by Lara Adrian
Detective Avery braced his fists on his hips and exhaled a heavy sigh. “There’s no easy way to say it, I’m afraid. Someone broke into his house overnight and … attacked him. He was killed, Tavia. He and a couple of his security guards as well.”
“What?” She struggled to process the news, even though her instincts had already been warning her that something terrible had occurred. Shock crept over her—shock and disbelief. “This can’t be happening. Senator Clarence can’t be dead. He was supposed to give a speech today at a hospital charity breakfast …”
Avery laid his hand consolingly on her shoulder. “We’re gonna catch this guy. Don’t you worry about that, all right?”
She mutely shook her head, trying to make some sense out of the awful news. Looking for explanations, answers. “The man last night at the station—he warned that the senator was in danger. You heard what he said, didn’t you? He said someone wanted to kill Senator Clarence. Someone called Dragos.”
A harsh scoff sounded from beside her. Tavia looked over and met the hard gaze of a uniformed policeman who had drifted over while she and Detective Avery were talking. A scar split the dark slash of his left eyebrow, making his scowl look even more severe. “Nothing but bullshit out of that bastard. Shoulda pumped his skull full of bullets. Maybe that woulda kept him down.”
At Tavia’s confused look, Avery said, “The man we had in custody … he escaped last night from the infirmary.”
“Escaped,” she murmured. “I don’t understand. How is that possible?”
“We’re trying to figure that out ourselves. I saw the guy when he was brought out of the lineup room. He was in bad shape. Somehow he managed to overcome a two-hundred-pound male nurse, knocking him unconscious before slipping out of the building unnoticed. I mean, the guy shouldn’t have been able to walk out of there on his own motor, let alone find his way to Marblehead to go after the senator like he did. I’ve never seen anything so brutal. So goddamn bloody.”
Tavia swallowed past the lump of sadness and horror that had lodged in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Avery said, looking at her in concern. “I realize you probably don’t need to hear the ugly details. You’ve been through quite a bit yourself lately.”
“It’s all right.” She drew in a quick breath, regaining her composure. “I’ll be fine.”
“We’d like you to come into the station, if you feel up to it. We have some more questions for you, and the feds will want to talk to you as well—”
“Of course.”
He gestured toward the door of the building, to where the reporters had seemed to multiply in the time since she’d been inside. “We can go now, before this place really turns into a zoo.”
Tavia nodded, falling in behind him as he and a small group of uniformed officers escorted her out to a waiting police sedan.
For a moment, as she stepped outside into the cold morning, she felt as though she were walking through a different world, one that didn’t belong to her. There was an unreal quality to everything, as though she were peering through the gauze of a veil, unable to see anything clearly.
Or maybe it was simply that she didn’t want to see.
She was unable to imagine the kind of man—the kind of inhuman lethality—it would take to do to Senator Clarence what Detective Avery had implied. She didn’t want to think about the senator’s final moments. She’d worked for him for years, knew he was a good man who believed he could make a difference. Sure, he’d seemed to be acting a bit odd lately. Detached somehow. Distracted. Who wouldn’t be, after the shooting at his house just a few nights ago? A bullet that could have easily struck him but had instead hit one of his VIP guests.
Drake Masters.
The name played through her head, and she returned again to what the man in the jailhouse lineup had said—that at the party he’d shot the person he knew as Dragos. The person he seemed convinced meant to harm or kill Senator Clarence. Someone who probably didn’t exist except in his imagination.
It sounded crazy to her now, even in her thoughts.
All the more so when she considered how violently that same man in police custody had leapt at Senator Clarence the moment he saw him in the viewing room.
And today Bobby Clarence was dead.
A confessed killer, clearly deranged, was on the loose.
Suddenly the troubling dream that had woken her last night felt even more disturbing in the chilling light of day.
As the police sedan rolled away from the curb, Tavia could only hope that the scorching blue eyes and merciless face that she could still see so vividly in her mind stayed relegated to her nightmares.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUCAN’S SHITTY NIGHT was turning into an even shittier morning.
