Lara Adrian

by Veil of Midnight (lit)

  The human he’d bought tonight was merely chum to be tossed into the water. Lex was looking to attract bigger fish.

  He knew as well as any other member of the Breed that nothing drew a vampire faster, or more surely, than the prospect of bleeding human prey. This deep into the underbelly of the city, where even the dregs of human society rushed about in an unspoken state of terror, Lex was counting on the presence of Rogues.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  The first two came sniffing around the crack house in mere minutes. Rogues were hopeless addicts, as much as the junkie now curled up in a fetal position and weeping quietly on the floor as his life slowly leeched out of him.

  Although few of the Breed lost themselves to Bloodlust—the permanent, insatiable thirst for blood—the ones who did rarely, if ever, came back from it. They lived in the shadows, savage, rootless monsters whose only purpose in living was to feed their hunger.

  Lex slid back into the corner of the room as the two predators crept inside. They immediately fell upon the human, tearing at him with fangs that never receded, eyes burning with the color and heat of fire.

  Another Rogue found the room. This one was larger than the others, more brutal as he threw himself into the carnage and began to feed. A scuffle broke out among the feral vampires. The three of them turned on each other like snarling, rabid dogs. Fists pounding, fingers tearing, fangs ripping through flesh and bone, each powerful male fought viciously to win his prey.

  Lex watched transfixed. Giddy from the violence, and drunk from the scent of so much spilled blood, human and Breed.

  He watched, and he waited.

  The Rogues would fight one another to the death, like the base animals they were. Only one of them would prove the strongest in the end.

  And that was the one Lex needed.

  * * *

  After a whole day of waiting for nightfall, now he had another two hours to kill before he could catch his ride back to Boston.

  Nikolai seriously considered skipping the airport rendezvous and heading out on foot instead, but even with his Breed stamina and hyperspeed, he would hardly clear the state of Vermont before sunrise drove him into hiding again. And frankly, the idea of bunking down in some low-country barn with a bunch of agitated livestock didn’t exactly have him dying to strap on a pair of Nikes and hit the open road.

  So, he would wait.

  Damn it.

  He and patience had never been the closest of friends. He’d been just about batshit with boredom by the time the sun had finally set and he was able to get out of the mausoleum shelter.

  He supposed it was that same boredom that led him into the humid tenderloin of Montreal, where he hoped to find something diverting to do while he cooled his heels. He didn’t much care how he used the time, but he’d deliberately sought out the one area of the city where the odds of finding a reason to burn off steam with his knuckles or his weapons were better than good.

  In this particular block of rat-infested alleys and low-rent slums, his immediate choices were limited to crack-heads, traffickers—be they dealers in narcotics or skin—and vacant-eyed streetwalkers of both genders. More than one idiot eyeballed him as he strode the block in no particular direction. Someone was even stupid enough to flash the business end of a blade at him as he passed, but Niko just paused and gave the toothless scumbag a dimpled, fang-tipped grin of invitation and the threat was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  Although he wasn’t opposed to confrontation in any form, fighting humans was a bit beneath him. He preferred more of a challenge. What he really itched to find right now was a Rogue. Last summer, Boston had been knee-deep in blood-addicted vampires. The fighting had been hard and heavy—with at least one tragic loss on the Order’s side—but Nikolai and the rest of the warriors had made it their mission to sweep the city clean.

  Other metropolitan areas still lost the occasional civilian to Bloodlust, and Niko would have bet his left nut that Montreal was no different. But aside from the pimps, pushers, and prostitutes, this stretch of brick and asphalt was feeling about as dead as the crypt where he’d been forced to spend the day.

  “Hey, baby.” The female smiled at him from a shadowed doorway as he walked past. “You lookin’ for something specific, or just window-shoppin’?”

  Nikolai grunted, but he paused. “I’m a specific kind of guy.”

  “Well, maybe I got what you need.” She grinned at him and hopped off her perch on the concrete stoop. “Matter of fact, I’m sure I got just exactly what you need, sugar.”

