Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (5 page)

With the report clutched in his hand, the clerk shuffled down the hallway in search of privacy. The break room, which was never empty no matter the time of day, was currently occupied by a couple of secretaries and Carrigan, a fat, loud-mouthed cop who was retiring at the end of the week. He was bragging about the primo deal he had gotten on some backwater Florida condo while the women basically ignored him, the two females lunching on day-old, frosted yellow party cake and washing it all down with Diet Coke chasers.

The clerk ran his fingers through his pale brown hair and walked past the open doorway, toward the restrooms at the end of the corridor. He paused outside the men’s room, his hand on the battered metal handle, as he casually glanced behind him. With no one there to see him, he moved to the next door down, the station’s janitorial supply closet. It was supposed to be kept locked, but seldom was. Nothing much worth stealing in there anyway, unless you had a thing for industrial-grade toilet paper, ammonia cleanser, and brown paper towels.

He twisted the knob and pushed the old steel panel inward. Once inside the dark closet, he clicked the pushbutton lock from within and retrieved his cell phone from the front pocket of his khakis. He pressed speed dial, calling the sole number that was stored in the untraceable, disposable device. The call rang twice, then fell into an ominous silence as his Master’s unmistakable presence loomed on the other end of the line.

“Sire,” the clerk breathed, his voice a reverent whisper. “I have information for you.”

He spoke quickly and quietly, divulging all of the details of the Maxwell woman’s visit to the station, including the specifics of her statement about a gang killing downtown. The clerk heard a growl and the soft hiss of breath skating across the cell phone’s receiver as his Master absorbed the news in silence. He sensed fury in that slow, wordless exhalation, and it chilled him.

“I ran her personal data for you, Sire—all of it,” he offered; then using the dim glow of the cell’s display, he recited Gabrielle’s address, unlisted phone number, and more, the servile Minion so very eager to please his dreaded and powerful Master.

CHAPTER
Three

T
wo full days passed.

Gabrielle tried to put the horror of what she had witnessed in La Notte’s alleyway out of her mind. What did it matter, anyway? No one had believed her. Not the police, who had yet to send anyone to see her as they had promised, and not even her friends.

Jamie and Megan, who had seen the thugs in leather harassing the punker inside the club, said the group left without incident sometime during the course of the night. Kendra had been too involved with Brent—the guy she picked up on the dance floor—to notice any trouble elsewhere in the club. According to the cops at the station Saturday night, the story had been the same from everyone their dispatched patrol had questioned at La Notte. A brief scuffle at the bar, but no reports of violence in or outside of the club.

No one had seen the attack she reported. There had been no hospital or morgue admissions. Not even a damage report filed by the cabbie at the curb.

Nothing.

How could that be? Was she seriously delusional?

It was as if Gabrielle’s eyes were the only ones truly open that night. Either she alone had witnessed something unexplainable, or she was losing her mind.

Maybe some of both.

She couldn’t deal with all the implications in that idea, so she sought solace in the one thing that gave her any joy. Behind the sealed door of her custom-built darkroom in the basement of the townhouse, Gabrielle submerged a sheet of photo paper in the tray of developing solution. From pale nothingness, the image began to take shape beneath the surface of the liquid. She watched it come to life—the ironic beauty of strong ivy tentacles spreading over the decayed brick and mortar of an old Gothic-style asylum she had recently discovered outside the city. It came out better than she had hoped, teasing her artist’s fancy with the potential of an entire series centered on the haunting, desolate place. She set it aside and developed another photo, this one a closeup of a pine sapling sprouting from between a crack in the crumpled pavement of a long-abandoned lumberyard.

The images made her smile as she lifted them out of the solution and clipped them to the drying line. She had nearly a dozen more like these upstairs on her worktable, wry testaments to the stubbornness of nature and the foolishness of man’s greed and arrogance.

Gabrielle had always felt something of an outsider, a silent observer, from the time she was a kid. She chalked it up to the fact that she had no parents—no family at all, except the couple who had adopted her when she was a troubled twelve-year-old, bounced from one foster home to another. The Maxwells, an upper-middle-class couple with no children of their own, had kindly taken pity on her, but even their acceptance had been at arm’s length. Gabrielle was promptly sent to boarding schools, summer camps, and, finally, an out-of-state university. Her parents, such as they were, had died together in a car accident while she was away at college.

