Darker After Midnight (Midnight Breed 10)

THE WORLD WAS ABLAZE and bleeding in the dark.

Chase eyed the terror-torn landscape from the backseat of the Order's speeding black Rover. Dante and Renata sat beside him in silence. Rio was grim-faced in the jump seat in back, Lucan stoic, jaw clenched, where he rode shotgun next to Nikolai up front.

They had miles of travel behind them, five-plus hours of drive time packed into barely three at Niko's breakneck speed. Brock followed fast in the second vehicle, carrying the rest of the Order's mission crew toward Boston. Even Lazaro Archer had strapped on arms and combat gear to accompany the warriors into the night's battle.

God knew they were going to need all the help they could get.

By Mathias Rowan's account, the Rogue population let loose from rehab facilities along the eastern seaboard alone numbered close to a hundred. It would take weeks to contain them all, possibly longer. And that didn't factor in the scores of others likely released in other parts of North America tonight.

The odds against the Order's success were staggering. Eventually, they would have to split up, tackle the problem from multiple directions.

But Boston was the immediate concern. It was there that Dragos had seemed to deliver the hardest hit, no doubt to flaunt his power in the warriors' faces, unleashing unholy hell in the Order's home turf.

The closer they got to the city, the worse the chaos became.

Scattered house fires shot bright orange flames skyward on both sides of the highway. Traffic was crazed in both directions as panicked drivers fought their way in and out of the various city arteries. Sirens blared from everywhere. And in the neighborhoods and surface streets, packs of humans rushed on foot in a blind confusion, eyes wild, faces contorted in terror, fleeing a danger they would never outrun.

Everywhere Chase looked, the scene was utter, bloody madness.

"Cristo," Rio hissed in the tomblike quiet of the Rover. In his peripheral vision, Chase saw the formidable Spanish warrior cross himself and lift a religious pendant on a thin chain around his neck, pressing the small medallion to his lips in silent prayer.

The Boston skyline loomed just ahead now, black smoke rising from smoldering buildings and the crumpled wreckage of cars left abandoned in the streets by their fleeing drivers. Screams rent the air, adding to the cacophony of violence that hung over the entire city.

Chase's thoughts went to Tavia. She hadn't left his mind for a moment in the time since he'd set out with the Order for Boston. He knew she was near, somewhere in the city. He could feel her in his blood. His veins still tingled with the pang of fear he'd picked up from her not long after the Order had set out for Boston. The jolt had been visceral but brief, and long diminished. The knowledge that she was safe now - that she was alive and unharmed - was a reassurance he clung to as the rest of the world was dissolving into bloodshed and ruin before him.

Still, the urge to wrench open the vehicle door and run to her was strong. Overwhelming. But his duty was with the Order right now, more than ever. So long as he knew she was breathing, he could do what he had to tonight.

Tavia was a strong, capable woman. She had been even before the astonishing revelation of her Breed lineage. She was smart and levelheaded. He knew that. He took comfort in the fact that his beloved - his mate, if he should ever prove worthy of the honor - was the most extraordinary female he would ever know.

But she was also courageous and determined. Two things that put a knot of worry in his chest when he considered what she might do if the violence Dragos had unleashed here tonight were to find its way to her. He prayed she'd lie low until he and the Order could clamp a lid on this hellish situation and he could break away to find her.

From the passenger seat up front, Lucan radioed the others in the second vehicle. "Tegan, take your team into the North End. Start your sweep there. The rest of us will begin in Southie, drive the Rogues together from both ends and take out as many as possible."

"On it" came the warrior's grim reply.

Behind them, the Rover's headlights veered away as Brock gunned the SUV through an obstacle course of clogged and chaotic traffic.

"Lock and load, everyone," Lucan said, casting a grave look at the rest of them. "It's gonna be a long, bloody night."

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THE TERROR CONTINUED until dawn.

Tavia hadn't slept at all. Probably no one in the city had. Probably no one across the entire bleeding nation had found a minute's rest so long as the screams and violence played out in what seemed an endless, hopeless night.

It wasn't until daybreak pushed the attacking Rogues to ground that the terror had paused. With morning came the cries of the grief-stricken and the lost - the war zone aftermath of an assault few human minds could fathom.

And it wasn't over yet.

When the sun set again, a fresh wave of carnage would come.

Tavia knew it with a dread in her marrow as she opened the front door of Chase's Darkhaven and stepped outside into the daylight. Her plan to seek out Dragos had solidified overnight. She'd taken the necessary steps, devised the method she would use to put herself in his presence and, with opportunity and any luck at all, kill the son of a bitch.

The scene outside the brownstone mansion as Tavia walked briskly was nothing short of Armageddon. Vacated cars lay scattered everywhere, headlights flashing, alarms bleating in a discordant symphony with the musical rings of what seemed to be a thousand unanswered cell phones. Smoke and ash billowed from the smoldering shells of looted storefronts and residences that had been smashed open during the worst of the attacks. Huge pools of blood soaked the snow-filled neighborhood yards and empty sidewalks.

The city was a ghost town. No one risked being out, except for Tavia and the grim-faced emergency workers patrolling the shambled streets, or the medical examiner's office personnel who soberly covered and collected the many dead.

Tavia hurried to her destination, head down, eyes stinging from the barrage of so much ugliness and destruction. She went across town, back to the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department, the same police station where she'd been just a week earlier. It seemed as though a decade had passed since she'd been summoned to identify the unnamed shooter from Senator Clarence's holiday party. Her world couldn't have rotated any farther on its axis than it had in the handful of days that followed.