It had started with the phone call from Mathias Rowan a few hours ago, around daybreak, reporting the mass slaughter of nearly a dozen humans in an Agency-run nightclub. Fortunately, Rowan had the situation cleaned up before the slayings could draw the attention of the public, but that was little comfort amid the hell storm of bad news and trouble the Order was facing.
And Lucan was sure things would only get worse before they got better.
Fuck, if they got better.
Now, while mankind was heading into their A.M. rush hour commutes elsewhere—the same hour that most of the night-dwelling Breed would be hunkered down in their Darkhavens to sleep and wait out the day—Lucan and the rest of the former Boston compound’s residents were still settling into their new surroundings.
Lucan hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, not that any of the other warriors had either. Gathered in the makeshift war room of the sprawling Darkhaven retreat in the woods of northern Maine, which was now their base of operations, Lucan and Gideon had been going over facility inventories and systems status checks for the past several hours. They’d since been joined by some of the others, and the talk around the large hand-hewn timber table of the former dining room had turned toward mission strategies and the need to retaliate against Dragos for his continued—and escalating—offenses.
“You know,” Dante said, “there is a bright side in all of this.” He sat on the edge of the big table, dark brows quirking over whiskey-colored eyes. “If we’ve ever needed a license to kick some Enforcement Agency ass, we’ve sure as hell got it now.”
“Damn right.” Standing nearby, Rio gave a tilt of his scarred face and lifted his fist to knock knuckles with Dante. “Tonight we’ll hit every sip-and-strip in the city with some heavy-duty payback,” he added, his Spanish accent rolling with his anger. “Nothing sweeter than a chance to bring down Dragos and the Agency together.”
Dante grinned. “Icing, meet cake.”
“How many of these private clubs does the Enforcement Agency have?” This time it was Lazaro Archer who spoke. The Breed elder was the lone civilian in the room and, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t have been permitted to sit in on Order business. But he was also the owner of the northern Maine property the warriors had commandeered as their temporary headquarters, and these were far from normal circumstances.
“According to Mathias Rowan,” Gideon replied, “there are five known clubs around Boston, the one in Chinatown being the primary location.”
“So, what are the odds Dragos will make another appearance at one of these places?” Archer asked.
Lucan grunted. “Slim to none.”
At the opposite end of the table from him, Tegan, leaning back in his chair and contemplative for most of the impromptu meeting, nodded in agreement. “He had a point to make last night and he made it in about as public a way as he could. We won’t find Dragos shooting the shit and slumming it with the Agency rank-and-file again anytime soon. Don’t think he’s gonna make it that easy for us.”
Dante frowned, considering. “I still say it can’t hurt to rustle the bushes with the Agency and see what we turn up. We might not flush out Dragos, but netting a few dirty Agents would be worth the effort. Espec
ially if we can get one of them to talk.” His thumb flicked idly at the leather blade sheath belted around his hips. A fraction of a second later, one of his twin curved blades was in his hand, titanium glinting as he made the weapon dance through his fingers. “If Harvard were here right now, I know he’d say the same thing.”
Lucan couldn’t disagree that Dante had a point. As for Sterling Chase—Harvard, as he’d been wryly christened by Dante from just about the moment the former Enforcement Agent had first set foot in the Order’s compound a year and a half ago—he’d spent decades in the Breed’s law enforcement organization. Long enough to have seen some of its ineffectiveness and corruption. It was because of him that the Order had found an ally in Mathias Rowan a few months ago. Rowan was one of Chase’s trusted colleagues during his time in the Agency and was proving to be a valuable asset as well as a friend to Lucan and the rest of the warriors.
There was a time Lucan would have said that about Chase too. Hell, he still felt that way, in spite of Harvard’s faults and failures of late. Lucan hated that he’d been forced to draw a hard line in the sand with him. He understood all too well the beast Chase was fighting. He’d walked that same path, had seen it take down his family and long-ago friends, and, very nearly, himself.
