light mounted to the roof of the place shone down on empty concrete and sparse, weed-choked grass. But the scent of blood permeated the air, particularly strong for Kade and any of his kind.

“There,” he said, spotting the dark stain in the dirt a few feet away from him.

Spatters in close proximity to each other soaked the dry
earth near a leaning stretch of ragged chain-link fence. The bleeding human took the worst of his damage over there, and the trail of hemoglobin on the ground made it clear that whatever had happened, the victim wasn’t going to get too far before he or she bled out completely.

“This isn’t only human blood,” Brock said, his deep bass voice grim. “The attacker was Breed. He spilled some of his own blood in the process.”

Now that the warrior mentioned it, Kade’s nose also picked up on something other than basic
Homo sapiens
cells. “Not a Rogue,” he guessed, detecting none of the foul odor left behind by the addicts of their race. “Who else would be idiot enough to feed this carelessly and let his Host stagger off like a stuck pig?”

Brock shook his head, but suspicion darkened his steady, obsidian gaze. Although he didn’t say it, Kade read the quiet doubt in the big male’s eyes.

“Chase?” Kade scoffed. “No fucking way.”

“Something’s not right with him, man.”

“Not this,” Kade said. The ex-agent was no Mr. Rogers, but to bleed out a human and break one of the Breed’s most essential laws? When he said he had an itch that needed scratching, he sure as hell couldn’t have meant something like this …

Brock nodded gravely. “Maybe we’d better go have a look, just to be sure.”

They took off, following the blood trail across a vacant lot and down a narrow alley. The deeper they went, the more serious the blood spill became. Spatters turned to pools, some of them spread wide and smeared from where the victim had apparently fallen then somehow managed to get up and run some more.

The trail led them to the entrance of a junkyard at the
end of an industrial area. The place was gated, but the padlock and heavy chain that secured it had been loosened. There was just enough room for someone to squeeze inside. And someone had; the wet crimson stains on the latch and edge of the gate left no question about that.

“Come on,” Kade said, wrenching the thing open wide enough for Brock and him to slip through.

He heard the rush of movement the instant before the big black dogs came barreling around a pile of scrap and rubbish. Two rottweilers, big as tanks and mean as hell.

“Holy shit!”

Brock’s shout was all but drowned out by the savage barks and growls of the oncoming dogs. No animal alive could take a vampire, but that didn’t mean the sight of a combined three hundred pounds of seething, furious canine wasn’t cause for a little alarm. Kade stood firm, his legs braced wide as the pair of rotties swiftly closed the distance on him.

He stared them down, eye to eye.

They slowed… then stopped, both of them dropping into a cower at his feet. The hounds whimpered, shifting on their bellies and keeping their big heads low as their dark eyes searched out his favor.

“Get out of here.”

They loped off, as docile as puppies.

Brock gaped. “What the hell was that?”

“This way,” Kade said, ignoring the question and the astonished stare that followed him as he stalked deeper into the junkyard. They had bigger things to deal with right now.

It wasn’t hard to find the bloodied victim. The young man had collapsed against a rusted metal crate, one jeans-clad leg stretched out in front of him, the other bent at the
knee. He looked boneless and weary, like a puppet whose strings had been severed. He held his hand up against his throat where the bleeding was the worst. He couldn’t stanch the flow. In just a few more minutes, he would be dead.

“Jesus Christ,” Brock hissed.

The warrior’s voice was thick and strained, but whether from revulsion or the simple fact that the sight and smell of so much fresh blood made even the most controlled vampire thirst like he was starving, there was no way to tell.

Kade’s own fangs tore farther out of his gums as he looked at the bleeding human. He tried his best to mask the sharp tips as he edged closer. “What happened to you?” he asked, despite the obvious injuries that could only have come from one of his kind.

“Jumped… me,” the human wheezed. “My neck… fucker… bit me.”

When the man removed his hand to show him the injury, the copper punch of his blood hit Kade like a fist to the gut. He’d fed only yesterday, but the urge to drink again pulled at him. His vision sharpened, bathing everything in amber.

“Who bit you?” Brock asked the human, smoothly stepping in when Kade had to glance away. “Can you describe who did this to you?”

The man exhaled a slow, shuddering sigh. He didn’t have long now. He looked up, eyes listless and glassy in the dark. He lifted his arm, slowly extending his finger to point somewhere past Brock’s thick shoulder. “Him,” he gasped, the voice thready and airless. “Behind you … that’s him …”

Kade and Brock swung their heads around in unison—just in time to see a huge Breed male running for the back
acre of the junkyard. The vampire wore black fatigues and a long-sleeved black knit shirt. His head was shaved bald, the back of his naked skull covered in an unmistakable pattern of
dermaglyphs

“Holy hell,” Kade muttered.

He broke into a run with Brock thundering at his heels. They bolted for the rear of the littered yard, but the Gen One male in front of them was ten times faster. He vaulted up onto a mountain of crushed cars in one swift leap, then he was gone.

