by Lara Adrian
“You were there?”
As soon as she said it, she knew he had been. She recalled the striking face and sunglass-shaded eyes that had watched her through the crowd. She’d felt a connection to him even then, in that brief glance that had seemed to reach out to her through the smoke and darkness of the club.
“I’d been tracking that group of Rogues for about an hour,” Lucan said, “watching for the prime opportunity to move in and take them out.”
“There were six of them,” she remembered vividly, seeing in her mind the half-dozen terrible faces, their glowing, feral eyes and snapping fangs. “You were going to confront them by yourself?”
His shrug seemed to say that it was not unusual odds, him against many. “I had some help that night—you and your cell phone camera. The flash surprised them, gave me the chance to strike.”
“You killed them?”
“All but one. I’ll get him, too.”
Looking at his fierce expression, Gabrielle had no doubt that he would. “The cops sent a squad car out to the club after I reported the killing. They didn’t find anything. No evidence at all.”
“I made sure they wouldn’t.”
“You made me look like a fool. The police insisted I was making all of it up.”
“Better that, than tipping them off to the very real battles that have been taking place on human streets for centuries. Can you imagine the wide-scale panic if substantiated reports of vampire attacks were to start making news around the world?”
“Is that what’s happening? These kinds of killings are going on all the time, everywhere?”
“More and more, lately. The Rogues are a faction of blood addicts that care only about their next fix. At least, that had been their mode until very recently. Something’s going on now. They’re preparing. Becoming organized. They’ve never been more dangerous than they are now.”
“And thanks to the pictures I took outside that club, these Rogue vampires are coming after me.”
“The incident you witnessed brought you to their attention, no doubt, and any human makes good sport for them. But it is the other pictures you’ve taken that have likely put you in the most jeopardy.”
“What other pictures?”
“That one.”
He indicated a framed photograph hanging on the wall of her living room. It was an exterior shot of an old warehouse in one of the sketchier parts of town.
“What made you decide to photograph that building?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, not even sure why she had decided to frame the picture. Just looking at it now gave her a little chill down her spine. “I never would have set foot in that part of town, but I remember I’d taken a wrong turn that night and ended up lost. Something just drew my eye to the warehouse—nothing I can really explain. I was nervous as hell to be there, but I couldn’t leave without taking a few shots of the place.”
Lucan’s voice was gravely serious. “I, along with several other Breed warriors who work with me, raided that location a month and a half ago. It was a Rogue lair, housing fifteen of our enemies.”
Gabrielle gaped at him. “There are vampires living in that building?”
“Not anymore.” He strode past her to the kitchen table, where a few other shots lay, including some from the abandoned asylum, taken just a couple of days ago. He picked up one of the photographs and held it out to her. “We’ve been surveilling this location for weeks. We have reason to believe it might be one of the largest colonies of Rogues in New England.”
“Oh, my God.” Gabrielle stared at the image of the asylum, a slight tremble in her fingers as she set it back down on the table. “When I took these pictures the other morning, a man found me there. He chased me off the property. You don’t think he was—”
Lucan shook his head. “Minion, not a vampire, if you saw him after dawn. Sunlight is poison to us. That much of the old folklore is true. Our skin burns quickly, like yours would if you held it under a very powerful magnifying glass at the height of morning.”
“Which is why I’ve only seen you in the evening,” she murmured, thinking back on each of Lucan’s visits, from that very first time when he began his deception with her. “How could I have been so blind when all the clues were right in front of me?”
“Maybe you didn’t want to see them, but you knew, Gabrielle. You suspected that the slaying you witnessed was something more than what your human experiences could explain. You nearly said as much to me, the first time we met. On some level of your consciousness, you knew it was a vampire attack.”
She did know, even then. But she had not suspected that Lucan was a part of it. Part of her still wanted to reject the idea.
“How can this be real?” she moaned, dropping into the nearest chair. She stared at the pictures scattered on the table in front of her, then looked back up at Lucan’s grim face. Tears threatened, burning in her eyes, a knot of desperate denial forming in her throat. “This can’t be real. God, please tell me that this is not really happening.”
CHAPTER
Nineteen
He had laid a lot on her to deal with—not everything, but more than enough for one night.
Lucan had to give Gabrielle credit. Aside from a bit of irrationality with the garlic and holy water, she had maintained an amazingly level head through a conversation that was, no doubt, pretty hard to swallow. Vampires, ancient alien arrivals, the rising war with the Rogues, who, by the way, were gunning for her now, too.
She had taken it all in with a stalwartness that most human men would not possess.
Lucan watched her struggling to process the information as she sat at the table with her head in her hands, stray tears only just beginning to stream down her cheeks. He wished there was a way to make her path easier. There wasn’t. And things were going to go from bad to worse for her, once she learned the full truth of what lay ahead of her.
For her own safety and that of the Breed, she was going to have to leave her apartment, her friends, her career. Leave behind everything that had been a part of her life so far.
And she was going to have to do it tonight.
