"I made sure they wouldn't."
"You made me look like a fool. The police insisted I was making all of it up."
"Better that, than tipping them off to the very real battles that have been taking place on human streets for centuries. Can you imagine the wide-scale panic if substantiated reports of vampire attacks were to start making news around the world?"
"Is that what's happening? These kinds of killings are going on all the time, everywhere?"
"More and more, lately. The Rogues are a faction of blood addicts that care only about their next fix. At least, that had been their mode until very recently. Something's going on now. They're preparing. Becoming organized. They've never been more dangerous than they are now."
"And thanks to the pictures I took outside that club, these Rogue vampires are coming after me."
"The incident you witnessed brought you to their attention, no doubt, and any human makes good sport for them. But it is the other pictures you've taken that have likely put you in the most jeopardy."
"What other pictures?"
"That one."
He indicated a framed photograph hanging on the wall of her living room. It was an exterior shot of an old warehouse in one of the sketchier parts of town.
"What made you decide to photograph that building?"
"I don't know, exactly," she said, not even sure why she had decided to frame the picture. Just looking at it now gave her a little chill down her spine. "I never would have set foot in that part of town, but I remember I'd taken a wrong turn that night and ended up lost. Something just drew my eye to the warehouse - nothing I can really explain. I was nervous as hell to be there, but I couldn't leave without taking a few shots of the place."
Lucan's voice was gravely serious. "I, along with several other Breed warriors who work with me, raided that location a month and a half ago. It was a Rogue lair, housing fifteen of our enemies."
Gabrielle gaped at him. "There are vampires living in that building?"
"Not anymore." He strode past her to the kitchen table, where a few other shots lay, including some from the abandoned asylum, taken just a couple of days ago. He picked up one of the photographs and held it out to her. "We've been surveilling this location for weeks. We have reason to believe it might be one of the largest colonies of Rogues in New England."
"Oh, my God." Gabrielle stared at the image of the asylum, a slight tremble in her fingers as she set it back down on the table. "When I took these pictures the other morning, a man found me there. He chased me off the property. You don't think he was - "
Lucan shook his head. "Minion, not a vampire, if you saw him after dawn. Sunlight is poison to us. That much of the old folklore is true. Our skin burns quickly, like yours would if you held it under a very powerful magnifying glass at the height of morning."
"Which is why I've only seen you in the evening," she murmured, thinking back on each of Lucan's visits, from that very first time when he began his deception with her. "How could I have been so blind when all the clues were right in front of me?"
"Maybe you didn't want to see them, but you knew, Gabrielle. You suspected that the slaying you witnessed was something more than what your human experiences could explain. You nearly said as much to me, the first time we met. On some level of your consciousness, you knew it was a vampire attack."
She did know, even then. But she had not suspected that Lucan was a part of it. Part of her still wanted to reject the idea.
"How can this be real?" she moaned, dropping into the nearest chair. She stared at the pictures scattered on the table in front of her, then looked back up at Lucan's grim face. Tears threatened, burning in her eyes, a knot of desperate denial forming in her throat. "This can't be real. God, please tell me that this is not really happening."
Chapter Nineteen
He had laid a lot on her to deal with - not everything, but more than enough for one night.
Lucan had to give Gabrielle credit. Aside from a bit of irrationality with the garlic and holy water, she had maintained an amazingly level head through a conversation that was, no doubt, pretty hard to swallow. Vampires, ancient alien arrivals, the rising war with the Rogues, who, by the way, were gunning for her now, too.
She had taken it all in with a stalwartness that most human men would not possess.
Lucan watched her struggling to process the information as she sat at the table with her head in her hands, stray tears only just beginning to stream down her cheeks. He wished there was a way to make her path easier. There wasn't. And things were going to go from bad to worse for her, once she learned the full truth of what lay ahead of her.>He scowled as though her mistrust wounded him. "The change cannot be forced. It is a physiological one that comes on with hunger, or during times of intense emotion."
"So, how much of a head start will I have before you decide to rip open my jugular and go for broke? A couple of minutes? A few seconds?"
His eyes flashed at her provocation, but his voice remained level. "I will not hurt you, Gabrielle."
"Then why are you here? To fuck me again, before you turn me into something awful like you?"
"Jesus," he ground out harshly. "That's not how it - "