A Touch of Midnight

by Lara Adrian

  “What are you saying, Lucan?” Rio asked. “You talking about bringing on new members?”

  He gave a vague nod. “Might not be a bad idea at some point.”

  “The Order started with eight,” Tegan said. “We’ve held steady at six for a long time now.”

  “Yeah,” Lucan agreed. “But things sure as hell aren’t getting any better out there. We may need more than eight of us in the long run.”

  Conlan braced his elbows on the edge of the table, sent a look around to everyone seated with him. “I know of a guy who’d be a good candidate as any, I reckon. Siberian-born. He’s young, but he’s solid. Might be worth talking to him.”

  Lucan grunted. “I’ll keep it in mind. Right now, priority is taking care of business at home. Six Rogues ashed last night and another nest in our crosshairs is a decent place to start.”

  “Decent, yes,” Gideon interjected. “But not nearly enough for my liking.”

  Rio gave a low whistle. “Only thing sharper than your mind, amigo, is your hatred for Rogues. If I ever fall, I’d not want to find myself at the end of your blade.”

  Gideon didn’t acknowledge the observation with anything more than a grim look in his comrade’s direction. He couldn’t deny the depth of his need to eradicate the diseased members of their species. His enmity went back about two centuries. Back to his beginnings in London.

  Dante eyed him speculatively from across the table. “Counting the suckheads you took out last night, how many kills does that make for you, Gid?”

  He shrugged. “Couple hundred, give or take.”

  Inwardly, Gideon did a quick tally: Two-hundred and seventy-eight since coming to Boston in 1898. Another forty-six Rogues lost their heads on the edge of his sword, including the three who slaughtered his baby brothers.

  He could no longer picture the boys’ faces, or hear their laughter. But he could still taste the ash from the fire as he tried desperately to pull them out of the burning stable the night they were killed. Gideon had been hunting Rogues ever since, trying to douse his guilt. Trying to find some small degree of redemption for how he’d failed to protect them.

  So far?

  He wasn’t even close.

  Chapter 5

  Savannah took the T in to the university campus from her apartment in Allston, still groggy and in dire need of coffee. She’d had a restless night’s sleep, to put it mildly. Too many disturbing dreams. Too many unsettling questions swirling in her head after what she’d witnessed by touching that damned sword. She’d been more awake than not for most of the night.

  It hadn’t helped that Rachel never made it home from her date with Professor Keaton. Of course, that had been her intention. Hadn’t she said as much yesterday? Nevertheless, Savannah had lain awake in her bedroom of the cramped little apartment, listening for her roommate to return. Worrying that Rachel was getting in over her head with a guy like Professor Keaton, a much older man who made no secret of his willingness to play the field. Or, in his case, a large part of the female student body.

  Savannah didn’t want to see her friend get hurt. She knew firsthand what it felt like to be played by someone she trusted, and it was a lesson she hoped never to repeat. Besides, Rachel would probably only laugh off Savannah’s concern. She’d call her a mother hen--too reserved and serious for her age--things Savannah had heard before from other people throughout her life.

  Truth be told, part of her was a little envious of Rachel’s free spirit. While Savannah had fretted and worried the night away, Rachel was probably having a great time with Professor Keaton. Correction: Bill, she amended with a roll of her eyes, trying not to imagine her roommate gasping out Professor Keaton’s name in the throes of passion.

  God, how she was going to get through class today without the involuntary--totally unwanted--mental picture of the pair of them naked together?

  Savannah rounded the corner onto the university campus on Commonwealth Avenue, still considering the potential awkwardness of it all when the sight of police cruisers and a parked ambulance with its lights flashing in front of the Art History building stopped her short. A pair of reporters and a camera crew jumped out of a news van to push their way through a gathering crowd outside.

  What on earth...?

  She hurried over, a heavy dread rising in her throat. “What’s going on?” she asked a fellow student toward the rear of the onlookers.

  “Someone attacked one of the Art History profs in his office late last night. Sounds like he’s in real bad shape.”

