Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (84 page)

He wouldn’t feed from a female.

He hadn’t in all this time…not since Sorcha’s death.

It was his choice, something he’d adopted as self-imposed punishment for failing the innocent girl who had been so wrong in trusting him to keep her safe from his enemies. But somewhere along the way, Tegan’s aversion to drinking from females, let alone binding himself to another Breedmate, had become an act of desperation.

It had become an act of plain survival.

His hungers ran too deep. And he knew from experience how easy it was to lose control. He’d tasted Bloodlust once before, and he could never allow himself to get close to it again.

That he’d been so tempted by Elise tonight had rattled him hard. He’d never wanted to take a female—to his mouth or to his bed—in a long span of time that had somehow become centuries. He’d been alone by his own will, bonded to nothing but his mission to wipe out the Rogues.

But now…?

“Fuck,” he ground out savagely from between clamped teeth and fangs.

Now he was about two seconds away from hauling ass back to the Darkhaven where Elise was probably cowering in terror from what he might have done to her—to them both—if he’d given in to the impulse to drink from her.

Instead, he plowed forward, his sights locking on to a trio of skinheads in black leather and chains. The white laces on their jackboots practically glowed in the scant light shed by the intermittent streetlamps overhead. They hooted at an elderly woman in a headscarf who was coming toward them up the sidewalk. Her dark eyes dropped to avoid facing the threat, and when she started to cross the street to get out of their way, the gang of neo-Nazis loped after her, taunting her with ugly racial slurs. They shoved her into the alcove of a nearby building, and one of them made a grab for her purse. The woman screamed and held on, and suddenly she was being dragged into the adjacent alley where the situation was sure to escalate.

Tegan moved in quickly, feeling battle rage transform him.

The first skinhead didn’t know what hit him until he was thrown several yards into the street. Wisely, he got up, took one look at Tegan, and started running in the opposite direction. His companions took a bit more convincing. While one pulled the old woman farther into the alley by her purse strap, the other one drew a switchblade and made a jab at Tegan.

He missed.

But then it’s damn hard to hit a target that’s standing in front of you one second, then suddenly behind you the next, wrenching your arm out of its socket. The skinhead howled in agony, dropping the blade as he crumbled to his knees on the pavement.

Tegan’s breath rolled out of his mouth in cloudy plumes, and his hands itched to finish the asshole, but the one who really needed killing was the one pounding his fists into a defenseless old woman a few yards away.

“Get the fuck out of my sight,” he snarled down at the whimpering human, peeling his lips back from his fangs to make sure the kid got a good eyeful of the hell he’d be dealing with if he decided to stick around.

“Ah, shit!” the human gasped, reading Tegan loud and clear. He scrambled to his feet and took off running, his dislocated arm dangling uselessly at his side.

Tegan wheeled around and stalked into the alleyway where the last of the skinheads had finally wrestled the purse away from the old lady. He dug through the leather bag, dumping out the scant contents. He tore out the lining and let it fall to the ground.

“Where’s your cash, bitch? You’ve got to be hiding something in here to hold on as tight as you did!”

The woman crawled forward to retrieve a small framed photo from the slushy pavement. “My photograph,” she wailed, her German tinged with an Arabic accent. “It’s all I have left of my husband. You’ve ruined it!”

The skinhead laughed. “Oh, my heart is breaking for you. Nasty foreign scum.”

Tegan came up on the guy like a ghost. He clamped his hand around the back of the skinhead’s neck and steered him away from the woman. In his periphery, he saw her collect her meager belongings and hurry out of the alley.

“Hey,
ubermensch
,” Tegan hissed about an inch away from the human’s ear. “You ever get tired of terrorizing old women? Maybe you wanna hit a hospital next, eh? Bet you could really do some damage on the children’s ward. Or would the cancer wing be more your speed?”

“Fuck you,” the thug seethed back at him in English. “Maybe I show you the morgue, asshole.”

Tegan smiled, flashing his fangs. “Funny. That’s exactly where you’re headed.”

The human hardly had a chance to scream before Tegan tore into his throat and began to feed.

CHAPTER
Nineteen

T
egan managed to avoid her the entire next day. Elise didn’t know where he’d gone the night before, or where he spent the hours before dusk, when the time of their appointment at the Enforcement Agency’s containment facility drew near. He didn’t speak to her—hardly did so much as look at her—the whole forty-five minutes in the car as Reichen’s driver took the three of them south of the city to the location where the Odolf Rogue was housed.

The entrance was gated and manned by an automated security system. There was no sign to indicate what lay on the other side of the tall, solid iron gates, but it was clear from the high-voltage, fortresslike perimeter wall that whatever was held inside was meant to stay there. As the car approached, Elise saw a thin red stream of light sweep through the vehicle from one of the mounted electronic devices that flanked the entrance. A moment later, the wall of iron parted in front of them.

Reichen’s driver eased the car inside, only to pause before another set of tall gates. A quartet of armed Breed guards approached from either side of the vehicle and opened the doors. Elise didn’t miss Tegan’s deep-throated growl as they all climbed out, practically held at gunpoint.

