by Lara Adrian
“Wilhelm Roth,” he bellowed darkly, centering all of his hatred, all of his white-hot energy, on the male who had taken so much from him, even before he’d called for the slaughter of Reichen’s Darkhaven kin. “Tonight you die, Roth!”
Focusing his talent, Reichen fisted his hand and punched it through the ultraviolet light bars of the cell. He felt no burn, other than the heat coursing through him already. He glanced up and took great satisfaction in the sudden, slack-jawed astonishment written across Roth’s face. Grinning himself now in a smile full of hatred and laser-sighted purpose, Reichen stepped out of the Ancient’s cage with a roar of mingled triumph and murderous rage.
The two Gen One assassins blasted at him with their useless weapons. Reichen glanced up at them, heat rippling outward from his body with nuclear intensity. He summoned power to his raised and fisted hands, then turned it loose on the pair. Twin fireballs rocketed out of his palms. The spinning white-hot orbs struck their targets in an instant, incinerating the vampires on impact, bodies and weapons reduced to a flurry of drifting ash and molten bits of metal showering down from the top of the double staircases.
“Holy shit!” one of the warriors crowed from behind him, but Reichen had no time to relish the small victory.
Not when Roth was staring wide-eyed in panic, backing away from the window as if he was preparing to bolt.
Reichen crouched low, then sprang into the air. In one fluid motion, fire engulfing him, he leapt off the floor and sailed up to the broad sheet of Plexiglas that separated him from his quarry. He locked eyes with Roth, curling his lip off his teeth and fangs as he smashed into the window and watched the barrier shatter inward in a million melting pebbles.
Wilhelm Roth gaped at the towering pillar of hellish fire that had transformed Andreas Reichen into something too incredible for words. He’d understood the male’s unique Breed-born talent was pyrokinesis, but this … this was beyond reckoning.
It was awesome in its power, and Roth could not keep himself from staring, struck dumb with wonder and fear, as Reichen stalked toward him. The concrete floor scorched black beneath Reichen’s boots. The fluorescent lights overhead popped and smoked as he passed under them, moving inch by inch across the viewing room. Roth retreated, feeling his hair and skin singe from the intensity of the heat rolling off Reichen.
“You think you can accomplish anything by killing me?” he asked the glowing form that stalked him with obvious deadly intent. “You’ve seen this place, Reichen. You can figure out what it’s been used for all these years. Dragos has bred his own army down here. He’s done much more than that, and he cannot be stopped now. Do you actually think my death will make a difference in the grand scheme of things?”
“It will make a difference to Claire,” came the deep, heat-warped reply. “It will make a difference to me.”
Roth kept moving backward, until the gauges and switches of the UV cage’s control panel behind him bit into his spine. “Let me go, and maybe your friends down there in that cell will live.”
“You can’t harm anyone. Not anymore.” Reichen’s glance bounced from point to point on the control panel. Circuits crackled, shooting off sparks and bitter, electronic smoke. Roth had to duck out of the way of the small explosions, the fallout of Reichen’s searing gaze driving him deep into the corner of the room in a cower. Roth snarled, infuriated to have been sent to his knees, particularly by this male, whose death he had craved and sought for far too long.
As Reichen stepped closer, murder blazing from every pore of his body, Roth made an abrupt lunge for one of the gauges on the control panel. He understood the fact that he wasn’t going to walk away from this fight now, but damn if he would accept defeat alone.
With a grunt of determination, Roth smashed his fist onto the panic switch that would activate the lab’s emergency detonation sequence. Sirens immediately began to wail overhead. The alarms sounded from every direction, signaling the start of an irreversible countdown.
Roth chuckled. “My God. It’s almost worth it—knowing that I am about to die down here alongside you and the bulk of the Order. Seeing that look on your face right now… your defeat is palpable, Reichen. So is the horror and outrage—the raw, emotional pain—it’s all there, in your eyes.” He sighed, knowingly dramatic. “I only wish I could take Claire along with us when this whole goddamned place blows to kingdom come in the next five—ah, make that four minutes and forty-nine seconds.”
