For Lucan and several others of the Breed, every night was a hunting expedition aimed at routing out the diseased few who would jeopardize all that the vampire race had worked so hard to achieve. Tonight, Lucan tracked his prey alone, not caring that he was outnumbered. He had waited until the opportunity to strike was prime: once the Rogues had greedily fed the addiction that ruled their minds.
Drunk on more blood than they could safely consume, they had continued to savage and fight over the body of the young man from the club, snarling and snapping like a pack of wild dogs. Lucan had been poised to dispatch quick justice - and would have, if it hadn't been for the sudden appearance of a ginger-haired female in the darkened corridor. In an instant, she had thrown the entire night off course: following the Rogues to the alley, then unwittingly drawing their attention away from their kill.
As the light from her cell phone's flash exploded in the dark, Lucan descended from the shadowed ledge of the window and landed on the pavement without a sound. Like the Rogues, Lucan's sensitive eyes were partially blinded from that sudden spark of light amid the dark. The woman fired a series of piercing flashes as she fled the carnage, those few panicked clicks likely all that spared her from the wrath of his savage kin.
But where the other vampires' senses were clouded and sluggish with Bloodlust, Lucan's were ruthlessly clear. From beneath his dark trenchcoat, he drew his weapons - twin blades wrought of titanium-edged steel - and swung to claim the head of the nearest Rogue.
Two more followed, the bodies of the dead thrashing as they began their swift cellular decomposition from oozing acidic pulp to incinerated ash. Animal shrieks filled the alleyway as Lucan severed the head of one more, then swung around to impale another Rogue through the torso. The Rogue hissed through bared, bloody teeth, its fangs dripping gore. Pale-gold eyes held Lucan in contempt, the huge irises swelled in hunger, swallowing up pupils that were narrowed to thin vertical slits. The creature spasmed, long arms reaching for him, its mouth stretched into a hideous, alien sneer as the specially forged steel poisoned its Rogue blood and reduced the vampire to smoldering stain on the street.
Only one remained. Lucan whirled to meet the large male, both blades raised to strike.
But the vampire was gone - fled into the night before he could slay it.
Damn.
He'd never let one of the bastards escape his justice before this. He shouldn't now. He considered chasing the Rogue down, but it would mean leaving the scene of the attack unsecured. That was the greater risk here, letting the humans know the full measure of the danger that lived among them. Because of the savagery of the Rogues, Lucan's kind had been persecuted and hunted by humans throughout the Old Times; the race might not survive a new age of retribution, now that man had technology on his side.
Until the Rogues were suppressed - better yet, eliminated entirely - humankind could know nothing of the existence of the vampires living all around them.
As he set about cleaning the area of all traces of the killing, Lucan's thoughts kept returning to the woman with the sunlit hair and sweet, alabaster beauty.
How was it she had been able to find the Rogues in the alley?
Although it was widely held among human folklore that vampires could disappear at will, the truth was only slightly less remarkable. Gifted with great agility and speed, they could simply move faster than human eyes could register, an ability that was augmented by the vampires' advanced hypnotic power over the minds of lesser beings. Oddly, this woman seemed immune to both.
Lucan had seen her in the club, he realized now. His gaze had been drawn away from his quarry by a pair of soulful eyes and a spirit that seemed nearly as lost as his own. She had noticed him, too, staring at him from where she sat with her friends. Even through the crowd and the stale odor of the club, Lucan had scented the trace notes of perfume on her skin - something exotic, rare.
He smelled it now as well, a delicate note that clung to the night, teasing his senses and calling to something primitive within him. His gums ached with the sudden stretching of his fangs, a physical reaction to need - carnal, or otherwise - that he was powerless to curb. He scented her, and he hungered, little better than his Rogue brethren.
Lucan tipped his head back and dragged the essence of the woman deeper into his lungs, tracking her across the city with his keen sense of smell. The sole witness to the Rogues' attack, it was more than unwise to let her keep the memory of what she had seen. Lucan would find the female and take whatever measures were necessary to ensure the protection of the Breed.
And in the back of his mind, an ancient conscience whispered that whoever she was, she already belonged to him.
"I'm telling you, I saw the whole thing. There were six of them, and they were tearing at the guy with their hands and teeth - like animals. They killed him!"
"Miss Maxwell, we've been over this numerous times already tonight. Now, we're all tired and the night is only getting longer."
Gabrielle had been at the police station for more than three hours, trying to give her account of the horror she witnessed outside La Notte. The two officers she spoke with had been skeptical at first, but now they were getting impatient, almost adversarial. Soon after she had arrived, the cops had sent a squad car around to the club to check out the situation and recover the body Gabrielle had reported seeing. The call had come up empty. No reports of a gang altercation and no evidence whatsoever of anyone having met with foul play. It was as if the entire incident had never happened - or had been miraculously swept clean.
"If you would just listen to me... if you would just look at the pictures I took - "
"We've seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times already. Frankly, nothing you've said tonight checks out - not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable images from your cell phone."
"I'm sorry if the quality is lacking," Gabrielle replied, acidly. "The next time I'm witnessing a bloody slaughter by a gang of psychos, I'll have to remember to bring my Leica and a few extra lenses."
"Maybe you want to rethink your statement," suggested the elder of the two officers, his Boston accent tinged with the Irish brogue of a youth spent in Southie. He stroked a chubby hand over his thinning brow, then slid her cell phone back across the desk. "You should be aware that filing a false police report is a crime, Miss Maxwell."
"This is not a false report," she insisted, frustrated and not a little angry that she was being treated like the criminal here. "I stand by everything I've said tonight. Why would I make this up?"
"That's something only you can answer, Miss Maxwell."
"This is unbelievable. You have my 911 call."
"Yes," agreed the officer. "You did, indeed, make a call to emergency dispatch. Unfortunately, all we have is static on the recording. You didn't say anything, and you didn't respond to the dispatcher's requests for information."
"Yeah, well, it's hard to find the words to describe seeing someone get their throat ripped out."
He gave her another dubious look. "This club - La Notte? It's a wild place, I hear. Popular with the goths, the ravers..."