Taken by Midnight (4 page)

"Her pain is stronger now than it has been before, too," Brock added.

"I don't know what's going on, but everything about her seems to be intensifying now that she's awake."

Lucan's scowl deepened as he glanced at Gideon. "We're certain she's human, and not a Breedmate?"

"Just your basic
Homo sapiens
stock," the Order's resident genius confirmed. "I asked Alexandra to conduct a visual scan of her friend's skin 24

right after they arrived from Alaska. There was no teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark anywhere on Jenna's body. As for blood work and DNA, all of the samples I took came back clear, as well. In fact, I've been running tests every twenty-four hours, and there's been nothing notable. Everything about the woman to this point--aside from the presence of the implant--has been perfectly mundane."

Mundane?
Brock barely refrained from scoffing at the inadequate word. Of course, neither Gideon nor any of the other warriors had been present for the head-to-toe body search performed on Jenna upon her arrival at the compound. She'd been racked with pain, drifting in and out of consciousness from the time Brock, Kade, Alex, and the rest of the team who'd joined them in Alaska had made the trip back home to Boston.

Given that he was the only one who could level her out, Brock had been drafted to stay at Jenna's side and keep the situation under control as best as it could be. His role was supposed to have been purely professional, clinical and detached. A specialized tool kept close at hand in case of an emergency.

Yet he'd had a startlingly unprofessional response to the sight of Jenna's unclothed body. It had been five days ago, but he remembered every exposed inch of her ivory skin as though he were looking at it again now, and his pulse kicked at the memory.

He recalled every smooth curve and sloping valley, every little mole, every scar--from the ghost of a c-section incision on her abdomen, to the smattering of healed puncture wounds and lacerations that peppered her torso and forearms, telling him she'd already come through hell and back at least once before.

And he'd been anything but clinical and detached when Jenna lapsed into a sudden convulsion of agony in the moments after Alex had finished searching in vain for a birthmark signifying that her friend was a Breedmate like the other women who lived at the Order's compound. He'd placed his hands on both sides of her neck and drawn the pain away from her, all too aware of how soft and delicate her skin was beneath his fingertips. He fisted his hands at the thought as it rose up on him now.

He didn't need to be thinking about the woman, naked or otherwise.

Except now that he'd gone there, he could think of damned little else. And when she glanced up and caught his gaze through the glass of the little window in the door, an unbidden heat went through him like a flaming arrow.

Desire was bad enough, but it was the odd sense of protectiveness serving as a chaser that really threw him off kilter. The feeling had begun in 25

Alaska, when he and the other warriors first found her. It hadn't faded in the days she'd been at the compound. If anything, the feeling had only gotten stronger, watching her fight and struggle through the strange sleep that had kept her unconscious since she'd come out of her ordeal with the Ancient in Alaska.

Her frank gaze still held his from across the infirmary: cautious, almost suspicious. There was no weakness in her eyes, nor in the slight tilt of her chin. Jenna Darrow was clearly a strong female, despite all she'd been through, and he found himself wishing she'd been a mess of tears and hysteria instead of the cool, in-control woman whose unflinching stare refused to let him go.

She was calm and stoic, as brave as she was beautiful, and it sure as hell wasn't making her less intriguing to him.

"When was the last time you ran blood work and DNA?" Lucan asked, the grave, low-voiced question giving Brock something else to focus on.

Gideon pushed back his shirtsleeve to check his watch. "I drew the last sample about seven hours ago."

Lucan grunted as he pivoted away from the infirmary door. "Run everything again now. If the readings have changed so much as an iota from the last sample, I want to hear about it."

Gideon's blond head bobbed. "Given what Brock has told us, I'd also like to take some strength and endurance measurements. Any information we can gather from studying Jenna could be crucial to figuring out what exactly we're dealing with here."

"Whatever you need," Lucan said grimly. "Just get it done, and fast.

This situation is important, but we also can't afford to lose momentum on our other missions."

Brock inclined his head along with the other warriors, knowing as well as any of them that a human in the compound was a complication the Order didn't need when they still had an enemy on the loose--namely Dragos, a corrupt Breed elder whom the Order had been pursuing for the better part of a year.

Dragos had been working in secret for many decades, under more than one assumed identity and within clandestine, powerful alliances. His operation had grown numerous and long-reaching tentacles, as the warriors were discovering, and every one of those grasping arms was working in concert toward a single objective: Dragos's complete and total domination over both the Breed and humankind alike.

The Order's primary goal was his destruction and the swift, permanent 26

dismantling of his entire operation. The Order meant to take Dragos out at the roots. But there were complications to that goal. He had all but vanished recently, and there were, as always, layers of protection in front of him--secret allies within the Breed nation, maybe outside of it, too. Dragos also had an unnumbered army of skilled assassins at his command, every one of them born and bred specifically for killing. Deadly Breed males who were direct progeny of the otherworlder who, until his escape to Alaska a few weeks ago and subsequent death, had been under Dragos's command.

Brock glanced into the infirmary room where Jenna had begun to pace back and forth like a caged animal. To say the Order had their hands full at the moment was putting it mildly. Now that she was awake, at least his part was over. His talent had seen Jenna through the past week; where she went from here would be up to Gideon and Lucan to decide.

Inside the room, Alex pivoted away from her friend and approached the door. She opened it and stepped out to the corridor, her brown eyes soft with concern under the dark blond bangs that fringed her forehead.