CHAPTER
Thirty-one
Claire wanted it to all be a dream. A terrible nightmare that she could simply wake from and the world would go back to normal. She wanted to go back to three nights ago, when she and Andreas had been alone at the house in Newport, making love, walking along the wharfs, embracing under the moonlight.
But the sound of Wilhelm Roth’s cruelly animated voice—the realization of what he had just done to Andreas, to the warriors inside the abandoned lair with him… to the women who would be mourning their mates in mere minutes—sank into Claire’s soul like a poison.
“I can’t stay in here another second,” she murmured, meeting Dylan’s ashen look.
“We can’t leave, Claire. Can’t you hear the gunfire out there by the entrance?”
Claire heard it. Rio had been gone for only a few minutes. He and Renata and Hunter were still engaged with the Gen One assassins who’d come up to ground level. It was dangerous outside the vehicle; Claire knew that. But as she stared anxiously out the tinted windshield at the forest that surrounded her, she knew a deeper sense of dread.
“Oh, my God… no. This cannot be Mira’s vision.”
She opened the door and slid out of the Rover, realizing just now that the premonition she’d seen in the little girl’s eyes was about to come true. Right here, within the next five awful minutes.
Dylan came out of the vehicle and circled around to grab her by the arms. “Claire, please, get back inside. You can’t—”
“This is the same woods I saw in Mira’s eyes,” she cried, sick with certainty. The same location where she’d felt the anguish of losing Andreas in that pile of smoking rubble and ash. “The explosion, Dylan. This is exactly what Mira showed me. It’s really going to happen. Oh, my God… no!”
Tearing loose of the other Breedmate’s hold, Claire raced into the darkened woods, her heart breaking, about to burst from her chest, and Andreas’s name a desperate prayer on her lips.
Every cell in Reichen’s body screamed for him to unleash the full power of his fury on Wilhelm Roth. It would be the matter of an instant to render the bastard nothing but ashes to be trampled under his boots.
But incinerating Roth with a single blast of rage was far too merciful. Evil like him deserved to suffer, especially after the cowardice he’d just shown in activating explosives that none of the warriors trapped in the UV cage below had any hope of escaping. His friends should not have to die as part of this bad blood between Roth and himself.
It was that thought, more than any other, that gave Reichen the ability to ignore his hatred of Roth and loose his rage on the control panel that encompassed the entire back wall of the viewing room. He threw one bolt of flame after another at the gauges and monitoring devices, until finally there was a loud pop and the entire space went dark.
He didn’t see Roth moving until the son of a bitch had managed to scramble through a side door. Reichen pivoted to the blown-out window and glanced down at the warriors leaping off the cell’s deactivated platform.
“Reichen!” It was Tegan’s deep voice calling up to him, although Reichen’s vision was swamped with amber and rippling with the heat that was escalating ever hotter inside him. “Reichen, come on! Leave the son of a bitch. He’s dead if he stays in here.”
True enough, Reichen thought. But the way his body felt now, the way his veins were seething lava and his mind fixed on one thing—destruction—he realized that the moment he’d dreaded for so long had finally arrived.
He was too far gone. The fir
es were intensifying within him, no longer his to control.
“Reichen, goddamn it!” Tegan shouted, hesitating when the rest of the warriors were wisely rushing to evacuate. “Forget Roth and let’s haul ass out of this place before it fucking blows!”
“Take care of her for me,” he somehow managed to say, his throat feeling as dry as kindling, scraping with each syllable. “Get her somewhere safe… do that for me, Tegan.”
He didn’t wait to hear the dark curse that shot up from the room below. Reichen took off after Wilhelm Roth, trusting the warrior—his friend—to carry out his request. If he could be certain of Claire’s safety, he didn’t need anything else.
Nothing but the knowledge that Wilhelm Roth was dead.