Another Breed male came forward now, having come out of a windowless door built into the interior gate of the complex. He looked serious and distinguished in his dark gray suit and black turtleneck, his reddish brown beard trimmed into a precise goatee.

“Madam Chase,” he said, greeting her with a curt nod. “Welcome. I am Heinrich Kuhn, director of this facility. If you are ready, we will escort you inside now.” He looked to the two males with her, barely affording Tegan a glance. “Your, er…companions may await you here, if you please.”

“Absolutely not.” Tegan’s deep voice, the first he’d spoken since leaving Reichen’s estate, sliced through the air like a sword. Ignoring the sudden clack of shifting metal as the guards raised their weapons on him, he stepped toward Elise, placing himself between the facility head and her in an unmistakably protective stance. “She’s not going in there alone.”

“It will be perfectly safe,” the director said, pointedly addressing Elise rather than Tegan, as if the warrior did not warrant a direct explanation. “The patient will be restrained, of course, and he has also been sedated for his feeding, which should be finished any moment now. There will be no danger from him, I can assure—”

“I don’t care if you have that suckhead bricked up behind ten feet of solid stone,” Tegan snarled, his green eyes flashing. “She doesn’t go inside that Rogue holding tank without me.”

Two of the guards flicked nervous glances at the director, as if they waited for his order to move in yet dreaded the idea of tangling with the Gen One warrior with a widely accepted lethal reputation.

And well they should hesitate. Elise had no doubt that if things escalated here, it was going to take a lot more than a Darkhaven-trained security detail to handle Tegan. Andreas Reichen seemed to understand that too, and the German evidently found the idea mildly amusing, smiling as he stood back and watched the suited civilian squirm.

“Madam, if you please,” said the director in a patently false diplomatic tone. “Facility visitations are rarely granted to anyone due to the stress it tends to cause the residents in treatment. At the pleasure of the Enforcement Agency’s Chief Director, we have made an exception for you with this interview, but I am loath to think what the mere sight of a warrior inside the clinic could do to my patient’s progress. You must be aware that his kind revels in agitating the afflicted among our race. We practice mercy here, not malice.”

Tegan scoffed. “I’m going in with her. It wasn’t a question.”

Even though he kept his narrowed gaze trained on the containment facility director, Elise knew that Tegan had already sized up the four guards and dismissed them as any kind of true threat. Underneath the long coat he wore, the warrior was also armed with a nasty-looking handgun and several deadly blades sheathed across his torso and at his hip. He made no move to reach for any of his weapons, but Elise knew from seeing him in action that it would take less than a second for him to turn the contained stretch of pavement into a blood-soaked graveyard.

“I would like Tegan to accompany me inside,” she said, taking control of the situation. She saw Tegan’s eyes slide her way for an instant, before he turned his icy stare back on the director.

“Madam, I really don’t think—”

“Tegan comes with me.” Elise removed her jacket and draped it over her arm. She smiled politely, but her gaze was as unwavering as her tone. “I’m afraid I must insist, Director Kuhn.”

Elise’s handling of the self-important facility director was impressive. She knew Darkhaven and Enforcement Agency protocol and understood just how far she could bend both. Her station as Quentin Chase’s widow brought her a lot of pull, which she didn’t hesitate to put to use.

The fact that she’d sided with Tegan when she could have just as well left him to fight his way inside to interrogate the Odolf Rogue—and would have been within her rights to do just that, after how things ended between them last night—impressed him even more. Elise was cool under pressure, a consummate lady and a levelheaded tactician.

She was, he had to admit if only to himself, a damn valuable asset.

The fact that he could hardly take his eyes off her in the sexy, all-business navy trousers and crisp white blouse she wore only amplified his appreciation of her. The evidence of that rousing appreciation was a hard, heavy presence behind the zipper of his black fatigues as he left Reichen to wait behind with the driver and followed the graceful sway of Elise’s hips through the second set of gates, toward the containment facility ahead.

Tegan ignored the gaping of the clinic employees he passed. He vaguely registered the hasty scrambling of civilian feet all around him—both the ones getting the hell out of his way and those few daring souls who came out from behind their monitoring stations or meeting-room doors to have a look at the dark, dangerous stranger stalking through their midst.

The facility director led Tegan and Elise deeper into the place, through one after another set of secured doors. Finally, they turned down a long concrete hallway and stopped in front of a heavy steel door marked
Treatment Center
. The director punched a code into a wall-mounted keypad, then put his face in front of a scanner and waited as a light took a quick read of his retinas.

“This way,” he said, sniffing almost imperceptibly down the length of his nose as he held the door open for Elise and Tegan to enter yet another hallway.

The space inside was dimly lit and quiet except for intermittent moans and feral-sounding growls not quite masked by the soft classical music piped in through overhead speakers. Closed doors lined either side of the hallway, some with small windows that looked in over the room’s occupant. A few of the rooms were empty, but others held Rogues in various stages of consciousness, all of them strapped into full body restraints. Heavy steel bars equipped with electronic locks held the doors closed, sealing the patients inside their rooms.