“If you have any other photographs like these, Gabrielle, I need to see them.”
She nodded, lifting her head. “I have everything on my computer,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face.
“What about the ones in the darkroom?”
“They’re on disk, too, along with every image I’ve sold through the gallery.”
“Good.” Her mention of art sales tripped an alarm in his memory. “When I was here a few nights ago, you mentioned having sold an entire collection to someone. Who was it?”
“I don’t know. It was an anonymous purchase. The buyer arranged a private showing in a rented penthouse suite downtown. They looked at a few images, then paid cash for all of them.”
He swore and Gabrielle’s already stressed expression slipped toward true terror.
“Oh, my God. Are you thinking it was the Rogues who bought them?”
What Lucan was thinking was that if he were the one standing at the helm of the Rogues’ current operation, he would be most interested in acquiring a weapon that could home in on his opponents’ locations. To say nothing of crippling his enemies’ ability to use said weapon for their own gain.
Gabrielle would be an extraordinary asset in Rogue hands, for many reasons. And once they had her in their possession, it wouldn’t take them long to discover her Breedmate mark. She would be abused like the meanest brood mare, forced to take their blood and bear their spawn until her body simply gave out and died. It could take years, decades, centuries.
“Lucan, my best friend took those photographs into the showing that night, by himself. It would have killed me if anything had happened to him. Jamie walked in there without knowing anything about the danger he was in.”
“Be glad for that, because it’s probably the only reason he walked out alive.”
She recoiled as if he’d slap
ped her. “I don’t want my friends getting hurt because of what’s happening to me.”
“You’re in more danger than anyone right now. And we need to get moving. Let’s download those pictures off your computer. I want to take all of them into the lab at the compound.”
Gabrielle led him over to a neat corner desk in her living room. She powered up the desktop workstation and as it cycled through its startup, she pulled a couple of flash memory sticks out of their store packaging and popped one into the computer’s USB drive.
“You know, they said she was crazy. They called her delusional, a paranoid schizophrenic. They locked her away for believing she had been attacked by vampires.” Gabrielle laughed softly, but it was a sad, empty sound. “Maybe she wasn’t crazy after all.”
Behind her, Lucan moved closer. “Who would that be?”
“My birth mother.” After beginning the copying procedure, Gabrielle spun around in her chair to look up at Lucan. “She was found late one night in Boston, injured, bloody, disoriented. She didn’t have a wallet or purse, or any kind of ID on her, and in the brief periods when she was lucid, she couldn’t tell anyone who she was so the police processed her as a Jane Doe. She was just a teenager.”
“She was bleeding, you say?”
“Multiple throat lacerations—presumably self-inflicted, according to the official records. The courts deemed her incompetent to stand trial and locked her away in a mental institution once she was released from the hospital.”
“Jesus.”
She gave a slow shake of her head. “But what if everything she said was true? What if she wasn’t crazy at all? Oh, God, Lucan … all these years, I’ve blamed her. I think I’ve hated her, even, and now I can’t help but think—”
“You said the police and the courts processed her. You mean, for some kind of crime?”
The computer beeped to indicate the memory stick was full. Gabrielle turned back to continue with the next copying function, and she stayed there, giving him her back. Lucan put his hands down gently on her shoulders and brought the swivel chair back around.
“What was your mother charged with?”
For a long moment, Gabrielle didn’t say anything. Lucan saw her throat working. There was a great deal of hurt in her soft brown eyes. “She was charged with abandoning her child.”
“How old were you?”
She shrugged, shook her head. “Young. An infant. She stuffed me in a trash bin outside an apartment building. It was only about a block from where the police picked her up. Fortunately for me, one of the cops decided to check the surrounding area. He heard my crying, I guess, and took me out of there.”
Holy Christ.
A jolt of recollection flashed hard in Lucan’s mind as she spoke. He saw a dark street, wet pavement gleaming in the moonlight, a wide-eyed female standing in transfixed horror as a Rogue vampire sucked at her throat. He heard the shrill wailing of the tiny baby nestled in the young mother’s arms.
“When did this happen?”
“A long time ago. Twenty-seven years ago this summer, to be exact.”
To one of Lucan’s age, twenty-seven years ago was a blink of time. He clearly remembered interrupting the attack at the bus station. Recalled stepping between the Rogue and its prey, sending the terrified female off with a stern mental command. She’d been bleeding profusely, some of it raining down on her baby.
After he’d killed the Rogue and cleared the scene, he had gone to look for the woman and her child. He hadn’t found them. He’d often wondered what had happened to the both of them, and cursed himself for not having been able to at least remove the horrific memories of the assault from the victim’s mind.
“She committed suicide in the mental facility not long afterward,” Gabrielle said. “I was already a ward of the state.”
He couldn’t stop himself from touching her. Gently sweeping aside her long hair, he cupped the delicate line of her jaw, stroked the proud lift of her chin. Her eyes were moist, but she didn’t crack. She was a tough one, all right. Tough and beautiful and so incredibly special.
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and tell her as much.
