Taken by Midnight (Midnight Breed 8)

Together the four of them raced out of the weapons room, gathering their guns and gear as they went.

At the same instant, Jenna and Renata both had their pistols drawn and leveled on the smiling nun--the Minion, whose dead eyes looked through them as though they weren't there.

As though they were nothing, meant nothing.

Which to this woman, Jenna knew without question, they weren't, and didn't.

Behind Sister Grace, two bulky men now stood. They'd been lurking in the shadows of the hallway at her back, summoned forward even before Jenna and Renata had raised their guns to shoot. The men's eyes held the same cold stare as the nun's. Each of them held a large pistol--one aimed at Renata, the other leveled on Jenna.

The standoff played out in wary silence for a long moment, time that she used to calculate possible ways of disabling one or both of the men without putting either Alex or Dylan in harm's way in the process. But damn, it didn't seem viable. Even if she hoped to use the implant-enhanced speed her reflexes seemed to have now, the risk to her friends was too great to chance it.

And then, more bad news.

From somewhere to her left, another male Minion stepped up and rested the cold nose of a revolver against her head.

The nun smiled her false smile. "I'm going to have to ask you girls to put down your weapons now."

Renata didn't budge. Neither did Jenna, despite the metallic click of turning gears as the Minion at her side chambered a round.

"How long have you been working for Dragos?" Renata asked the female mind slave. "He's your Master, am I right?"

Sister Grace blinked, unfazed. "One more time, dear. Put down your weapon. The rug you're standing on has been in my family for more than two hundred years. It would be a pity to ruin it by having Arthur or Patrick here blast a fucking hole in your chest."

Jenna's own chest constricted with fear at the thought of any of her friends being hurt by these Minion assholes. She waited in tense, terrified silence, watching as Renata's lean arm muscles lost some of their tautness.

Jenna thought she was about to comply, but the subtle, sidelong glance Renata gave her seemed to indicate otherwise.

Jenna acknowledged that look with a barely discernible shift of her own gaze. There would be only one chance to make her move. A split second to either make it work or lose everything in an instant.

Renata exhaled a resigned-sounding sigh.

She started to lower her gun ...

As she did so, Jenna seized on every bit of speed she could summon from the tendons and sinews of her human limbs. She pivoted with blinding swiftness and snapped the wrist of the Minion holding her at gunpoint. He screamed in pain, throwing the whole room into a state of chaos.

In what seemed like slow motion to Jenna but probably played out in fractions of seconds, she leveled her pistol on the fallen Minion and put two bullets in his head. Renata meanwhile had shot one of the others behind the nun. As the second Minion spurted a bloody fountain from his chest and dropped to the floor, Sister Grace turned to dash for the hallway.

Jenna was on her before she could take even two steps.

She leapt over the Minion, heading her off in an instant. She thrust her hands out at the woman and shoved her backward, sending the gray-haired monster airborne. She crashed down onto the parlor floor as Renata plugged the last of the male Minions and left the body twitching and bleeding on Sister Grace's heirloom rug.

Jenna stalked over to the scrabbling Minion nun and hauled her up onto the delicate silk-covered settee near the window. "Start talking, bitch.

How long have you been serving Dragos? Did you already belong to him when you were working in his shelter?"

The Minion grinned through bloodstained teeth and shook her head.

"You won't get anything out of me. You don't scare me. Death doesn't scare me."

As she spoke, a pair of heavy footsteps thundered up from somewhere below the house. Two more Minions, racing up from the cellar. The door off the hallway crashed open as they stormed out. Renata swung around and nailed each one dead center in the head, stopping them in their tracks.>"I hope we have better luck here," Alex said from beside Jenna in the backseat, peering out at the impressive estate as they followed the white picket fence in front, then turned into the narrow driveway.

As Renata parked the Rover near the house, Dylan pivoted around from next to her up front. "If she can't help identify some of the missing women from the New York shelter, maybe she'll be able to tell us the names of the Breedmates in the two new sketches Claire Reichen has given us."

Jenna got out of the back with Alex, both of them coming around to the front of the Rover, where Renata and Dylan now stood. "I didn't realize we had new sketches."

"Elise picked them up from her Darkhaven friend yesterday."

Dylan handed Jenna a manila file folder as they walked toward the gingerbread-style veranda and front porch of the house. Jenna opened the folder as she followed her companions up the creaky wooden steps to the front door. She glanced inside at the artist's renderings, which were based on Claire's recollections of faces she saw some months ago, when her talent for dreamwalking had given her unexpected access to one of Dragos's hidden labs.