Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

"So I heard. We all did. Gideon told us all about your run-in with Lois Lane back there in Prague," Dante said.

"No worries, man. We're gonna clamp a hard lid on her story and her pictures before any of that shit goes public. As for her, calls have already been made to find her a place in the Darkhavens if that's her choice after all this is over. It's as good as handled."

Rio didn't doubt a word Dante said, but he couldn't help wondering which way Dylan was going to go in the end. If she chose the Darkhavens, it would only be a matter of time before a savvy Breed male convinced her that she needed him and ought to be his mate. God knew she'd have no shortage of candidates. With her unusual beauty, she would be the flame they all converged on, and the thought of her being pursued by a bunch of sophisticated, smooth-talking, mostly useless civilians set Rio's teeth on edge.

Though why he should give a damn what she did or with whom, he didn't know.

He had no claim on her, other than the immediate goal of thwarting the disaster that her presence was stirring up. Or rather, the disaster he'd invited by wallowing in his own misery instead of blowing that damn cave like he'd been entrusted to do. Being back in Boston only made him wish he was back on that mountainside, pressing the detonator and watching as a ton of rock sealed him in for good.

"What were you doing over there all this time?" Chase asked, a casually phrased question that didn't quite mask the male's suspicion. "You told Nikolai that you were going to secure the cave and take off on your own for Spain. The way he told it, you'd up and quit the Order. That was five months ago and no word out of you until now, when you show up bringing bad news and trouble. What the fuck gives?"

"Chill it, man," Dante advised, throwing a dark look across the front seat. To Rio he said, "Feel free to ignore Harvard. He's had a hard-on all night because he didn't get to play with his Beretta."

"No, really," Chase said, not about to give it up. "I'm curious is all. What exactly happened over there with you since February when we left you on that mountainside with a duffel full of C-4? Why'd you wait this long to do the damn job? Why the change of plans?"

"There was no change of plans," Rio replied, meeting the measuring gaze of the warrior in the passenger seat. He couldn't be offended by the challenging tone. Chase had every right to question him - they all had the right - and there wasn't much Rio could say in his defense. He'd let his weakness own him these past several months, and now he had to set that to rights. "I had a mission to carry out, and I failed in it. Simple as that."

"Well, we're not exactly batting a thousand on this end either," Dante put in. "Since we found that hibernation chamber outside Prague, we've been running leads on the possible existence of an Ancient and they've all come up empty. Chase has been doing some covert internal digging with the Darkhavens and the Enforcement Agency, but those sources aren't turning up anything useful either."

In the passenger seat, Chase gave an affirmative nod. "It doesn't seem possible, but if the Ancient is out there, the son of a bitch is deep underground and laying very low."

"What about the Breed family from Germany that was linked to the Ancient back in the Middle Ages?" Rio asked.

"The Odolfs," Dante said, shaking his head. "No survivors that we've found. The few who didn't go Rogue and end up dead from Bloodlust over the years turned up missing or dead of other causes. The entire Odolf line is no more."

"Shit," Rio murmured.

Dante nodded. "That's about all we've got. Just a whole lot of silence and dead ends. We're not about to give up, but right now we're looking for a fucking needle in a haystack."

Rio frowned, considering the difficulties in hiding the existence of an otherworldly creature like the one the Order hunted now. It would be damn hard not to notice a nearly seven-foot-tall, hairless, dermaglyph -covered vampire with an insatiable thirst for blood. Even among the most savage dregs of Breed society, the Ancient would stand out.

The only reason the Ancient had gone undetected for as long as it had was because of the hibernation chamber that housed it on the remote mountain in the Czech countryside. Someone had freed the Ancient from its hidden crypt, but the Order had no way of knowing when, or how, or even if the bloodthirsty creature had survived its awakening.

With any luck, the savage son of a bitch was long dead.

The other alternative was a scenario no one, Breed or human, would want to imagine.

Dante cleared his throat in the long stretch of silence, his tone going serious. "Listen, Rio. Whatever your deal was these past months you've been AWOL, it's good to have you back in Boston. We're all glad you're back."

Rio nodded stiffly as he met the warrior's eyes. No sense telling Dante or anyone else that his return was only temporary. The last thing the Order needed was a liability like him in the ranks. No doubt they'd already discussed that subject when Gideon alerted them about Rio's return.

Dante met his gaze in the rearview. "You ready to roll, amigo?"

"Yeah," Rio said. "I'm more than ready."

The metallic clack of a lock being freed echoed like a gunshot against the tunnel of rough-hewn granite walls. The door was old, the oiled wood as dark as pitch and as aged as the stone that had been hollowed out of the earth to create the long tunnel and the locked chamber secreted at its end.

But here was where the primitiveness of the place ended.

Beyond the stone and wood and crude iron locks was a laboratory equipped with the finest state-of-the-art technology. It had evolved over the years, employing the best science and robotics that money could buy. The staff of humans operating the facility had been collected from some of the most advanced biological institutions in the nation. They were Minions now, their minds enslaved, loyalty unquestioningly ensured.

All for one purpose.

A single inpidual, unlike any that existed in all the world.

That inpidual waited at the end of the tunneled corridor, behind the electronic quadruple-bolted steel door. Inside was a cell constructed specifically to hold a man who was no man at all, but a vampiric, alien creature from a planet far different from the one he inhabited now.

He was an Ancient - the last remaining forebear of the hybrid race known as the Breed. Many thousands of years old, he was more powerful than an army of humans, even kept as he was currently, in a managed state of near starvation. The hunger weakened him, as intended, but it also pissed him off, and rage was always a factor when it came to controlling a powerful creature like the one lifting its hairless, glyph -riddled head within the cell.