Because he’d tasted the destructive power of Bloodlust and had seen what it could do to even the strongest of his kind, Lucan was all the less forgiving when it came to protecting his kith and kin from its harm. Chase’s inability—or unwillingness—to right himself from his downward spiral had put everyone in the compound at risk.
Yet Lucan wouldn’t hesitate to admit that the Order was a lot better for having had Chase in its fold. And working without him now—especially after what he’d done to buy them the much-needed opportunity to vacate the Boston compound—felt as though the Order had lost a limb.
For what hadn’t been the first time, Lucan considered the viability of heading back into the city to retrieve Chase from police custody. It went against the grain to leave a comrade alone and exposed in the field. The Order had always taken great care with its fallen, and even though Chase was still alive—for all they knew, that is—it had been one of the damned hardest decisions Lucan had ever made to depart Boston with the rest of the compound and leave Chase behind.
It didn’t help that there had been no word on him since he’d been hauled into custody yesterday morning. Gideon was keeping an ear to the ground, monitoring news stations and cable sources for any updates, but there’d been nothing to report.
The radio silence was the thing that bugged Lucan the most. He didn’t expect for a minute that Chase would stay put inside a human lockdown for any longer than he wanted. And it wouldn’t have taken much time before his blood thirst drove him to feed. God forbid he lost his shit and attacked anyone inside the station.
Just thinking of it made Lucan blow out a low curse.
“All we’d need is one pair of loose lips,” Rio was saying now, drawing him back to the topic at hand. “One Agent to tell us something we don’t know about Dragos and we’ll be that much closer to killing the bastard at last.”
“I won’t argue any of that,” Lucan said. “The Order—hell, all of the Breed nation—would be better off if the Agency underwent some serious housecleaning. But we can’t take our sights off Dragos as our primary target. As much as I’d like to storm down those hallowed Agency halls and start making heads roll, we’ve got our hands full enough without declaring all-out war on the Enforcement Agency as a whole.”
Tegan met his gaze with a thoughtful narrowing of his green eyes. “That might be exactly what Dragos was hoping we’d do. Toss a little distraction our way while he’s busy making other plans.”
Gideon grunted. “Divide and conquer. He’d hardly be the first megalomaniac to draw that weapon.”
And in another place, another time, Lucan might have been arrogant enough to fall into such a tactical trap, believing himself above failure. He’d been infallible once, for a long time undefeatable.
The Order had been founded on the edge of his sword and the mettle of his convictions. Back then he’d feared nothing, bowed to no one. He’d ridden into every battle alongside his fellow warriors, determined to defy death yet willing to accept it, should that moment come.
Nearly seven hundred years had passed since that time. But it was only recently—a matter of months, a blink of time compared to the centuries he’d been living—that he’d begun to make decisions not based solely on his confidence as a leader and the battle prowess of his men.
He’d never concerned himself with the well-being of anyone but himself. There’d been no need. But now?
Hell …
Now he felt the responsibility for the lives of everyone under his roof, and it was a weight that had gotten even heavier since the abrupt evacuation from Boston.
He heard the source of some of his angst—the bright laughter and delighted squeal of a little girl—drifting in from another room. “Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh, Rennie! He said he would do it and he really did!”
At Lucan’s confused scowl, Gideon explained. “Apparently Mira’s just discovered the Christmas tree Niko brought in for her from the woods before daybreak this morning.”
“Christmas tree,” Lucan echoed with mild annoyance. He vaguely recalled Nikolai saying something about the eight-year-old girl’s want of holiday decorations at the new headquarters, but there had been no mention of bringing in a damn tree.
Lucan got up and stalked out of the meeting room to confront the foolery going on in the vaulted great room at the center of the large stone-and-timber house. By the time he got there, half the compound was already gathered to admire the seven-foot pine. Nikolai and his mate, Renata, stood with Rio’s mate, Dylan, helping to position the tree while warriors Kade and Brock looked on with their respective mates, Alexandra and Jenna, both recent arrivals from Alaska.
