"Lucan, my best friend took those photographs into the showing that night, by himself. It would have killed me if anything had happened to him. Jamie walked in there without knowing anything about the danger he was in."
"Be glad for that, because it's probably the only reason he walked out alive."
She recoiled as if he'd slapped her. "I don't want my friends getting hurt because of what's happening to me."
"You're in more danger than anyone right now. And we need to get moving. Let's download those pictures off your computer. I want to take all of them into the lab at the compound."
Gabrielle led him over to a neat corner desk in her living room. She powered up the desktop workstation and as it cycled through its startup, she pulled a couple of flash memory sticks out of their store packaging and popped one into the computer's USB drive.
"You know, they said she was crazy. They called her delusional, a paranoid schizophrenic. They locked her away for believing she had been attacked by vampires." Gabrielle laughed softly, but it was a sad, empty sound. "Maybe she wasn't crazy after all."
Behind her, Lucan moved closer. "Who would that be?"
"My birth mother." After beginning the copying procedure, Gabrielle spun around in her chair to look up at Lucan. "She was found late one night in Boston, injured, bloody, disoriented. She didn't have a wallet or purse, or any kind of ID on her, and in the brief periods when she was lucid, she couldn't tell anyone who she was so the police processed her as a Jane Doe. She was just a teenager."
"She was bleeding, you say?"
"Multiple throat lacerations - presumably self-inflicted, according to the official records. The courts deemed her incompetent to stand trial and locked her away in a mental institution once she was released from the hospital."
"Jesus."
She gave a slow shake of her head. "But what if everything she said was true? What if she wasn't crazy at all? Oh, God, Lucan... all these years, I've blamed her. I think I've hated her, even, and now I can't help but think - "
"You said the police and the courts processed her. You mean, for some kind of crime?"
The computer beeped to indicate the memory stick was full. Gabrielle turned back to continue with the next copying function, and she stayed there, giving him her back. Lucan put his hands down gently on her shoulders and brought the swivel chair back around.
"What was your mother charged with?"
For a long moment, Gabrielle didn't say anything. Lucan saw her throat working. There was a great deal of hurt in her soft brown eyes. "She was charged with abandoning her child."
"How old were you?"
She shrugged, shook her head. "Young. An infant. She stuffed me in a trash bin outside an apartment building. It was only about a block from where the police picked her up. Fortunately for me, one of the cops decided to check the surrounding area. He heard my crying, I guess, and took me out of there."
Holy Christ.
A jolt of recollection flashed hard in Lucan's mind as she spoke. He saw a dark street, wet pavement gleaming in the moonlight, a wide-eyed female standing in transfixed horror as a Rogue vampire sucked at her throat. He heard the shrill wailing of the tiny baby nestled in the young mother's arms.
"When did this happen?"
"A long time ago. Twenty-seven years ago this summer, to be exact."
To one of Lucan's age, twenty-seven years ago was a blink of time. He clearly remembered interrupting the attack at the bus station. Recalled stepping between the Rogue and its prey, sending the terrified female off with a stern mental command. She'd been bleeding profusely, some of it raining down on her baby.
After he'd killed the Rogue and cleared the scene, he had gone to look for the woman and her child. He hadn't found them. He'd often wondered what had happened to the both of them, and cursed himself for not having been able to at least remove the horrific memories of the assault from the victim's mind.
"She committed suicide in the mental facility not long afterward," Gabrielle said. "I was already a ward of the state."
He couldn't stop himself from touching her. Gently sweeping aside her long hair, he cupped the delicate line of her jaw, stroked the proud lift of her chin. Her eyes were moist, but she didn't crack. She was a tough one, all right. Tough and beautiful and so incredibly special.
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and tell her as much.
"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it with utmost sincerity. And regret, something he wasn't used to feeling. But, then, since he'd first laid eyes on her, Gabrielle made him feel a lot of things that were entirely new to him. "I'm sorry for both of you."
The computer beeped again.
"That's all of them," she said, reaching up as if she might stroke his hand, but couldn't quite bring herself to touch him yet.