"How's she doing?" Kade asked, moving toward his woman as though gravity pulled him there. They were a newly mated pair, having met during Kade's mission in Alaska, but looking at the warrior and his pretty bush pilot Breedmate, it seemed impossible to Brock that they had only been together for a couple of weeks. "Does Jenna need anything, babe?"

"She's confused and upset, understandably," Alex said, moving into the shelter of Kade's body just as he had done with her. "I think she'll feel better after a long shower and some fresh clothes. She says she feels stir crazy in the room and wants to take a walk to stretch some of the tightness out of her legs. I told her I would ask if it was all right."

Alex looked to Lucan as she said it, directing the request to the Order's oldest member, its founder and leader.

"Jenna is not a prisoner here," he replied. "Of course she is free to wash and dress and walk around."

"Thank you," Alex said, gratitude brightening some of the uncertainty in her eyes. "I told her she wouldn't be kept here as a prisoner, but she didn't seem to believe me. After what she's been through, I guess that's not surprising. I'll go tell her what you said, Lucan."

As she turned to slip back into the infirmary, the Order's leader cleared his throat. Kade's mate slowed and swung a glance over her shoulder, some of the wind already leaving her sails as she met Lucan's stern look. "Jenna is free to walk about and do most anything she likes--so long as someone is with her, and so long as she doesn't try to leave the compound.

See that she has whatever she needs. When she's ready for her walk around 27

the compound, Brock will take her. I'm putting him in charge of her well-being. He'll make sure Jenna doesn't lose her way."

Brock had to work to bite back the curse that rose to his tongue.

Just frigging great
, he thought, wanting like hell to reject the continued assignment that would keep him in close quarters with Jenna Darrow.

Instead he acknowledged Lucan's order with a nod.

28

Jenna's hands were fisted as she shoved them deep into the pockets of the belted, white terry robe that covered her thin hospital gown. Her feet swam in the new, but extra-large, man-size slippers Alex had retrieved out of a cabinet drawer in the infirmary room where Jenna had awakened less than an hour ago. She shuffled beside her friend, walking along a lighted, marble-white corridor that snaked and twisted in a seemingly endless maze of similar walkways.

Jenna felt oddly numb, not just from the shock of hearing that her brother was dead but from the fact that the nightmare she'd awakened from had not ended with her survival. The creature that had attacked her in her cabin might have been killed, as she'd been informed, but she wasn't free of its hold.

After what she saw in the X-ray images and on the video feed from the infirmary, she knew with a bone-deep dread that part of that fanged monster still held her in its ruthless grasp. She should be screaming in terror for that knowledge alone. Deep down, fear and grief roiled. She clamped a hard lid on her bubbling hysteria, refusing to show that kind of weakness, even to her best friend.

But there was a true calmness inside her, one that had been with her in the infirmary room--since the moment Brock had put his hands on her and promised she was safe. It was that reassurance as well as her own determination to soldier on that kept her from breaking down as she walked the labyrinth of corridors with Alex.

"We're almost there," Alex said as she led Jenna around another corner, toward another long stretch of gleaming hallway. "I thought you'd be more comfortable getting cleaned up and dressed in Kade's and my quarters rather than the infirmary."

Jenna managed a vague nod, although it was hard to imagine that she might be comfortable anywhere in this strange and unfamiliar place. She walked cautiously, her rusty cop instincts prickling as she passed unmarked room after unmarked room. There wasn't a single exterior window in the 29

place, nothing to indicate where the facility was located, nor what might lie beyond its walls. No way to tell even whether it was day or night outside.

Above her head, tracking the length of this corridor like the others, small black domes concealed what she guessed must be surveillance cameras. It was all very state-of-the-art, very private, and very secure.

"What is this place, some kind of government building?" she asked, voicing her suspicions out loud. "Definitely not civilian. Is it some kind of military facility?"

Alex slid her a hesitant, measuring glance. "It's more secure than any of those things. We're about thirty stories belowground, not far outside the city of Boston."

"A bunker, then," Jenna guessed, still trying to make sense of it all. "If it's not part of the government or military, what is it?"

Alex seemed to consider her reply for a moment longer than was needed. "The compound we're in, and the gated estate that sits above us on street level, belongs to the Order."

"The Order," Jenna repeated, finding that Alex's explanation was raising more questions about the place than it answered. She'd never been anywhere like this before. It was alien in its high-tech design, a far cry from anything she'd ever seen in rural Alaska or any of the places she'd been in the Lower Forty-eight.

Adding to the strangeness, beneath her slippered feet, the polished white marble was inlaid with glossy black stone that made a running pattern of odd symbols along the floor--arcing flourishes and complex geometric shapes that somewhat resembled tribal tattoos.

Dermaglyphs
.

The word leapt into her thoughts out of nowhere, an answer to a question she didn't even know to ask. It was an unfamiliar word, as unfamiliar as everything about this place and the people who apparently lived here. And yet the certainty with which her mind supplied the term made it feel as though she must have thought or said it thousands of times.

Impossible.

"Jenna, are you all right?" Alex paused in the corridor a couple of steps ahead of where Jenna's own feet had ceased moving. "Are you tired?

We can rest for a minute, if you need to."

"No. I'm okay." She felt a frown creasing her forehead as she glanced up from the intricate design on the smooth floor. "I'm just ... confused."

And that was due to more than just the peculiarity of where she found herself now. Everything felt different to her, even her own body. Some part of her intellect knew that after five days unconscious in a sickbed, she 30

probably should be exhausted from even the short distance she'd just walked.