Darker After Midnight (Midnight Breed 10)

CHAPTER TEN

HE WAS HALLUCINATING. Had to be.

Chase knew what Bloodlust could do to one of his kind. He understood how the disease could corrode logic, rob the senses and reason until nothing remained of even the soundest mind. He'd sure as hell felt it nipping at his own sanity in recent days.

Bloodlust had been raking him hard after he left the detective back at the police station parking lot. The hand-to-hand combat with the two unconscious feds and the dead Minion lying in the other room had made it even worse. He was in a bad way, he knew, but never had his affliction manifested in such a crazed mental trick as it did now.

Because what he thought he was seeing on Tavia Fairchild's bared skin was impossible. A pattern of dense but delicate markings tracked her body from neck to torso. They were light-colored, a faint mauve barely darker than her fair skin tone. To his impaired vision, swamped in the amber light of his hunger, the webwork of interconnecting flourishes and twining swirls looked like something he was intimately familiar with.

The markings looked very much like Breed dermaglyphs.

"Impossible," he said, hearing his own confusion in the feral growl of his voice.

Skin designs like these occurred only on his kind. And courtesy of a genetic anomaly of the race, beginning when the Ancients sired their young on Breedmates and created the Breed, all of Chase's kind - for all the thousands of years they'd existed on this planet - were born male. Through the fog of his questionable reason, he was reminded of Jenna Darrow, the woman who'd recently come to the Order from Alaska following an assault by the last of the Ancients. Brock's human mate had marks like these now, but they were minor in comparison and caused by the alien DNA contained in the rice-size bit of biotechnology the Ancient had implanted in her during her ordeal.

This was something altogether different.

Where the thick terry robe was still loosely fastened at Tavia's waist, the intricate skin pattern disappeared beneath the folds of the fabric. He caught a glimpse of more on her hip as she tried to scramble away from him on the bed.

Jesus, how far did they extend?

He reached for the belted tie, about to yank it open.

"No!" she cried, eyes fixed on him in abject horror as she drew the edges closed in trembling fists. "Get away! Don't touch me!"

Her fear jolted him from the insane tack his mind was taking. He hadn't come there to terrify her. His objective had been to see her safe, to make certain the Minion cop accompanying her didn't harm her. At the same time, he'd been damned curious why Dragos would enlist one of his mind slaves to act as her guard.

That question burned more fiercely as he stared down at her white-knuckled hands that gripped the robe closed over her body like her life depended on it.

Chase laid his palm to her forehead once more, another attempt to trance her, but she had a strong mind that didn't want to go down easy. She fought the lull that should have put her under in just a few moments and would have made it easier for him to decide what to do with her next. She pushed and fought, refusing to surrender despite the fear that he could feel rolling off her tall, deceptively athletic body in waves.

And he had other problems stirring now.

In the room outside, one of the federal agents Chase'd knocked unconscious was starting to rouse. If either of them woke and saw him there, eyes throwing off amber sparks and fangs extended to razor-sharp points, his mind scrub on them a few minutes ago would have been for nothing. And he didn't have time for a do-over.

"Stand up," he growled at Tavia Fairchild. He took off his stolen coat and covered her with it, robe and all. Then he fisted his hand in the woolen lapels and hauled her up off the bed. "Come with me."

He gave her little choice. Pulling her along the short hallway to the living room of the hotel suite, he ignored her choked gasp as she saw the signs of the struggle and the three large law enforcement personnel lying in crumpled heaps on the floor. Her breath was coming fast and hard now, on the verge of hyperventilation.

"You killed them," she cried. "Oh, God ... let me go!"

"I only killed the one who needed killing," he said as he dragged her through the room, past the dead Minion. One of the feds moaned, started to move where he lay on the floor nearby. It would only be seconds before he came to, and Chase needed to be gone before that happened. "Please," Tavia choked. "Please, don't do this. Tell me what you want from me!"

God help him, he wasn't sure how to answer that now. All he knew was he had to get out of there and he couldn't leave her behind. So she was coming with him.

When she sucked in a breath and he felt her prepare to let it loose in a scream, he brought the Minion cop's gun around from the back waistband of his pants where he'd stashed it after the scuffle. All it took was one look at the weapon and she got quiet. He never would have used it on her; he was Breed, and that gave him about a dozen other ways he could have threatened her into silence. But the pistol spoke the most convincingly to her mortal sensibilities. "This way," he ordered her. "Quickly."

Shocked and confused, she didn't resist. Chase pushed her into the empty hotel corridor outside the suite, then hustled her toward the back stairwell.

FRESH FROM A SHOWER, Lucan stepped out the French doors of his and Gabrielle's private bedroom at the Maine compound and stood alone on the timber deck. He was naked, beads of water still clinging to his skin, which steamed in tendrils all around him as he walked into the brittle night air. It was cold this far north and this deep into winter, punishingly so. He breathed it in, let it clear his mind and crystallize his thoughts around mission goals and duty. The things he knew best - the burdens he had elected to carry on his shoulders alone when he founded the Order all those centuries ago.

He'd never resented that choice, and he'd be damned if he let himself start doing so now. On a muttered curse, he inhaled another lungful of bracing cold and pushed it deep down, determined to smother the strange ache that had been troubling him all day. It had plagued him longer than that, he had to admit, although it had taken seeing Gabrielle with Dante and Tess's baby before the disturbing ache - the unwanted void - had given itself a name.

It was longing.

Bone-deep, and undeniable.

Christ, he was sick with it.