He stalked through the anterior hallway where Roth had run, hearing the bow of metal bending, the steel and concrete reinforcements of the underground bunker protesting his presence. Empty metal supply carts sagged as he passed them, glass windows in doors and offices shattering from the sheer intensity of the white-hot flames that ringed his limbs and torso like an impenetrable, living cocoon of energy.
“Wilhelm Roth!” he roared, coming up on the vampire from a few dozen yards away.
Roth had been running like the vermin he was, but now he slowed, then stopped. No doubt he sensed the futility in trying to escape the death that was coming to him, either by Reichen’s hand or his own, when he’d smashed that detonator switch some three minutes ago.
Roth slowly turned around to face him. “You surprise me, Reichen. I would have thought your love for my faithless mate was stronger than your hatred of me.”
Reichen grunted. He wasn’t about to discuss Claire or his feelings for her with this offal. Roth had to know that with less than three minutes on the detonator, neither one of them was getting out of the bunker before it blew.
Reichen stalked forward, using all his focus to keep from ashing Roth on the spot. He wanted to make the next two minutes of his life count, and he could think of no greater purpose than killing Roth second by second, burning away his existence inch by inch. As he approached, Roth had no choice but to retreat backward, edging nearer to the end of the corridor.
He saw Roth’s skin start to go red. He moved closer, driving him farther back. Beads of sweat erupted from Roth’s brow and upper lip, then his entire face and throat sheened with moisture. And still Reichen advanced. Roth hissed as his exposed skin began to blister and burn. A stench rose up from his fair hair as it, too, started to singe under the heat of Reichen’s merciless talent.
Roth cried out when his clothes began to smoke. “Go ahead and do your worst,” he sputtered, gasping in agony yet finding the ability to peel back his splitting, scorched lips into a sadistic smile. “Have you forgotten? My blood bond to Claire… so long as I’m alive, she feels my pain. Torture me, and you torture her, too.”
Claire screamed and dropped to the ground on her knees. Up ahead of her in the dark, she saw Renata, Hunter, and Rio taking on the last of the Gen One assassins at the old barn. Through the black maw of the entrance, Claire watched as Kade and Nikolai, then Brock and Tegan came up from the depths of Dragos’s lair. What about Andreas? She was about to call out to the warriors, but the searing pain that racked her so suddenly had stolen her breath.
It had taken her down swiftly, heat running over her body as if she were standing in the heart of the devil’s own furnace. Or, rather, Wilhelm Roth was standing in that hellish inferno. It was his agony that rocked her, his pain echoing in her blood.
Andre.
He was the source of Roth’s pain. Which meant he was still alive. Still breathing somewhere in that underground bunker, which meant he still had a chance to get out before the worst could happen. He still had a chance to come back to her.
Claire dragged herself up to her feet, buoyed by hope.
She pushed through the painful psychic link to Roth and started running once more. If Tegan and the rest of the warriors had made it out all right, then she was certain that Andreas couldn’t be far behind them.
CHAPTER
Thirty-two
Reichen staggered back on his heels at the realization that he was hurting Claire as he took his hatred out on Roth. Like the heavy, Bloodlust-induced sleep that had muted his own bond to her earlier that day, his pyro now had obliterated nearly all his senses. It had stripped him of nearly everything but his fury, and the fire that rose along with it.
“Why did you do it?” Reichen demanded roughly. “Why did you need to have Claire?”
Roth’s smile stretched tight behind the cracking skin of his scorched lips. “Because you wanted her. And because she couldn’t see that I was a far better man. You were nothing compared to me. You never were. I even removed the one obstacle that prevented me from pursuing Claire in earnest—”
“The female you’d already taken as your mate,” Reichen growled.
“The female you had the audacity to coddle after I’d put her in her rightful place.”
Roth was staring at Reichen as though he should remember the event he spoke of. Reichen thought back to his dealings with Roth… and suddenly recalled a timid Breedmate sitting outside a Darkhaven party on a rain-soaked balcony. “I brought her inside and gave her my jacket,” he said, picturing her stricken face as he’d shown her that small kindness. “She was freezing and crying, so I sent her home with my driver.”
