Darker After Midnight (Midnight Breed 10)

Chase's fury spiked as he watched the Minion cop put his hands on her to assist her into the vehicle - the same way it had spiked when he'd seen her stand next to Senator Clarence in the police station viewing room. Although he was far from being anyone's hero, Chase felt the tarnished inklings of his old sense of honor grind to life inside him when he thought of her being anywhere near Dragos or his legion of soulless servants.

The morning news report was easily eight hours old. Potentially eight hours that Tavia had been breathing the same air as the Minion cop who climbed into the car with her and the police detective and drove off. If Dragos had wanted to harm the woman, he'd had plenty of time to get it done. Not that Chase should be the one to save her. Hell, when it came right down to it, he doubted he could even save himself.

But that didn't keep his blood from surging with new purpose.

It didn't keep his feet from moving, stepping away from the pub and heading across the street for the shadows. He vanished into the gloom, all of his predatory focus rooted to a single goal: finding Tavia Fairchild.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Chase was crouched like a gargoyle at the edge of the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department rooftop, his eye trained on the employee parking lot below. After an end- of-shift parade of uniformed officers and shuffling office types trickled down to nil, his patience was strained and he was about two seconds away from storming the place to find the cop he was looking for. But then, at last, pay dirt. He recognized the middle-age police detective as soon as the human exited the building.>Breedmates, a rarity among their mortal sisters, were identifiable by their unique ESP talents and personal blood scent, as well as a small scarlet birthmark somewhere on their bodies in the shape of a teardrop falling into the cradle of a crescent moon.

Although Jenna had been born human, to call her mortal now would not be quite accurate. "Gideon tells me your latest blood work looks good. A few fluctuations in cell counts, but no more big surprises."

The tall brunette gave a sardonic laugh. "Nothing too unusual. Still a cyborg freak in progress."

"Freakin' hot, if you ask me," added her mate, Brock. The huge black warrior flashed her a broad smile that held a hint of fangs. "I kinda dig having my own personal RoboCop."

"Oh, yeah," she replied, smiling along with him. "I'll remind you of that the day I'm strong enough to kick your vampire butt."

Brock exhaled an exaggerated sigh. "Damn, woman. You already have me on my knees where you're concerned. Now you want me on my ass?"

Across the room, Nikolai laughed. "Hey, welcome to my world, man."

The jibe earned him a playful cuff in the shoulder from Renata. She reached over to Mira and covered the girl's ears before adding quietly "On their ass or on their back, it's all good. Right, Jen?"

At Jenna's chuckling agreement, Brock drew her close and planted a kiss on her mouth. He wrapped his palm around the back of her neck, possessive but tender as he gazed into his mate's brown eyes. "She knows she's got me, any way she wants me. Forever, if I have anything to say about it."

Where his fingers rested at Jenna's nape was a rice-size bit of alien biotech matter embedded beneath her skin. An unwanted souvenir she'd woken up with following a recent, prolonged attack by an Ancient, the last of the eight vampiric otherworlders who'd fathered the first generation of the Breed on Earth. Jenna emerged from that ordeal miraculously alive, but changed in many ways. She was still changing, evolving both physically and genetically.

Her body was able to heal itself from injury, something Gideon described as adaptive regeneration - similar to the way the Breed healed, except in Jenna's case, she didn't require ingested blood to aid the process. She didn't have fangs or blood thirst, but she was stronger and faster than any human, as supernaturally agile as any of the Breed. Gideon wasn't entirely certain, but early tests seemed to indicate that some of the Ancient's DNA contained within the biotech chip was integrating with Jenna's genetic structure. Overtaking it, on several levels. Part of that was obvious, even to the casual observer.

Curling around to her shoulders from the back of her neck, where the implant resided, were the swirling arcs and flourishes of a growing dermaglyph. The skin markings were unique to Lucan's kind and the otherworlders who fathered them, yet this human woman now bore her own. Jenna's glyph had never changed colors or pulsed as Lucan and his Breed brethren's did in moments of extreme emotion or hunger. Her glyph's color remained static, just a shade darker than her fair skin.

And then there was the matter of Jenna's tendency to speak in the Ancients' language while she was asleep. The nightmares were a new development, having come on strong in just the last couple of days. Violent dreams of combat and catastrophe.

The Order was still trying to make sense of everything Jenna was becoming, and it seemed that one key to solving that question might be found in deciphering the alien words and images that plagued her unconscious mind. Lazaro Archer had enlisted himself to assist on that front. At somewhere near a thousand years old and a first-generation Breed like Lucan and Tegan, Archer also brought the useful experience of having spent more time than most in the company of his Ancient sire. Relying on his memory of the otherworlders' language, Archer was helping Jenna to journal all that she could in the hopes that the writings would offer some answers.

Lucan was about to ask for a quick update when the sound of his own mate's voice behind him snagged his full attention. "I hope you weren't planning on decorating that Christmas tree without us."

Gabrielle snaked her arm around his waist and smiled up at him as he wrapped her in the shelter of his arm. Just the feel of her close to him, her soft brown eyes like melted chocolate, made his pulse kick into a harder rhythm.

"Ohh, it's beautiful," said Dante's mate, Tess, who'd come into the room as well now. She held their three-day-old infant son in her arms, a pink-skinned, swaddled bundle that cooed and gurgled within the pale blue blanket that surrounded his tiny form. She lowered her voice to a tender whisper as she dipped her face toward her child. "Look at this, Xander. Your very first Christmas tree."

As she spoke, Gideon's longtime mate, Savannah, and Elise, who'd been mated to Tegan for only the past year, entered the great room too. It didn't take more than a moment for all of the women, Mira included, to cluster around Tess and the baby. Not even Gabrielle was immune. She ditched Lucan without a word, apparently drawn like the others by some invisible, female- mesmerizing beacon to the presence of such a little package of innocent life.

Lucan spared the baby and his admirers only a passing notice, and begrudging at that. He'd long felt that the Order's base of operations was no place for children, let alone helpless infants. Then again, until he'd met and fallen in love with Gabrielle, he hadn't been too keen on females underfoot at the compound either.

Not that this was a compound, exactly. Or anything close to a viable command base, least of all now, when the Order needed every tactical advantage it could get in this war with Dragos. He looked around him, at the borrowed Darkhaven in the middle of a secluded forest, the cozy great room with its fireplace and soaring rafters and the enormous pine that stretched up toward them, fragrant with the evergreen scent of the outdoors. He looked at the people who stood around him there, most of his brothers in arms and their beloved mates. The family he'd never wanted but had somehow ended up having anyway.

And then he looked at Gabrielle.

She was his irresistible beacon. His greatest strength, and his most vulnerable weakness. She was his heart. And it was there that he felt a tightness growing as he watched her stroke the velvety cheek of the baby in Tess's arms. She leaned her face down and kissed the infant's delicately rounded brow, and the pure beauty in that single instant made the fist around Lucan's heart squeeze even tighter.

He didn't want to acknowledge this thing that was infiltrating his body. This queer ache deep inside him that could mean no good, especially now.

It was a relief to hear the sudden, long stride of boots pounding in the hallway. The urgent beat thrust him into battle mode in an instant, even before Tegan appeared, trouble written across the warrior's stern face. "More bad news out of Boston."

"Chase?" Lucan asked, dreading the answer as the rest of the room fell into an equally grave silence.

Tegan nodded. "Gideon just got wind of it on an Internet news-feed. Senator Clarence is dead, Lucan. Brutally attacked and killed in his home, along with several of his security detail. And guess who vanished without a trace from the police station last night?"