It wasn’t Chase who’d brutalized the human and left him for dead, but another Breed male who was recently familiar to all of the Order. A Gen One who’d joined them only a few weeks ago.

“Hunter,” Brock growled. “Son of a bitch.”

CHAPTER
Fourteen

C
laire felt a bit queasy from the flight as she and Andreas stepped off the Order’s private jet in Boston later that night. It had been a long trip, mostly because of the chasm of uncomfortable silence that seemed to have opened up between Andreas and her. Fortunately her lack of sleep after the dreamwalking disaster with him had made her plenty tired on the flight from Denmark to the States. She slept most of the way but he had seemed much too edgy for rest.

Even now, as he guided her across the private hangar toward a sleek black Land Rover that pulled up to greet them, Andreas practically vibrated with broody, dangerous energy.

“Tegan and Elise,” he told her as a big tawny-haired Breed male and his petite blond mate climbed out of the vehicle. At the sight of them, Andreas’s demeanor changed from the maddening aloofness he’d been subjecting her to on the flight, to one of warm familiarity. “My friends,” he said, stepping forward to greet the golden, beautiful couple.

In one of his brief moments of conversation on the flight, Andreas had mentioned that Elise had been mated to a director of the Enforcement Agency here in Boston. She’d lost him a few years past to an altercation with a Rogue while on the job, and had lost her only son more recently than that. Claire wasn’t privy to the details of how Elise had found happiness again with Tegan, but it was obvious from the glow of peace they both radiated as they approached that the two of them were deeply in love.

Claire hung back as Andreas took the female’s hand to his lips and brushed her fingers with a chaste but friendly kiss. She had no right to feel the least bit possessive of him, but the pang stabbed her a little as the pretty Breedmate took Andreas into a welcoming hug.

Elise’s mate looked nearly as affected as Claire felt. The tall, muscular Breed warrior had a hard-edged look about him, from the wild tousle of his golden hair, to the glittering gem-green eyes that watched over his woman with a combination of pride and purely masculine protectiveness. Andreas had said Tegan was Gen One Breed, and seeing him up close, Claire would have guessed it on her own. His studied stillness called to mind the mien of a big cat; all those muscles might seem coiled and at ease, but it would take only a fraction of a second for him to spring into deadly action if he felt his world or the mate he openly adored were threatened in any way.

“Hello, Claire. I’m Elise,” Tegan’s Breedmate said, releasing Andreas to come over and greet her with equal kindness. While the two males shook hands, Claire found herself engulfed in a quick, welcoming hug. Elise stepped back, her pale lavender eyes bright with intellect and warmth, her chin-length light blond bob framing her delicate face. “It’s very nice to meet you. Even though our paths never crossed in the Agency, I am familiar with some of your philanthropic work in Hamburg. You’ve really done a lot for the Darkhaven communities over there.”

Claire shrugged faintly uncomfortable with the praise, given the purpose of her emergency arrival in the States with Andreas. And although the two males spoke in low voices, she heard Tegan’s murmured condolences on the deaths of Andreas’s kin and the destruction of his Darkhaven.

“I recall one of your young nephews and his shy Breedmate who’d been with child when I last saw you in Berlin a year ago,” Tegan added, his brows furrowed over those fierce green eyes.

Andreas gave him a sober nod. “They asked me to be godfather while you were there, I believe.”

“Yes,” the warrior replied, a faint smile in remembrance before his expression darkened with sympathy. “We were all stunned to hear what happened. The attack won’t go unmet, not if the Order has anything to say about it.”

Tegan sent the briefest look in Claire’s direction, unspoken acknowledgment of her mate’s hand in the tragedy that Andreas alone had managed to survive. Her sense of guilt and awkwardness increased, as did the tense knot in her belly. Her nerves were stretched peculiarly taut, putting an anxious flutter in her chest.

Andreas put his hand on Tegan’s shoulder as they continued their quiet conversation. “I want your word on
something, my friend. If it turns out that Dragos is even remotely connected to what happened to my Darkhaven, I’ll do whatever I can to help you get the bastard and shut him down. But Roth is mine alone. Can you give me that much?”

The warrior inclined his head in a slow nod. “I know the kind of hatred you’re feeling. I’ve been there myself. I’m the last one to tell you how to deal with your own demons, but just be careful, yeah? Plenty of bastards out there deserve a good killing, but vengeance will consume you if you don’t control it.”

It may be too late for that advice
, Claire thought, watching Andreas’s rigid stance and haunted, hardened gaze as the four of them made their way toward the waiting SUV His need to avenge his family and his human lover only seemed to be growing stronger, more volatile, for the fact that the justice he craved had yet to be realized.

After the horrors he showed her in his dream, there was a part of her that understood his rage, even shared it. But from what she’d seen of him these past couple of days, she worried that his own life might mean nothing to him. Would he hold anything sacred if he finally got his chance to destroy the one who’d hurt him?