Midnight Awakening (Midnight Breed 3)

It's our ride back to Boston. I've arranged a flight out tonight.

He answered the call, his tone clipped and serious--back to warrior mode in an instant. Yeah. Right. Tegel Airport. Corporate terminal. Departure in one hour.

Elise slid off the mattress and padded over to where Tegan stood, naked and gorgeous. She wrapped her arms around him, pressing the front of her body against the hard muscles of his backside. She nipped his shoulder blade, smiling as goose bumps rose along the beautiful dermaglyphs on his arms. She heard his low growl of interest and couldn't help but smile as he cast a heated look at her.

You'd better make it two hours from now, he instructed the person on the other end of the line. Something's just come up.

Elise glanced down as he turned to face her. Something had indeed come up--quite impressively, in fact. She backed away, her lip caught in her teeth as Tegan disconnected the call, his hooded eyes rooted on her.

He tossed the phone aside.

Then he pounced.

Chapter Twenty-eight

They slept most of the trip back to Boston, Elise contentedly curled up in Tegan's arms. He'd told her that the Minion who attacked her at Irina's was dead. He'd also informed her that the human mind slave was just one of several in Berlin who'd been given orders by Marek to hunt her down. Elise had accepted the news with her usual calm understanding, but Tegan couldn't help holding her a bit tighter as she dozed across his lap.

Marek was a treacherous enemy. He'd been a formidable warrior, ruthless in battle, often unnecessarily cruel. Tegan had known Lucan's elder brother well, had trusted him with his life more than once on the field. They'd fought side by side in the Old Times, when the Breed was young and trouble with Rogues was commonplace. Marek had been one of the original members of the Order, but he'd always been the renegade. He balked at his younger brother's command--Lucan was founder of the warrior class and a natural-born leader, two things Marek seemed unable to accept. Impatience and arrogance were Marek's strongest traits, and the two things that prevented him from getting the respect he felt he deserved.

The fact that he'd been presumed dead for so long--some six centuries--only to resurface in Boston with obvious plans to target the Order, seemed to indicate that Marek had somehow learned to bide his time. He'd shown great patience in staying hidden as long as he had, and Tegan had no doubt that the vampire had been using those years to his benefit. He had a plan, and he was slowly but surely putting it into motion. That the name Dragos was suddenly in the mix, along with the Odolfs' cryptic ramblings, hinted at trouble of a very old nature.

Tegan flipped open the journal and read the strange passages again. It had to be a location, but where? And what did it signify?

That's where he's hiding, Odolf had blurted.

Tegan didn't think it referred to Marek. But could it possibly be Dragos? Or might it be someone else who wasn't even on the Order's radar yet?

Whatever Marek was after, and whatever secret it was that haunted Petrov Odolf and his kin, it did not bode well for anyone.

As the jet touched down in Boston, Tegan phoned the compound and told Gideon to assemble the others for a meeting. They were going to have to rout out Marek, wherever he'd run to, and make sure that the Order stayed one step ahead of him.

One of his Minions was dead, according to the latest report out of Berlin. Marek was enraged to lose another of his pawns, but since the human had failed to carry out his task, Marek could only hope that the Minion was made to suffer in his final moments of life. The savagery of the killing left little doubt that he had suffered greatly, his body broken and bloodied almost beyond recognition. And that fact was surprising in itself, considering the Minion's executioner had most certainly been Tegan. He had killed the Minion that Marek had dispatched to get rid of the Darkhaven female--not with the immaculate, cold efficiency the warrior was known for, but with a clearly evidenced rage.

Tegan had killed with a vengeance.

That he'd acted in retaliation over the female could mean only one thing: Tegan cared for her.

Marek could hardly wait for the chance to exploit that weakness in the warrior. He'd nearly destroyed Tegan once through his love of a woman; how gratifying it would be to use this new affection to finally finish him off for good.

How satisfying it would be to finish off all the Order, and to assume his rightful place as the ruler of all the Breed. It was what he'd been working toward all along, a plan that had required more patience than Marek had thought himself capable of.

He'd been dreaming of his crowning moment for centuries--ever since the warrior Dragos had confided in him a powerful, damning secret.

Marek got up from his desk and paced to the tall window that overlooked a moonlit Berkshires valley in the distance. The woods were thick out here, as dense as any medieval forest. The landscape reminded him of the Old Times, his thoughts returning to the Order's long-ago past.

Back then, a war had been raging within the vampire nation. It pitted father against son, except the fathers in this scenario were the band of vicious otherworlders--the Ancients, alien creatures who arrived on Earth thousands of years ago and preyed on human blood for their survival. Their eventual sons, the hybrid progeny born of alien seed carried by human mothers, formed the first generation of the Breed. Marek, Lucan, and Tegan were among those rare Gen One sons. They saw firsthand the savagery perpetrated by the Ancients on humankind, the wholesale slaughter of entire villages at times, lives lost to ravenous vampire appetites. The carnage had never disturbed Marek the way it did his younger brother.

While Lucan despised the terror the Ancients delivered, Marek often indulged in it himself. The power to stir panic and kill without recourse was heady stuff, and more than once he wondered why the Breed shouldn't simply enslave their human Hosts and claim the planet for their own. Marek had been feeding those seeds of discontent to the Ancients for some time when all of his plans were thrown into a tailspin.

In a fit of Bloodlust, his alien sire took the life of Marek and Lucan's mother. The creature slaughtered her, and Lucan, claiming justice, took the vampire's head in exchange. With that killing of an Ancient, Lucan declared war on the remaining few like him and any who served them. Lucan formed the Order, pulling Marek into the fold as well, along with Tegan and five other Gen One vampires all pledged to end the mass carnage and start a new way of life for the Breed.

Such noble, lofty intentions.

Marek could hardly contain his derisive chuckle, even now. He hadn't been the only one of the Order to bristle at Lucan's vision of a peaceful coexistence with humankind. Another warrior, Dragos, eventually confided in Marek that he had different ideas for the future of the Breed.

And even more intriguing, he'd actually taken steps to ensure that future.

While the Order waged war on the surviving Ancients, hunting them down one by one in a battle that took years to complete, one of those deadly creatures remained.