  “At least he’s alive,” someone else added. “More than you can say for the student who was with him.”

  Savannah’s heart sank to her stomach, as cold as a stone. “A student?” No, not Rachel. It couldn’t be. “Who is it?”

  The reply came from another person nearby. “Some chick in his freshman Antiquities class. Rumor is they were engaged in a little extracurricular activity up in his office when the shit went down.”

  Savannah’s feet were moving underneath her, carrying her toward the building entrance, before she even realized she was in motion. She ran inside, dodging the cops and university officials trying to keep the growing crowd outside and under control.

  “Miss, no one’s allowed in the building right now,” one of the police officers called to her as she dashed for the stairwell. She ignored the command, racing as fast as she could up the three flights of steps and down the corridor toward Professor Keaton’s office.

  The news crew she saw arrive a few minutes ago hovered in the hallway, cameras rolling as the police and paramedics worked just inside the open door. As she drew nearer, a stretcher was wheeled out into the corridor with a patient being administered to by one of the ambulance attendants.

  Professor Keaton lay unconscious as they pushed his gurney toward the elevators, his face and neck covered in blood, his skin bone-white above the blanket that covered him up to his chin. Savannah stood there, immobile with shock, as Keaton was whisked off to the hospital.

  “Coming through!” a gruff Boston accent shouted from behind her. She jolted back to attention, and took a step aside as another gurney was pushed out of the professor’s office.

  There were no medics attending this patient. No urgency in the way the emergency responders wheeled the stretcher into the hallway and began an unrushed march toward the second bank of elevators. Savannah brought her hand up over her mouth to hold back the choked cry that bubbled in her throat.

  Oh, Rachel. No.

  Her petite body was draped completely in a sheet mottled with dark red stains. One of her arms had slid out from under the cover to hang limply over the side of the gurney. Savannah stared in mute grief, unable to tear her gaze away from that lifeless hand and the dozen-plus bangle bracelets gathered at Rachel’s wrist, sticky with her blood.

  Reeling in disbelief and horror, Savannah stumbled into the professor’s office, her stomach folding in on itself.

  “Outta here now, everybody!” one of the police detectives working inside ordered. He put a hand on Savannah’s shoulder as she slumped forward and held her midsection, trying not to lose her breakfast. “Miss, you need to leave now. This is a crime scene.”

  “She was my roommate,” Savannah murmured, tears choking her. Nausea rose at the sight of the blood that sprayed the wall near Professor Keaton’s desk and sofa. “Why would someone do this? Why would they kill her?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out here,” the cop said, his voice taking on a more sympathetic tone. “I’m sorry about your friend, but you’re gonna have to let us do our work now. I’d like to talk to you about when you last saw your roommate, so please wait outside.”

  As he spoke, the news crew seemed to think it was the opportune time to crowd in with their camera. The reporter inserted himself between Savannah and the officer, shoving his microphone at the detective. “Do you have any indication of what happened in here? Was it a random break-in? Robbery? Or some kind of personal attack? Should the
campus be concerned for the safety of its students and faculty?”

  The cop narrowed his eyes on the vulture with the mic and heaved an annoyed sigh. “Right now, we have no reason to believe anyone else is in danger. There are no signs of forced entry, nor any obvious evidence of a struggle beyond what occurred here in this office. Although it doesn’t appear anything was stolen, we can’t rule out theft as a motive until we’ve had a chance to fully review and process the scene....”

  Savannah couldn’t listen to any more. She drifted out of Keaton’s office and into the adjacent study lab where she, Rachel and the other students had been working less than twenty-four hours ago. She dropped into a chair at one of the work tables, feeling outside her own body as the discussion of Rachel’s murder and Professor Keaton’s narrow escape continued in the blood-splattered office.

  Savannah’s gaze roamed aimlessly over the reference materials stacked on the lab tables, then over toward the archive storage room. The door was wide open, but no cops or university officials were inside.

