Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (237 page)

At the same moment Hunter shot forward, the assassin released his gun and launched himself into the air in a great leap. The pair of Gen Ones collided in a crash of pummeling bone and muscle. As they went down onto the ground, locked in vicious hand-to-hand combat that would not cease until one or the other was killed, the rest of the warriors moved in quickly to mow down the remaining Minions guarding the mine.

The dual battles were furious, bloody, and seemed to take place in a vacuum of time that was both agonizingly slow motion and spinning out at the speed of light.

Kade and the others converged on the mine’s entrance. Blood and bone and bullets sprayed the snow-filled darkness. Minions fell in greater numbers now, their sharp, agonized screams splitting the night as the mine’s alarms continued to blare and howl.

And on the ground nearby, Hunter and the Gen One assassin rolled and twisted in an indiscernible blur of movement, hammering each other with their fists. As Kade took out another Minion near the entrance, he saw the flash of the assassin’s fangs in the darkness as the Gen One opened his maw and brought his bite down hard on Hunter’s shoulder.

Kade had an opening to fire on the bastard, but in the midst of all the chaos around them, it was a miserably thin chance. If he missed, he could put a bullet in Hunter’s head instead.

He blew out a curse and lined up his shot—just as Hunter grabbed the black polymer collar around the assassin’s neck and threw him off. Hunter pounced onto the male’s chest. Silent, merciless, he grabbed the vampire’s huge, hairless head in both hands and cracked it hard onto the snow-packed ground. Kade felt the skull-crushing
thump
reverberate in the ground beneath his boots.

The assassin’s fight slowed then, but Hunter wasn’t finished. Hands moving with grim efficiency and ruthless strength, he hoisted the heavy bulk of the other male and sent the disabled assassin flying. The body crashed into the side of one of the cargo containers, the assassin’s electronic collar shooting off a shower of sparks as it impacted with the corrugated steel.

“Oh, shit!” Kade shouted, having seen firsthand what those collars could do. “UV blast coming—everybody down!”

His command sent Hunter and all the rest of the warriors straight to the deck. No sooner had they hit the ground than there was a sudden, blinding flash of pure white light. The ultraviolet ray shot out from beneath the assassin’s head, cutting a clean line through skin, flesh, tendons, and bone. When it extinguished a moment later, the immense Gen One assassin lay in the melting snow in a broken heap, his hairless,
glyph-covered
head severed cleanly from the rest of him.

Without missing a beat, Hunter drew a pistol from his weapons belt and squeezed off more rounds at the handful of Minions who were staggering around, temporarily
blinded by the explosion of light a second ago. Kade and the rest of the group joined in, and, within moments, nothing stood in their way of the mine’s entrance except a field of fallen bodies.

Tegan kicked in the steel door and led the push inside the building. The front room was vacant, except for more Minion carnage and a couple of security cameras. At the back of the space was another door, this one steel, as well, but fortified with a heavy latch and turnstile lock, like the door of a bank vault.

“Brock,” Tegan said. “Give it a bump of that C-4.”

Brock moved forward and swung the black ammunitions satchel off his back. He took out one of the pale cakes of explosive material and cut off a small piece. When he’d pressed it into place on the steel door and set the charges, everyone drew back outside and covered their heads as he hit the detonator and blew the door.

“We’re in,” he said, as the rolling smoke and dust started to clear.

They hauled open the blasted interior door and crept into the corridor on the other side. Bunk rooms lined one side of the passageway, presumably for the Minion guards who manned the place. Farther down was a storage room, a modest kitchen, and farther still, a communications room that looked recently vacated of personnel.

The warriors continued their search, past a spartan quarters that was nothing more than a prisonlike room with no light or bunk for sleeping, just a blanket folded neatly on the floor. On a small stool in the corner sat an open box of rounds and a sheath for a large blade.

Hunter looked inside the room with a dispassionate eye. “The assassin slept here.”

The cold cell was in stark contrast to the plush living
quarters the group encountered a few yards down the corridor. Through the partially open door, Kade glimpsed a lot of dark, polished wood and luxurious furnishings. Behind a gleaming cherry desk a leather wing chair was still spinning, in motion from its recent occupant’s apparently hasty departure.

No doubt, this fancy suite belonged to Dragos’s lieutenant.

Kade gestured down the passageway, toward the last remaining room before the corridor opened into the mine shaft itself. “Only one way he could have run.”

“Yeah.” Tegan’s green gaze slid to him in agreement. “Right into a trap.”

He motioned for the others to fall in behind him, then led the way into the shadowy maw of the corridor.

CHAPTER
Twenty-four

T
he snowstorm that had started as a teasing flurry was worsening into heavy, persistent flakes as Alex and Luna were riding back from making the delivery out to the bush. Alex was glad to have been able to help the young mother who’d been counting on her today, but she fretted that she hadn’t yet been able to touch base with Jenna. She took out her cell phone and tried calling Jenna’s cabin once again.

No answer.

The niggle of worry she’d been carrying for her friend had only increased in the time Alex had been out, turning into a full-fledged jab of concern. What if Jenna was taking things harder this year than before? Alex knew that she
struggled, that she despaired still, over the loss of her husband and child. What if that despair had deepened to something worse this time?

What if it had become something dangerous and she’d harmed herself?

“Oh, God … Jenna. Please let me be wrong.”

With Luna running alongside her, Alex gave the sled more speed as she diverted from the game trail that would eventually lead into Harmony. She headed away from town instead, toward Jenna’s cabin a mile outside.

She was still an easy fifteen minutes away when she saw something moving in the trees up ahead of her. She couldn’t quite make out the shape in the dark, but it looked to be … a person?

