Darker After Midnight (Midnight Breed 10)

A harsh scoff sounded from beside her. Tavia looked over and met the hard gaze of a uniformed policeman who had drifted over while she and Detective Avery were talking. A scar split the dark slash of his left eyebrow, making his scowl look even more severe. "Nothing but bullshit out of that bastard. Shoulda pumped his skull full of bullets. Maybe that woulda kept him down."

At Tavia's confused look, Avery said, "The man we had in custody ... he escaped last night from the infirmary."

"Escaped," she murmured. "I don't understand. How is that possible?"

"We're trying to figure that out ourselves. I saw the guy when he was brought out of the lineup room. He was in bad shape. Somehow he managed to overcome a two-hundred-pound male nurse, knocking him unconscious before slipping out of the building unnoticed. I mean, the guy shouldn't have been able to walk out of there on his own motor, let alone find his way to Marblehead to go after the senator like he did. I've never seen anything so brutal. So goddamn bloody."

Tavia swallowed past the lump of sadness and horror that had lodged in her throat.

"I'm sorry," Detective Avery said, looking at her in concern. "I realize you probably don't need to hear the ugly details. You've been through quite a bit yourself lately."

"It's all right." She drew in a quick breath, regaining her composure. "I'll be fine." "We'd like you to come into the station, if you feel up to it. We have some more questions for you, and the feds will want to talk to you as well - "

"Of course."

He gestured toward the door of the building, to where the reporters had seemed to multiply in the time since she'd been inside. "We can go now, before this place really turns into a zoo." Tavia nodded, falling in behind him as he and a small group of uniformed officers escorted her out to a waiting police sedan.

For a moment, as she stepped outside into the cold morning, she felt as though she were walking through a different world, one that didn't belong to her. There was an unreal quality to everything, as though she were peering through the gauze of a veil, unable to see anything clearly.

Or maybe it was simply that she didn't want to see.

She was unable to imagine the kind of man - the kind of inhuman lethality - it would take to do to Senator Clarence what Detective Avery had implied. She didn't want to think about the senator's final moments. She'd worked for him for years, knew he was a good man who believed he could make a difference. Sure, he'd seemed to be acting a bit odd lately. Detached somehow. Distracted. Who wouldn't be, after the shooting at his house just a few nights ago? A bullet that could have easily struck him but had instead hit one of his VIP guests. Drake Masters.

The name played through her head, and she returned again to what the man in the jailhouse lineup had said - that at the party he'd shot the person he knew as Dragos. The person he seemed convinced meant to harm or kill Senator Clarence. Someone who probably didn't exist except in his imagination.

It sounded crazy to her now, even in her thoughts.

All the more so when she considered how violently that same man in police custody had leapt at Senator Clarence the moment he saw him in the viewing room.

And today Bobby Clarence was dead.

A confessed killer, clearly deranged, was on the loose.

Suddenly the troubling dream that had woken her last night felt even more disturbing in the chilling light of day.

As the police sedan rolled away from the curb, Tavia could only hope that the scorching blue eyes and merciless face that she could still see so vividly in her mind stayed relegated to her nightmares.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LUCAN'S SHITTY NIGHT was turning into an even shittier morning.

It had started with the phone call from Mathias Rowan a few hours ago, around daybreak, reporting the mass slaughter of nearly a dozen humans in an Agency-run nightclub. Fortunately, Rowan had the situation cleaned up before the slayings could draw the attention of the public, but that was little comfort amid the hell storm of bad news and trouble the Order was facing. And Lucan was sure things would only get worse before they got better.

Fuck, if they got better.

Now, while mankind was heading into their A.M. rush hour commutes elsewhere - the same hour that most of the night-dwelling Breed would be hunkered down in their Darkhavens to sleep and wait out the day - Lucan and the rest of the former Boston compound's residents were still settling into their new surroundings.

Lucan hadn't slept in more than thirty-six hours, not that any of the other warriors had either. Gathered in the makeshift war room of the sprawling Darkhaven retreat in the woods of northern Maine, which was now their base of operations, Lucan and Gideon had been going over facility inventories and systems status checks for the past several hours. They'd since been joined by some of the others, and the talk around the large hand-hewn timber table of the former dining room had turned toward mission strategies and the need to retaliate against Dragos for his continued - and escalating - offenses.

"You know," Dante said, "there is a bright side in all of this." He sat on the edge of the big table, dark brows quirking over whiskey-colored eyes. "If we've ever needed a license to kick some Enforcement Agency ass, we've sure as hell got it now."

"Damn right." Standing nearby, Rio gave a tilt of his scarred face and lifted his fist to knock knuckles with Dante. "Tonight we'll hit every sip-and-strip in the city with some heavy-duty payback," he added, his Spanish accent rolling with his anger. "Nothing sweeter than a chance to bring down Dragos and the Agency together."

Dante grinned. "Icing, meet cake."

"How many of these private clubs does the Enforcement Agency have?" This time it was Lazaro Archer who spoke. The Breed elder was the lone civilian in the room and, under normal circumstances, wouldn't have been permitted to sit in on Order business. But he was also the owner of the northern Maine property the warriors had commandeered as their temporary headquarters, and these were far from normal circumstances.

"According to Mathias Rowan," Gideon replied, "there are five known clubs around Boston, the one in Chinatown being the primary location."