Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (142 page)

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 men 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 nose 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

R
enata 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.