  She wasn’t a beauty, with her brittle, teased-up brassy hair, dull eyes, and sallow skin, but then again Nikolai didn’t expect he was going to be spending much time looking at her face. She smelled clean, if deodorant soap and hairspray could be considered clean-smelling scents. To Niko’s acute senses, the woman reeked of cosmetics and perfumes, with an undercurrent of recent narcotic use that seeped from her pores.

  “Whattaya say?” she asked, sidling up to him now. “You wanna go someplace for a little while? If you got twenty bucks, I’ll give you half an hour.”

  Nikolai stared at the pulse point ticking in the woman’s neck. It had been several days since he’d last fed. And he did have two hours of do-nothing ahead of him…

  “Yeah,” he said, giving her a nod. “Let’s take a walk.”

  She took his hand and led him around the corner of the building and down an empty alley.

  Nikolai didn’t waste any time. As soon as they were secluded from potential onlookers, he took her head in his hands and bared her neck for his bite. Her startled cry was squashed the instant he sank his fangs into her carotid and began to drink.

  The woman’s blood was unremarkable—the usual copper heaviness of human red cells, but laced with a bittersweet tang of the speedball she’d had before stepping out for her night’s work. Nikolai gulped down several mouthfuls, feeling the blood’s energy course through his body in a low vibration. It wasn’t unusual for a Breed male to get aroused by the act of feeding. The response was purely physical, an awakening of cells and muscles.

  That his cock was fully erect now and straining for relief didn’t surprise him at all. It was the fact that his head was swimming with thoughts of a certain raven-haired female—a female he had no intention of seeing ever again—that made Niko rear back in alarm.

  “Mmm, don’t stop,” his human companion moaned, pulling his mouth back to the wound at her neck. She too was feeling the effects of the feeding, enthralled as all humans became when held under the bite of the Breed. “Don’t stop, baby.”

  Nikolai’s vision was swamped with amber fire as he clamped back down on her throat. He knew she wasn’t Renata, but as his hands skimmed up the woman’s bare legs and under the short denim skirt she wore, he pictured himself caressing Renata’s long, beautiful thighs. He imagined it was Renata’s blood that fed him. Renata’s body that responded so eagerly to his touch.

  It was Renata’s fevered gasps that drove him as he ripped at the cheap thong panties with one hand and worked to free himself with the other.

  He needed to be inside her.

  He needed—

  Holy hell.

  A light breeze eddied through the alleyway, carrying with it the stench of vampires gone Rogue. And there was spilled blood too. Human blood. A damned lot of it, mixed with the vile odor of bleeding Rogues.

  Nikolai froze with his hand still on his fly, shocked stupid in one blinding instant.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  What the fuck was going on?

  He yanked the woman’s skirt back down and swept his tongue over her neck wound, sealing up his bite.

  “I said, don’t st—”

  Niko didn’t give her a chance to finish the thought. With a glance of his palm over her brow, he scrubbed her mind of the entire thing. “Get out of here,” he told her.

  He was already jogging up the alley by the time she shook out of her daze and started moving. He followed his nos
e to a dilapidated building not far from where he’d been. The stench emanated from inside, a couple floors off the street.

  Nikolai climbed the lightless stairwell to the second floor. His eyes were practically watering from the overwhelming stink of death that rolled out from under a closed door. His hand on the gun holstered at his hip, Niko approached the place. There was no sound on the other side of the battered, graffiti-tagged door. Only death, human and Breed. Niko turned the loose knob and braced himself for what he would find.

  It had been a massacre.

  An apparent junkie lay in a supine sprawl amid discarded syringes and other trash that littered the blood-soaked floor and a fouled mattress. The body was so ruined it was hardly recognizable as human, let alone a distinguishable gender. The other two bodies were savaged as well, but definitely Breed—without question, both of them Rogues judging by the size and stench of them alone.

  Nikolai could guess what might have happened here: a lethal struggle over prey. This fight was fresh, maybe only minutes old. And the two dead suckheads wouldn’t have been able to shred each other so thoroughly before one or the other went down.