Gabrielle didn’t attend the funeral, but the first serious photograph she took was of two maple-shaded gravestones in the city’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. She’d been taking pictures ever since.

Never one to mourn the past, Gabrielle turned off the darkroom light and headed back upstairs to think about supper. She wasn’t in the kitchen two minutes before her doorbell rang.

Jamie had generously stayed over the past two nights, just to make sure Gabrielle was all right. He was worried about her, as protective as a big brother she never had. When he left that morning, he had offered to come by again, but Gabrielle had insisted she would be fine by herself. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoyance that she might not have any alone time tonight, either.

“Be right there,” she called from inside the apartment’s foyer.

Habit made her check the peephole, but instead of seeing Jamie’s blond sweep of hair, Gabrielle found the dark head and striking features of an unfamiliar man waiting on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the sidewalk just off her front steps. The soft yellow glow wrapped itself around the man like a golden cloak draped over night itself. There was something ominous, yet compelling, about his pale gray eyes, which were staring straight into the narrow cylinder of glass as if he could see her on the other side, too.

She opened the door, but thought it best not to remove the chain lock. The man stepped in front of the wedge of open space and glanced at the tight chain length that stretched taut between them. When his eyes met Gabrielle’s again, he gave her a vague smile, as if he thought it amusing she would expect to bar him so easily if he truly wanted in.

“Miss Maxwell?” His voice stroked her senses like rich, dark velvet.

“Yes?”

“My name is Lucan Thorne.” The words rolled past his lips in a smooth, measured timbre that eased some of her anxiety at once. When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “I understand you had some difficulty a couple of nights ago at the police station. I wanted to come by and make sure you were all right.”

She nodded.

Evidently the police hadn’t completely blown her off after all. Since it had been a couple of days with no word from them, Gabrielle had not expected to see anyone from the department, despite the promise to send a patrol out to look in on her. Not that she could be certain this guy, with his sleekly styled black hair and chiseled features, was a cop.

He looked grim enough, she supposed, and apart from his dark, dangerous good looks, he didn’t seem intent on causing her any harm. Still, after what she’d been through, Gabrielle thought it wise to err on the side of caution.

“Have you got ID?”

“Of course.”

With deliberate, almost sensual movements, he opened a thin leather billfold and held it up to the crack of space at the door. It was nearly dark outside, which was likely why it took a second for Gabrielle’s eyes to focus on the shiny policeman’s badge and the picture identification card next to it, bearing his name.

“Okay. Come in, Detective.”

She freed the chain lock, then opened the door and let him enter, watching as his broad shoulders filled the doorway. His presence seemed to fill the entire foyer, in fact. He was a large man, tall and thickly hewn beneath the drape of his black overcoat, his dark clothes and silky jet hair absorbed the soft light of the pendant lamp overhead. He had a confident, almost regal bearing about him, his expression gravely serious, as if he would be better suited to commanding a legion of armored knights than schlepping out to Beacon Hill to handhold a hallucinatory female.

“I didn’t think anyone was going to come. After the reception I got down at the station this weekend, I figured Boston’s finest had written me off as a nutcase.”

He didn’t acknowledge or deny it, merely strode into her living room in silence and let his gaze roam freely over the place. He paused at her worktable, where the roughs of some of her latest images had been arranged. Gabrielle trailed after him across the room, casually watching for his reaction to her work. One dark brow quirked as he perused the photographs.

“Yours?” he asked, turning his pale, piercing eyes on her.

“Yes,” Gabrielle replied. “They’re part of a collection I’m calling
Urban Renewal
.”

“Interesting.”

He looked back to the array of images and Gabrielle felt herself frown slightly at his careful, yet indifferent response. “They’re just something I’m playing around with right now—nothing I’m ready to exhibit yet.”

He grunted, still considering the photographs in silence.

Gabrielle moved closer, trying to get a better handle on his reaction, or lack thereof. “I do a lot of commissioned work around the city. In fact, I’ll probably be taking some pictures of the governor’s place on the Vineyard later this month.”

Shut up
, she admonished herself.
Why was she trying to impress this guy?

Detective Thorne didn’t seem overly impressed. Saying nothing, he reached out, and with fingers entirely too elegant for his profession, gently rearranged two of the images on the table. Inexplicably, Gabrielle found herself imagining those long, deft fingers touching her bare skin, splaying into her hair, cupping the back of her skull…guiding her head back until it rested on his strong arm and his cool gray eyes drank her in.