“You humiliated me in front of my peers. Even worse, in front of my subordinates. You and Ilsa both humiliated me that evening.”
“So you had her killed?” Reichen snarled, incredulous.
“Attacked by a Rogue vampire,” Roth said lightly. He shrugged. “No one questioned me about the incident, since it was my close associates who took the report.”
“Out of spite, you killed an innocent woman who trusted you above all others. Then you took Claire as your mate to get back at me.”
“I did more than that.” Roth sneered. “I arranged to get rid of you, as well. You vanished for a year without a word of excuse. Everyone wondered if you were dead. And yet Claire still wanted you.”
He practically spat the word.
Jealousy and pride, Reichen thought, sickened that something so petty had caused so much pain.
Roth’s stare was sharp, cuttingly so. “I suppose after I realized that, my hate for Claire exceeded even the hate I had for you. I would have enjoyed killing her, Reichen. Just as I enjoyed ordering the deaths of your Darkhaven kin and turning that human whore of yours into my Minion.”
Reichen roared with fresh anguish and outrage. He was through with Roth now. Sick to death of the bastard’s ugly words. He brought his hands out before him and felt the fires travel from his core through his limbs. Out to his fingertips that stretched toward Wilhelm Roth.
“Die, you sick fuck,” he snarled.
And then he released a double-barreled blast of flame and heat at the face of his most treacherous enemy. Roth’s death was instant, a mercy Reichen granted only because of Claire.
Reichen was still screaming with animal fury, still torching the empty floor where Roth’s ashes had piled up, when he felt the first rumblings of the explosion building under the soles of his feet.
The walls around him trembled.
Then the earth heaved violently with the force of the lab’s detonation.
Claire knew the precise moment that Wilhelm Roth took his last breath. It came to her as a sudden flood of peace—an impossible sense of freedom that lit up her veins and gave her limbs a renewed strength to carry her forward as she raced the few remaining yards toward the old barn where the warriors had just spilled out.
Roth was dead.
Andreas was alive.
God… could the hell of the past several days, of the past several decades that she and Andreas had been separated by Roth’s machinations, actually be coming to an end?
She wanted to believe it. Needed to believe it.
Claire clutched hope close, even as the ground beneath her fee
t gave a prolonged, bone-rattling shudder.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted a low male voice up ahead of her in the dark. “Did you feel that? This son of a bitch is about to blow!”
Claire kept running, denying what she was hearing. It couldn’t be true. It could not be happening. Not when Andreas hadn’t yet come out to safety.
“Get back, get back!” Rio’s rolling accent sounded from somewhere close. The big warrior came crashing through the trees with Renata, Hunter, and a couple of others from the mission. Rio reached for Claire, tried to pull her along with them, but she dodged his grasp and kept on running.
There were more shouted warnings, more urgent movement in the night-dark woods, as the shudder deep within the earth rumbled louder.
There was a violent jolt, then a deep, thunderous boom!
Strong arms and a warm, hard body wrapped itself around Claire, twisting her around to cushion her fall as the percussion blasted her backward, off her feet. She screamed but could hardly hear her own voice as the forest shook and roared with the force of a seemingly endless, ungodly explosion.
“Stay down, Claire.” Tegan’s voice blew hot against her ear. “I promised him I’d get you out of here in one piece.”
“Noo!” she cried, beyond caring if she lived or died, watching in horror as the derelict barn blasted skyward in a blinding mass of flames and heat and thick, roiling smoke. The plumes of fire shot out in all directions, showering large chunks of splintered wood and burning embers down onto the forest. More heat erupted from out of the hole bored into the earth beneath the barn, the entrance to the bunker from which Andreas had yet to escape. “Oh, my God… no! He’s still down there! Andreas, no!”
She vaulted to her feet. Tegan’s hold was firm on her arm, but she shook him off with a desperate cry. “Let me go, damn you!”