  There had been at least one more Rogue involved in this scuffle.

  If Niko was lucky, the victor might still be in the area, licking his wounds. He hoped so, because he’d love to give the diseased bastard a taste of his 9mm’s custom rounds. Nothing said “Have a nice day” like a Rogue’s corrupted blood system going into allergic meltdown from a dose of poisonous titanium.

  Nikolai went to the boarded-up window and tossed the crudely nailed panels aside. If he was looking for action, he’d just found it in spades. Below, on the street, stood an enormous Rogue. He was bloodied and battered, looking like ten kinds of hell.

  But holy shit…he wasn’t alone.

  Alexei Yakut was with him.

  Incredibly, Lex and the Rogue walked toward a waiting sedan and got in.

  “What the fuck are you up to?” Niko murmured under his breath as the car roared up the street.

  He was about to leap out the open window and follow on foot when a shrill scream sounded behind him. A woman had wandered into the carnage and now gaped at him in terror, an accusing, shaky finger pointed in his direction. She screamed again, loud enough to wake every crackhead and dealer in the neighborhood.

  Nikolai eyed the witness and the bloody evidence of a struggle that looked anything but human.

  “Damn it,” he growled, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Lex’s car disappear around the corner. “It’s all right,” he told the shrieking banshee as he left the window and approached her. “You didn’t see a thing.”

  He wiped her memory and shoved her out of the room. Then he took out a titanium blade and stuck it into the remains of one of the dead Rogues.

  As the body began to sizzle and dissolve, Niko set about cleaning up the rest of the mess that Lex and his unlikely associate had left behind.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  Renata stood at the counter of the lodge’s galley kitchen, a knife gripped loosely in her hand. “What kind of jelly do you want tonight—grape or strawberry?”

  “Grape,” Mira replied. “No, wait—I want strawberry this time.”

  She was perched on the edge of the wood countertop next to Renata, her legs swinging idly. Dressed in a purple T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and scuffed sneakers, Mira might have seemed like any other normal suburban little girl waiting on her dinner. But normal little girls weren’t made to eat the same thing, practically day in and day out. Normal little girls had families to love and care for them. They lived in nice houses on pretty, tree-lined streets, with bright kitchens and stocked pantries and mothers who knew how to cook endless wonderful meals.

  At least, that’s what Renata imagined when she thought of the ideal picture of normal. She didn’t know from any kind of personal experience. As a child of the streets before Yakut found her and brought her to the lodge, Mira didn’t know what normal was either. But it was that wholesome, normal kind of life that Renata wished for the child, as futile a wish as it seemed, standing in Sergei Yakut’s dingy kitchen, next to a beat-up range that probably wouldn’t work even if it did have a gas line running to it.

  Since Renata and Mira were the only ones at the lodge who ate food, Yakut had left it up to Renata to see that she and the child were regularly fed. Renata didn’t particularly care what she had for sustenance—food was food, a necessity of function, nothing more—but she hated not being able to treat Mira to something nice once in a while.

  “Someday you and I are going to go out and have ourselves a real dinner, one with five entirely different courses. Plus dessert,” she added, slathering the strawberry jam over the slice of white bread. “Maybe we’ll have two desserts apiece.”

  Mira smiled under the short black veil that fell to the tip of her little nose. “Do you think they’ll be chocolate desserts?”

  “Definitely chocolate. Here you go,” she said, handing the plate to her. “PB&J, heavy on the J, and no crusts.”

  Renata leaned back against the counter as Mira bit into the sandwich and ate like it was as delicious as any five-course meal she could imagine. “Don’t forget to drink your apple juice.”

  “M-kay.”

  Renata stabbed the plastic straw into the juice box and placed it next to Mira. Then she started putting things away, wiping down the counter. Every muscle tensed when she heard Lex’s voice in the other room.

  He’d been gone since dusk. Renata hadn’t really missed him, but she had wondered what he’d been up to in the time since he’d left. The answer to that question came in the form of a drunken female cackle—several drunken females, by the sound of the laughter and squealing going on in the main area of the lodge.