  She stood up and approached numbly, walked into the darkened room.

  And even through her fog of shock and grief, she realized immediately that something wasn’t right.

  “It’s not here.”

  She pivoted, a sudden surge of adrenaline sending her back to Professor Keaton’s office at a near run. She made a quick visual search of the room, looking past the disheveled desk and well-worn sofa. Past all the blood.

  “It’s gone.” The police officers and news crew went silent, everyone turning to look at her now. “Something was taken from here last night.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Eva had set off the compound’s kitchen smoke alarm again.

  The high-pitched beeping brought every warrior in the place running at full tilt to shut the bloody thing off.

  Gideon abandoned his morning’s work on the microcomputer--his new obsession--and hot-footed it up the serpentine corridor of the underground headquarters to the kitchen installed specifically for Eva and Danika, the only two residents biologically capable of eating anything that came out of it. Even that was questionable, when it was Rio’s Breedmate’s turn at the stove.

  The Spaniard arrived in the kitchen mere seconds before Gideon got there. Rio had silenced the alarm and was pulling Eva into an affectionate embrace, chuckling good-naturedly as she tried to make excuses for what happened.

  “I only turned away for a minute to watch something on the news,” she protested, waving her hand toward the small television set on the counter as Lucan, Dante and Tegan shook their heads and returned to what they’d been doing. Conlan stayed, going over to put an arm around his mate, Danika, who stood nearby, trying to hide her smile behind her hand.

  “Besides,” Eva went on, “there was only a little bit of smoke this time. I swear that alarm hates me.”

  “It’s all right, baby,” Rio said around rich laughter. “Cooking has never been your best quality. Look at the upside, at least no one got hurt.”

  “Tell that to their breakfast,” Gideon said wryly. He picked up the skillet of charred eggs and sausage from the stove and dumped the mess into the trash.

  As he walked past the TV, he was struck by a pair of chocolate-brown doe eyes, fringed with feathery, thick lashes. The young woman was being interviewed outside one of the local universities. Short black curls haloed her face, a lovely, gentle face. Its soft features graced a perfect oval of smooth coffee-and-cream skin that looked like it would be as soft as velvet to the touch.

  But the young beauty’s mouth was tense, bracketed with stress lines on either side. And now that Gideon was looking closer, he realized tears were welled in those pretty dark eyes.

  “Tell me more about the artifact you say appears to be missing,” the news reporter pressed, shoving a microphone up toward her face.

  “It’s a sword,” she answered, a voice to match her beautiful face, despite the tremor that made her words shake a bit. “It’s a very old sword.”

  “Right,” said the reporter. “And you say you’re certain you saw this sword just yesterday in Professor Keaton’s classroom?”

  “What’s this about?” Gideon asked, his gaze riveted to the young woman.

  “Someone assaulted a professor at the college last night,” Danika explained. “He’s been taken to Mass General, critical but stable. The student who was with him was killed. Sounds like they suspect it may have been a robbery gone bad.”

  Gideon grunted in acknowledgment, wondering what the student being interviewed had to do with the situation.

  “The sword was part of a collection of Colonial furnishings and art objects that were donated to the university recently,” she told the reporter. “At least, I believe it was part of the collection. Anyway, it’s missing now. It’s the only thing missing, far as I can tell.”

  “Uh, huh. And can you describe for our viewers what the sword looks like?”

  “It’s English. Mid-seventeenth century,” she replied with certainty. “It has an eagle or a falcon engraved into the handle.”

  Gideon froze, his blood running suddenly cold in his veins.

  “There’s a ruby in the pommel,” the young woman went on, “held in place by carved steel talons.”

  Ah, Christ.

  Gideon stood there, wooden, immobilized by the words that sank into his brain.

  The weapon this student was describing in such unmistakable detail...he knew it all too well.

  He’d held that very sword in his hand, a very long time ago. It vanished the night his twin brothers were murdered, taken, he assumed, by the Rogues who’d slaughtered them with it while Gideon had been away from the Darkhaven. Not there to protect them, as he should’ve been.