Yes, it was. Someone crashing through the snow-laden underbrush of the forest. Incredibly, in spite of the bitter cold, he was utterly naked.

And he wasn’t alone.

Several other shapes materialized from the shadows to run alongside him, four-legged, dark forms … a pack of half a dozen wolves. The sight of the man and wild animals together didn’t so much shock her as it confused her.

Kade?

Alex cut the gas and slowed her sled to a crawl, Luna drawing to a pause at her side.

“Kade,” she called, his name rushing out of her mouth on a breath of pure instinct. She felt a brief moment of elation to see him, but then logic crashed down on her like a cold hammer. Kade had left hours ago to meet the other warriors from Boston. What would he be doing out here, like this?

Something about him didn’t seem quite right …

It couldn’t be Kade.

But …
it was
.

The headlight of her snowmachine pinned him in its beam. The wolves scattered into the forest, but he stood there now, alone, one arm raised to shield his brightly glowing amber eyes from the glare. His
dermaglyphs
were so dark they seemed black against his skin, and something almost as dark—something her mind refused to acknowledge at first—slickened his naked body from head to toe.

Blood
.

Oh, Jesus.

He was injured … badly injured, by the horrific look of him.

Alex’s heart gave a sick lurch in her chest. He was wounded. His mission with the Order must have gone terribly wrong.

“Kade!” she cried, and leapt off her sled to run toward him. Luna circled in front of her, blocking her way as she barked in a high-pitched whine, a warning to her, or maybe even the dog could see that something was very wrong with him.

“Kade, what happened to you?”

He cocked his head at her and stared as though transfixed, his black hair wild about his head and slick with wetness. Even from the hundred feet that separated them, Alex could see that blood splattered his face, streaked off his chin in gory lines.

Why wouldn’t he answer her?

What the hell was wrong with him?

Alex paused, her feet suddenly refusing to move. “Kade? Oh, my God … please, talk to me. You’re hurt. Tell me what happened.”

But he didn’t utter a single word.

Like a creature of the forest himself, he bolted away from her, vanishing into the dark woods.

Alex called after him, but he was nowhere to be seen now. Her sled’s headlight cut deep into the trees where Kade and the wolves had been. She took a couple of hesitant steps forward, trying to ignore the knot of dread in her gut and the low, tentative warning of Luna’s growl beside her.

She had to find Kade.

She had to know what had happened.

Alex’s uncertain steps became a jog, her boots dragging in the snow. Her heartbeat was racing, lungs squeezing for each breath as she ran through the frigid darkness, following the piercing beam of her snowmachine’s headlight.

She sucked in a gasp when she saw the bloodstains in the snow. So much blood. Kade’s footprints tracked it everywhere. So had the pack’s many paws.

“Oh, God,” Alex whispered, feeling sick, about to retch, as she ventured deeper into the forest, following the trail of gore.

The snow was stained almost black the farther she went. Blood as she’d never seen. Far too much for Kade to have lost and still be able to stand upright, let alone run off as he had when he’d realized she was there.

Alex walked numbly, all of her instincts clamoring for her to turn around before she saw something she would never be able to purge from her mind.

But she couldn’t turn away.

She couldn’t run.

She had to know what Kade had been doing.

Alex’s feet slowed as she reached the place where the
carnage had begun. Her vision swam as she stared down at the bloodied aftermath of a vicious attack. A vampire attack—worse than any savagery she’d witnessed before. Another human being, another innocent person, brutalized by the monstrous killers of her nightmares.

By Kade, though she never would have believed it had she not seen him with her own eyes.

Alex couldn’t move. God, she could barely feel a thing as she stood there, numb with shock and a horror so profound she couldn’t even summon the breath to scream.

Kade felt the oddest sensation in his chest as he and the other warriors pushed farther into the corridor of the mine’s shaft. He crept forward in the dark, weapon held at the ready, trying to dismiss the chill feeling that was knotting up tight behind his sternum.

Jesus, had he taken a chest hit in the earlier fracas?

Surreptitiously, he felt around for a wound or the stickiness of spilling blood but found nothing. Nothing but the phantom ache that seemed to want to suck a lot of the air out of his lungs. He shook it off, struggling to keep his attention on the pitch-black cavern that stretched out ahead of him and the other warriors.

The alarm sirens continued to wail from behind them; nothing but quiet awaited in the depths of the mine shaft. Then—the most minute scuff of a footstep came from somewhere deep within the shadows. Kade heard it, and he was certain all the rest of the warriors had, too.

Tegan held up his hand to halt their progress in the passageway. “Looks like the damn place is empty,” he said, fishing for Dragos’s lieutenant as he cast the line into the
murky abyss ahead. “Hand me some of that C-4. Let’s blow this mother—”

“Wait.” The detached voice was begrudging and arrogant, an airless grunt of sound in the dark. “Just … wait, please.”

“Show yourself,” Tegan ordered. “Walk out nice and slow, asshole. If you’re armed, you’ll be eating lead before you take the first step.”

“I do not have a weapon,” the voice growled back in reply. “I am a civilian.”

Tegan scoffed. “Not today. Show yourself.”

Dragos’s associate came out of the darkness as instructed, but only barely. Dressed in tailored gray pants and a black cashmere sweater, he looked to be more of a boardroom strategist than a military tactician. Then again, from what the Order had seen in the past of Dragos’s handpicked associates, he seemed to recruit his lieutenants based on pedigree and aptitude for corruption more than anything else.

Hands held up in surrender, Dragos’s man hung back near the shadows of the mine shaft. He moved with slow deliberation, his carefully cultured expression not quite able to mask his fear as his eyes took stock of the five Breed warriors holding him in their killing sights.

“Who are you?” Tegan demanded. “What’s your name?”