  Lex often brought human women home to serve as his blood Hosts and general entertainment. Sometimes he’d keep them for days at a time. Occasionally he’d share his spoils with the other guards, all of them using the women however they saw fit before scrubbing their memories and dumping them back into their lives. It sickened Renata to be under the same roof while Lex was in a party mood, but no more than it infuriated her that Mira had to be exposed—even peripherally—to his games as well.

  “What’s going on out there, Rennie?” she asked.

  “Finish your sandwich,” Renata told her when Mira stopped eating to listen to the ruckus in the other room. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  Renata walked out of the galley and down the hallway toward the disruption.

  “Drink up, ladies!” Lex shouted, dropping a box of liquor bottles on the leather sofa.

  He wouldn’t be consuming the alcohol, nor the other party favors he’d procured. A couple of clear, rolled-up plastic bags, each fat with what was likely cocaine, were tossed out onto the table. The sound system came on, a bass beat throbbing behind crude hip-hop lyrics.

  Lex grabbed the curvy brunette with the giddy cackle and brought her under his arm. “I told you we were going to have us some fun tonight! Come here and show me some proper gratitude.”

  He certainly was in a rare, good mood. And no wonder. He’d come back with quite a haul: five young females dressed in tall heels, skimpy tops, and micro-short skirts. At first, Renata guessed them to be prostitutes, but on closer look she decided they were too clean, too fresh under their heavy makeup to be part of the street life. They were probably just naive club girls, unaware that the persuasive, attractive man who picked them up was actually something out of a nightmare.

  “Come in and meet my friends,” Lex told the giggling group of women as he motioned the other Breed males around to view his evening’s catch. There was a moment of palpable apprehension as the four muscle-bound, heavily armed guards leered hungrily at their human appetizers. Lex pushed three of the women toward the eager vampires. “Don’t be shy, ladies. This is a party, after all. Go say hello.”

  Renata noticed he was keeping a tight hold on the two prettiest girls. Typical of
Lex, he had obviously reserved the best for himself. Renata was about to turn around and go back to Mira in the kitchen—to try to ignore the bloody orgy that was about to begin—but before she took two steps away, Sergei Yakut came thundering out of his private quarters.

  “Alexei.” Fury rolled off the elder vampire in waves of heat. He glared at Lex, his eyes flashing amber. “You’ve been gone for hours. Where were you?”

  “I’ve been in the city, Father.” He attempted a magnanimous smile, as if to say his time away from his duties hadn’t been entirely about serving his own selfish needs. “Look what I brought you.”

  Lex pulled one of the females away from the guards and held her out for Yakut’s inspection. Yakut didn’t even spare a glance for the prize Lex offered. He stared only at the two women Lex was keeping for himself.

  The Gen One grunted. “You would scrape shit off your boot heels and tell me it’s gold?”

  “Never,” Lex replied. “Father, I would never so much as consider—”

  “Good. These two will do,” he said, indicating Lex’s females.

  As irate as he had to be, as humiliated as he must have felt by the public jab to his pride, Lex didn’t say a word. He dropped his gaze and waited in silence as Yakut collected his two female companions and strode with them toward his private quarters.

  “I expect not to be disturbed,” Yakut ordered darkly. “Not for any reason.”

  Lex gave a nod of restrained obeisance. “Yes, Father. Of course. Whatever you wish.”

  * * *

  Nikolai heard music and loud voices before he was even five hundred feet out from the lodge. He stole in close, moving through the woods like a ghost, past Lex’s car parked around back, the hood still warm from the drive out of the city.

  Niko wasn’t sure what he was going to find. He wasn’t expecting a damned party, but that’s what seemed to be going on inside the main house. The place was lit up like a Christmas tree, light pouring out of the windows of the great room where someone was apparently entertaining a number of females. Hard-core rap vibrated all the way into the earth beneath Nikolai’s boots as he drew up to the side of the building and peered inside.