Lazaro Archer’s teenage grandson, Kellan, brooded on the periphery. At just fourteen, the lanky kid had already been through hell and back, thanks to Dragos. His only remaining kin was his grandfather, and even though the youth tried to insist he was all right about everything that had happened, Lucan guessed it was only going to be a matter of time before Kellan Archer either detonated like an atom bomb or imploded into himself.
The Breed youth stood at the back of the room like a bored spectator, his arms crossed over his chest, a hank of overlong ginger bangs drooping over his brow as he tried not to look too impressed with the whole production going on in front of him now. Lucan could relate.
Mira had no such restraint. She bounced in her purple pajamas and fleece-trimmed suede slippers, ebullient in her joy. “Rennie, isn’t it the most wonderful tree you’ve ever seen?”
“It’s pretty awesome, Mouse.” Niko and Renata had for all intents and purposes adopted Mira as their own after the warrior had brought them both home to Boston with him from a mission in Montreal last summer. Dark-haired Renata was as lethal as any one of the Order’s warriors, but her cool jade eyes softened as they lit on Nikolai’s crooked smile on the other side of the tree as they tried to balance it on its stand. “It’s perfect, babe.”
“Wait—not there,” Mira abruptly directed. “You’re gonna put it too close to the fireplace, you guys!”
Niko shot the girl a wry look over his shoulder. “Of course. We don’t want to block Santa from coming down the chimney with all your presents.”
Kellan Archer scoffed from his post near the back of the room. “Santa Claus is a myth. Only babies believe in him.”
“Kellan!” Renata gasped.
“It’s okay, Rennie.” Wispy blond hair swinging, Mira turned toward the boy, looking greatly offended. “I haven’t believed in Santa since I was five years old. I just didn’t want the tree to catch on fire if it was too close to the hearth.” She rolled her eyes. “Kellan thinks I’m a baby.”
“How should we decorate the tree, Mira?” This time it was Alex, Kade’s Breedmate, who spok
e. “Did you bring the ornaments you made?”
Mira’s mouth pressed into a sullen line. “I only had time to pack up a few. I had to leave the rest back in Boston at the compound.”
Ah, Christ. Lucan groaned inwardly. So much for clamping down on the merriment out here. He’d done that even before he entered the room.
Feeling awkward and out of place, he was about to turn around and leave the room when Niko threw him under the bus. “Hey, Mira, make sure you thank Lucan too. Bringing this tree in from the forest was all his idea.”
“No,” Lucan denied sharply. “I had nothing to do with—”
But the little girl had already launched herself in his direction. She caught him in a tight hug around the waist, her sweetly innocent face turned up to meet his glower. “Thanks, Lucan. This is gonna be the best Christmas ever.”
For fuck’s sake.
He stood there unmoving, helpless in the child’s embrace.
“Maybe we can make popcorn garlands?” Mira wondered aloud, releasing him in that next instant to skip back over to continue her supervision of the tree setup. “Do you think so, Rennie?”
“Sure,” Renata answered.
Brock’s mate, Jenna, strode over to ruffle Mira’s bed-head hair. “We could gather some pinecones from the woods today. They’d make pretty ornaments, don’t you think?”
The girl nodded enthusiastically. “It’s gonna be great!”
“What do you think?” Lucan asked the sulking Breed youth as he drew up next to him.
Kellan shrugged. “The tree looks kinda short and scraggly to me.”
“Short and scraggly?” Niko replied. “The hell you say.”
With the tree in place to Mira’s satisfaction now, the Breed warrior put his hands into the brushy boughs and held them there. He was quiet for a long moment, and Lucan knew the Russian-born vampire was summoning the extrasensory ability that was unique to him. Every Breed male inherited some type of power from his Breedmate mother, be it a blessing or a curse. In Lucan’s case, through hypnotic suggestion he could manipulate a human mind into seeing and believing whatever he willed.