  He never thought he’d see the sword again, never wanted to see it. Not after that night.

  He never imagined it might end up here, in Boston.

  For how long? Who had it belonged to?

  More to the point, who would want it badly enough to kill for it?

  The need to find answers to those questions lit his veins up with fire. He had to know more.

  And as Gideon watched the pretty coed on the television screen, he knew exactly where to start looking.

  Chapter 6

  “That’s the last of today’s returns, Mrs. Kennefick.” Savannah replaced the checkout card in the back of a popular new horror novel about a social misfit named Carrie. She eyed the book, sympathetic to the fictional high school girl from Maine who possessed some kind of frightening power. She was half-tempted to sign the novel out herself. Maybe she would have, if her day hadn’t already been horrific enough.

  Her supervisor, old Mrs. Kennefick, had offered to let Savannah take the night off, but the sad fact was, the last thing Savannah wanted to do was spend any more hours than necessary back home at her apartment alone. Her evening shift at the library was a welcome distraction from what happened at the university.

  Rachel was dead. God, Savannah could hardly believe it. Her stomach clenched at the thought of her friend and Professor Keaton being attacked by an unknown assailant. Her eyes prickled with welling tears, but she held them back. She couldn’t allow herself to cave in to her grief and shock. She’d had to excuse herself from the book return desk twice already tonight, barely making it to the ladies’ room before the sobs had torn out of her throat.

  If she could get through the remaining forty minutes of her shift without losing it again, it would be a miracle.

  “All set then, dear?” Mrs. Kennefick patted her neat gray bun, then smoothed her similarly colored cardigan as she ambled around from her desk in the processing room.

  “All set,” Savannah said, adding the worn-out copy of Carrie to the wheeled book cart with the rest of the returns she’d handled that evening.

  “Very well.” The old woman took the cart and began rolling it away before Savannah could stop her. “No sense in you waiting around any longer tonight, dear. I’ll go shelve these returns. Will you lock up behin
d you on your way out?”

  “But, Mrs. Kennefick, I really don’t mind--”

  The woman dismissed her with a little wave and kept going, hunched over the cart, her drab-skirted behind and soft-soled shoes retreating into the quiet labyrinth of the library corridor.

  Savannah glanced at the clock on the wall, watching the second hand tick slowly. She looked for something more to do there, knowing it was just an excuse to keep from returning to the reality that awaited her outside the library. She took advantage of the opportunity to organize Mrs. Kennefick’s pencil cup and paperclip dispenser, even going so far as to use the edge of her long sleeved turtleneck sweater to sweep away the nonexistent dust from the pristine surface of her supervisor’s desk.

  Savannah was busy straightening the patron files when she felt the fine hairs at the back of her neck rise with a odd sense of awareness. A warmth prickled over her skin, strange and unsettling.

  Someone was in the library’s delivery room outside.

  Although the adjacent room was silent, she closed the file drawer and walked out to investigate.

  Someone was there, all right.

  The man stood in the center of the room, facing away from her, dressed in a long black trench coat, black pants and black, heavy-soled boots. A punk, from the look of him. A very large punk.

  Geez, the guy had to be six-and-a-half-feet tall and built of solid muscle. Which made it all the more incongruous to find him standing there in silent meditation, his head full of thick, spiky cropped blond hair tipped back on his broad shoulders while he perused the mural of paintings that circled a full 360 degrees around the ornately paneled, medieval-styled room.

  Savannah strode toward him, cautious yet intrigued. “The library is about to close soon. Can I help you find something?”

  He slowly pivoted around to face her, and, oh, wow....

  The punk description might have fit his clothing style, but that’s where it ended. He was handsome--devastatingly so. Under the crown of his golden hair, a broad brow and angular cheekbones combined with a square-cut jaw that would have seemed more in place on a movie screen than standing in the middle of the Abbey Room in the Boston Public Library.