Tegan glanced into one of the windows as he passed, taking in the pathetic sight of a drooling, blood-addicted Breed vampire, its limp body stuffed into a soiled white jumpsuit, head shaved bald and still sporting tiny contact pads from a recent bout of electroshock therapy. The Rogue’s fiery amber eyes were at half-mast, rolled back into its skull from whatever sedative it had been given.

“So, this is the Darkhavens’ version of Betty Ford, eh?” Tegan gave a humorless chuckle. “And you people have the balls to say the Order has no mercy.”

Elise shot him a quelling look, but Kuhn ignored the jab completely. He walked them toward the last of the holding cells, pausing to enter an access code. As the admittance light blinked green above the door, the director said, “Since the feeding is still under way, we will have to wait in the observation room until they finish. It should only be another few minutes.”

Tegan followed Elise inside the vestibule, and was there to hold her steady as she physically recoiled the instant she got her first glimpse of the procedure taking place on the other side of the shaded one-way glass.

“Good Lord,” she gasped, one hand coming up to her mouth.

In the adjacent room, the Rogue named Petrov Odolf was strapped down on a custom-rigged examination table like a specimen under a scope. He was naked except for the multiple sets of thick metal clamps that held him at each limb, around the torso and neck, and across the width of his brow. His shaved head was wrapped in a leather-and-wire-mesh mask that held his jaw and massive fangs stationary for the tube that was running fresh blood into his mouth from the Host who had the unpleasant task of feeding him. The Rogue had pissed himself at some point during the procedure, leaving a puddle of urine beneath the table that only added to the degradation of the whole thing.

And then there was the woman.

Tegan exhaled a ripe curse as his gaze followed the blood-filled tube running from the Rogue’s mouth to the inner forearm of a young woman lying on another exam table a few feet away from him. Garbed in a white clinic jumpsuit without sleeves, she lay very still on her back, calmly in fact, but her freckled cheeks were stained with tears.

“You sent a female in there with that beast?”

“She’s his Breedmate,” Kuhn replied. “They’d been together for many years before he succumbed to Bloodlust and turned Rogue. She’s been coming in every week to feed him, and to take her own nourishment from him as well. She must keep her own health and longevity in order to continue to care for him. Truly, he’s lucky to have her devotion. Most of our other patients have no Breedmate to look after them, so they must be fed from human donors.”

Elise inched closer to the glass now, obviously as transfixed by what she was seeing as she was repulsed. “How do you find those other donors, Director Kuhn?”

He shrugged when she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “We never have to look far. University students willing to join medical studies for a little money, prostitutes, the homeless…drug addicts, if we’re desperate.”

“Well, shit,” Tegan drawled, full of sarcasm. “This is a real class operation you got here.”

“No harm done to anyone, generally speaking,” Kuhn said with an annoyed smile. “The procedures are very closely monitored and none of our recruited Hosts maintain a single memory afterward. We simply return them to their lives with a little cash in their pocket that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. A little time spent here is the best thing to happen to some of the unfortunates we collect as donors.”

Tegan was ready to spit a cutting remark at the pompous Darkhaven male, but it had been less than twenty-four hours since he himself had been hunting for blood on Berlin’s darkened streets. He’d killed, even though he could justify it with the knowledge that there was one less human criminal around to violate a defenseless woman. But that didn’t make him a saint by any stretch. At heart, all of the Breed were self-serving, ruthless predators. Some just attempted to hide the fact behind sterile white walls and a fleet of clinical equipment.

“There now,” the facility director announced when a small beep sounded on the console near the viewing window. “The feeding procedure is complete. As soon as the patient is alone and resting, we can go in.”

They waited as Odolf was disconnected from his feeding tube. The vampire fought the removal, his insatiable blood addiction making him snap and growl behind the wire-mesh face mask as the attendants cut off his supply. He struggled against his body restraints, but the effort was sluggish and ineffective, no doubt from the sedatives Kuhn had mentioned earlier.

The Rogue’s
dermaglyphs
were still seething from deep purples to red to black, the colors of ferocious hunger traveling along the pattern of markings that ran up his bare chest and over his shoulders.

His huge fangs flashed bone white with his sudden roar of protest. His pupils were fixed into vertical slits, the irises throwing off a blast of amber light every time he tried to raise his big head up off the table. Even though he was drugged, the taste of blood had inflamed him to the point of madness—as it did all Rogues.

Tegan ought to know. He’d lived a similar thirsting, angry as hell himself. He hadn’t progressed as far Rogue as this male, thankfully, but he’d come damn close. Seeing this blood-addicted male up close was a strong reminder of what those dark months Tegan had fought to shake off his own weakness had been like.

As Petrov Odolf rattled his bonds in futility, his Breedmate got up off the table beside him and cautiously approached where he lay. She kept her hands at her sides, even though it was clear from the anguish in her eyes that she longed to touch her mate. She said something too quiet to be heard over the cell’s audio monitors, then she turned away and walked toward the door of the observation room, wiping tears from her freckled cheeks.

Kuhn opened the door for her, and she seemed startled to see that she’d had an audience. Her face flamed red, and her downcast gaze said it was in shame. “Pardon me,” she murmured, trying to make a beeline for the outside hallway.