“So,” she said, snapping herself back to reality. “I’ll bet you’d rather have a look at the pictures I took outside the club Saturday night.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she walked to the kitchen and grabbed her cell phone off the counter. She flipped it open, brought up an image, and held the device out to Detective Thorne.

“That’s the first shot I took. My hands were shaking, so it’s a little blurry. And the light from the flash washed out a lot of the detail. But if you look closely, you’ll see six dark shapes huddled low to the ground. That’s them—the killers. Their victim is that lump they’re tearing at in front of them. They were…biting him. Like animals.”

Thorne’s eyes held fast to the image; his expression remained grim, unchanging. Gabrielle clicked to the next photograph.

“The flash startled them. I don’t know—I think it might have blinded them or something. When I clicked these next few shots, some of them stopped to look at me. I can’t really make out features, but that’s the face of one of them. Those weird slits of light are the reflection of his eyes.” She shuddered, recalling the yellow glow of vicious, inhuman eyes. “He was looking right at me.”

More silence from the detective. He took the cell phone from Gabrielle’s fingers and clicked through the remaining pictures.

“What do you think?” she asked, hoping for confirmation. “You can see it, too, can’t you?”

“I see…something, yes.”

“Thank God. Your buddies at the precinct tried to make me think I was crazy, or that I was some drugged-out loser who didn’t know what I was talking about. Not even my friends believed me when I told them what I saw that night.”

“Your friends,” he said with careful deliberation. “Do you mean someone other than the man you were with at the station—your lover?”

“My lover?” She laughed at that. “Jamie is not my lover.”

Thorne looked up from the cell phone’s image display to meet her gaze. “He spent the past two nights with you alone, here in this apartment.”

How did he know that?
Gabrielle felt a jolt of outrage at the prospect of being spied on by anyone, including the police, who probably would have done so more out of suspicion than as a means of protecting her. But as she stood beside Detective Lucan Thorne in her living room, some of that anger seeped out of her, replaced by a feeling of calm acceptance. Of subtle, languid cooperation. Strange, she thought, but found herself fairly unfazed by the idea.

“Jamie stayed with me for a couple of nights because he was concerned about me after what happened this weekend. He’s my friend, that’s all.”

Good.

Thorne’s mouth didn’t move, but Gabrielle felt certain she had heard his reply. His unspoken voice, his pleasure at her denial of a lover, seemed to echo from somewhere deep inside of her. Wishful thinking, maybe. It had been a long time since she’d had anything close to a boyfriend, and merely being in the presence of Lucan Thorne was doing strange things to her head. Or rather, her body.

As he stared at her, Gabrielle felt a pleasant knot of warmth begin to pool in her belly. His gaze penetrated like heat itself, physical and intimate. A picture suddenly formed in her mind: she and him, naked and writhing together in the moonlit dark of her bedroom. An instant blast of heat flooded her. She could feel his hard muscles beneath her fingertips, his firm body moving over her…his thick shaft filling her, stretching her, exploding deep within her.

Oh, yes
, she thought, practically squirming where she stood.
Jamie was right. She really had been celibate for too long.

Thorne blinked slowly, his thick black lashes shuttering stormy silver eyes. Like a cool breeze skating over flushed bare skin, Gabrielle felt some of the tightness in her limbs dissipate. Her heart was still pounding; the room still seemed oddly warm.

He turned his head away from her, and her eyes were drawn to the base of his scalp, where his hair met the collar of his tailored shirt. He had a tattoo on his neck—at least, she thought it was a tattoo. Intricate swirls and geometric-looking symbols rendered in ink just a few shades darker than his skin came up the back of his neck and around the side, disappearing beneath the thick growth of his dark hair. She wondered what the rest of it looked like, and if there was some special meaning to the beautiful pattern.

She had an almost irrepressible urge to trace the interesting markings with her fingertip. Maybe her tongue.

“Tell me what you told your friends about the attack you witnessed at the club.”

She swallowed on a dry throat, shaking her head to bring herself back to the conversation. “Yes. Right.”

God, what was wrong with her?
Gabrielle dismissed the peculiar race of her pulse and focused on the events of the other night. She recounted the story for the detective, as she had for the other officers, and, later, her friends. She told him every horrific detail, and he listened carefully, letting her relay it all uninterrupted. Under the cool acceptance of his gaze, Gabrielle’s memory of the slaying seemed more precise now, as if the lens of her recollection had been sharpened, the details magnified.