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it with utmost sincerity. And regret, something he wasn’t used to feeling. But, then, since he’d first laid eyes on her, Gabrielle made him feel a lot of things that were entirely new to him. “I’m sorry for both of you.”
The computer beeped again.
“That’s all of them,” she said, reaching up as if she might stroke his hand, but couldn’t quite bring herself to touch him yet.
He let her back out of his caress and felt a sharp pang of remorse for the way she silently turned away.
Shutting him out like the new stranger he was.
He watched her remove the last memory stick and place it with the other. When she began to close the application, Lucan said, “Not yet. I need you to delete the image files from the computer and from any backups you might have. The copies we take out of here have to be the only ones remaining.”
“What about print copies? The ones on the table there, the ones I have downstairs in my darkroom?”
“You wrap up here. I’ll get the prints.”
“Okay.”
She got right to work, and Lucan made a quick sweep of the rest of the apartment. He gathered all the loose snapshots and took down her framed images as well, wanting to leave nothing behind that could be of use to the Rogues. He found a large duffel bag in Gabrielle’s bedroom closet and brought it downstairs to load it up.
As he finished packing and zipping the bag closed, he heard the low rumble of a muscle car coming to a stop outside the townhouse. Two doors opened, then slammed shut, followed by urgent footsteps coming toward the apartment.
“Someone’s here,” Gabrielle said, sending him a stark look as she shut down her computer.
Lucan’s hand was already inside his trenchcoat and snaked around to the base of his spine, where a custom Beretta 9mm was tucked into the back waistband of his pants. The gun was loaded with maximum blast, Rogue-smoking, titanium rounds—one of Niko’s latest innovations. If a Rogue stood outside that door, the Bloodlusting son of a bitch was about to get a belly full of hurt.
But it wasn’t Rogues, he realized at once. Not even Minions, which also would have given Lucan a bit of satisfaction in blowing away.
There were humans on the front stoop. A man and a woman.
“Gabrielle?” The doorbell rang several times in rapid succession. “Hello? Gabby! Are you in there?”
“Oh, no. It’s my friend Megan.”
“The one you went to last night?”
“Yes. She’s been calling here most of the day, leaving messages. She’s worried about me.”
“What did you tell her?”
“She knows about the assault in the park. I told her how I was attacked, but I didn’t tell her anything about you … what you did.”
“Why not?”
Gabrielle shrugged. “I didn’t want her involved. I don’t want her to be put in any danger because of me. Because of all this.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Maybe I didn’t want to say anything about you until I had some answers for myself.”
The doorbell rang again. “Gabby, open up! Ray and I need to talk to you. We need to know that you’re okay.”
“Her boyfriend’s a cop,” Gabrielle said softly. “They want me to file a report about what happened last night.”
“Is there a back way out of here?”
She nodded, then seemed to change her mind and shook her head. “The slider opens onto a shared backyard, but there’s a tall fence—”
“No time,” Lucan said, discarding the option. “Go to the door. Let your friends come in.”
“What are you going to do?” She saw that his hand had just slipped back out of his trenchcoat, easing off the weapon concealed behind him. Panic flooded into her expression. “Do you have a gun back there? Lucan, they won’t do anythin
g to you. I’ll make sure they don’t say anything.”
“I won’t have to use the weapon on them.”
“Then what will you do?” After so deliberately avoiding any physical contact with him, now she finally did touch him, her small hands clutching at his arm. “God, please tell me you won’t hurt them—”
“Open the door, Gabrielle.”
Her legs moved sluggishly beneath her as she approached the front door. She twisted the deadbolt and heard Megan’s voice on the other side.
“She’s in there, Ray. She’s at the door. Gabby, open up, honey! Are you all right?”
Gabrielle slid the chain free, saying nothing. Not sure whether she should assure her friend that she was okay, or shout for Megan and Ray to get the hell out of there.
A look behind her at Lucan gave her no indication either way. His sharp features were emotionless and still. His silver eyes were rooted on the door, cool and unblinking. His powerful hands were empty, down at his sides, but Gabrielle knew he could spring into motion with no warning at all.
If he wanted to kill her friends—even her, for that matter—it would be done before any of them knew to take the first breath.
“Let them in,” he told her in a low growl.
Gabrielle slowly turned the knob.
The door was barely open a crack before Megan pushed inside, her boyfriend, still in uniform, right behind her.
“Holy shit, Gabby! Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? Why haven’t you returned my calls?” She pulled her into a fierce hug, then released her, only to frown at Gabrielle like a frantic mother hen. “You look tired. Have you been crying? Where have you—”
Megan broke off abruptly, her eyes, and Ray’s, catching a sudden glimpse of Lucan in the middle of the living room behind Gabrielle.
“Oh … I didn’t realize you had someone here….”
“Everything okay here?” Ray asked, stepping past the two women and letting his hand rest lightly on his holstered weapon.
“Fine. Everything’s fine,” Gabrielle quickly replied. She held her hand out toward Lucan. “This is, uh … a friend of mine.”