Kiss of Midnight (Midnight Breed 1)

Chapter Three

Two full days passed.

Gabrielle tried to put the horror of what she had witnessed in La Notte's alleyway out of her mind. What did it matter, anyway? No one had believed her. Not the police, who had yet to send anyone to see her as they had promised, and not even her friends.

Jamie and Megan, who had seen the thugs in leather harassing the punker inside the club, said the group left without incident sometime during the course of the night. Kendra had been too involved with Brent - the guy she picked up on the dance floor - to notice any trouble elsewhere in the club. According to the cops at the station Saturday night, the story had been the same from everyone their dispatched patrol had questioned at La Notte. A brief scuffle at the bar, but no reports of violence in or outside of the club.

No one had seen the attack she reported. There had been no hospital or morgue admissions. Not even a damage report filed by the cabbie at the curb.

Nothing.

How could that be? Was she seriously delusional?

It was as if Gabrielle's eyes were the only ones truly open that night. Either she alone had witnessed something unexplainable, or she was losing her mind.

Maybe some of both.

She couldn't deal with all the implications in that idea, so she sought solace in the one thing that gave her any joy. Behind the sealed door of her custom-built darkroom in the basement of the townhouse, Gabrielle submerged a sheet of photo paper in the tray of developing solution. From pale nothingness, the image began to take shape beneath the surface of the liquid. She watched it come to life - the ironic beauty of strong ivy tentacles spreading over the decayed brick and mortar of an old Gothic-style asylum she had recently discovered outside the city. It came out better than she had hoped, teasing her artist's fancy with the potential of an entire series centered on the haunting, desolate place. She set it aside and developed another photo, this one a closeup of a pine sapling sprouting from between a crack in the crumpled pavement of a long-abandoned lumberyard.

The images made her smile as she lifted them out of the solution and clipped them to the drying line. She had nearly a dozen more like these upstairs on her worktable, wry testaments to the stubbornness of nature and the foolishness of man's greed and arrogance.

Gabrielle had always felt something of an outsider, a silent observer, from the time she was a kid. She chalked it up to the fact that she had no parents - no family at all, except the couple who had adopted her when she was a troubled twelve-year-old, bounced from one foster home to another. The Maxwells, an upper-middle-class couple with no children of their own, had kindly taken pity on her, but even their acceptance had been at arm's length. Gabrielle was promptly sent to boarding schools, summer camps, and, finally, an out-of-state university. Her parents, such as they were, had died together in a car accident while she was away at college.

Gabrielle didn't attend the funeral, but the first serious photograph she took was of two maple-shaded gravestones in the city's Mount Auburn Cemetery. She'd been taking pictures ever since.

Never one to mourn the past, Gabrielle turned off the darkroom light and headed back upstairs to think about supper. She wasn't in the kitchen two minutes before her doorbell rang.

Jamie had generously stayed over the past two nights, just to make sure Gabrielle was all right. He was worried about her, as protective as a big brother she never had. When he left that morning, he had offered to come by again, but Gabrielle had insisted she would be fine by herself. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoyance that she might not have any alone time tonight, either.

"Be right there," she called from inside the apartment's foyer.

Habit made her check the peephole, but instead of seeing Jamie's blond sweep of hair, Gabrielle found the dark head and striking features of an unfamiliar man waiting on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the sidewalk just off her front steps. The soft yellow glow wrapped itself around the man like a golden cloak draped over night itself. There was something ominous, yet compelling, about his pale gray eyes, which were staring straight into the narrow cylinder of glass as if he could see her on the other side, too.>He smelled it now as well, a delicate note that clung to the night, teasing his senses and calling to something primitive within him. His gums ached with the sudden stretching of his fangs, a physical reaction to need - carnal, or otherwise - that he was powerless to curb. He scented her, and he hungered, little better than his Rogue brethren.

Lucan tipped his head back and dragged the essence of the woman deeper into his lungs, tracking her across the city with his keen sense of smell. The sole witness to the Rogues' attack, it was more than unwise to let her keep the memory of what she had seen. Lucan would find the female and take whatever measures were necessary to ensure the protection of the Breed.

And in the back of his mind, an ancient conscience whispered that whoever she was, she already belonged to him.

"I'm telling you, I saw the whole thing. There were six of them, and they were tearing at the guy with their hands and teeth - like animals. They killed him!"

"Miss Maxwell, we've been over this numerous times already tonight. Now, we're all tired and the night is only getting longer."

Gabrielle had been at the police station for more than three hours, trying to give her account of the horror she witnessed outside La Notte. The two officers she spoke with had been skeptical at first, but now they were getting impatient, almost adversarial. Soon after she had arrived, the cops had sent a squad car around to the club to check out the situation and recover the body Gabrielle had reported seeing. The call had come up empty. No reports of a gang altercation and no evidence whatsoever of anyone having met with foul play. It was as if the entire incident had never happened - or had been miraculously swept clean.

"If you would just listen to me... if you would just look at the pictures I took - "

"We've seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times already. Frankly, nothing you've said tonight checks out - not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable images from your cell phone."

"I'm sorry if the quality is lacking," Gabrielle replied, acidly. "The next time I'm witnessing a bloody slaughter by a gang of psychos, I'll have to remember to bring my Leica and a few extra lenses."

"Maybe you want to rethink your statement," suggested the elder of the two officers, his Boston accent tinged with the Irish brogue of a youth spent in Southie. He stroked a chubby hand over his thinning brow, then slid her cell phone back across the desk. "You should be aware that filing a false police report is a crime, Miss Maxwell."

"This is not a false report," she insisted, frustrated and not a little angry that she was being treated like the criminal here. "I stand by everything I've said tonight. Why would I make this up?"

"That's something only you can answer, Miss Maxwell."

"This is unbelievable. You have my 911 call."

"Yes," agreed the officer. "You did, indeed, make a call to emergency dispatch. Unfortunately, all we have is static on the recording. You didn't say anything, and you didn't respond to the dispatcher's requests for information."