Lucas

In loving memory of my brother Daniel.

I miss you every day.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I want to thank Linda Kichline for all of her hard work and dedication. These books wouldn’t be the same without her. And thanks to Patricia Lazarus for helping me find the perfect Lucas, with his golden eyes.

Endless thanks and appreciation to my very talented fellow writers, Steve McHugh and Michelle Muto, who read these manuscripts before anyone else, and whose input makes them eminently better. To John
Gorski
for answering my sometimes endless questions about guns, ammo, and pretty much every other lethal thing. To my fellow
OWG’ers
who
provide
support and distraction as needed for a tired and/or over-caffeinated writer.

For helping Lucas speak his native tongue, I am very grateful to Tracy Nugent and Beryl Nugent for their help with Irish translations, and to John Hart (www.gaelicclothing.com) for providing both translations and transliterations. All of them gave generously of their time and effort to keep my Irish accurate, and any mistakes are solely my fault not theirs. For advice about horses, and their training and breeding, my sincere thanks to Valerie Strauss, and, once again, any mistakes I made are
mine
alone.

Thank you to Judy Peterson for her thoughtful donation to the L. A. Banks auction, and for lending me her name and character for LUCAS. Hope you like her, Judy!

And last but never least, love and gratitude to my family for more reasons than I can count, and especially to my wonderful husband who too often loses his wife to a laptop computer.

Other Books by D. B. Reynolds

Raphael

Jabril

Rajmund

Sophia

Duncan

Betrayed (E-book
Only
)

Coming Soon

Aden

For more info, visit me at www.dbreynolds.com

Copyright

Kindle ISBN:
 
978-1-61026-101-2

EPub
ISBN:
 
978-1-61026-102-9

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Lucas Copyright 2012 by Donna Beltz.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of ImaJinn Books, Inc.

Cover design by Patricia Lazarus

Cover photo credits:

Kathryn—area381—123rf

Lucas—
curaphotography
—
CanStock
Photos

Contact us at:

ImaJinn Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 74274
,
Phoenix
,
AZ
85087

Toll Free: 1-877-625-3592

http://www.imajinnbooks.com

Prologue

Quantico
,
Virginia

Special Agent Kathryn Hunter lay on her stomach in the dirt, the butt of her Sig Sauer 3000 rifle
snugged
into the curve of her shoulder. She leaned into the
Leupold
scope and settled the crosshairs on her target. Data ran through her brain, was processed, and let go. Like all snipers, she tended to step out of the moment when she was shooting, focusing only on the target, the shot. She concentrated on taking shallow, even breaths, her entire world reduced to what she could see beyond the crosshairs.

It was a relatively easy shot. Eighty yards, less than the length of a football field. A slight breeze was blowing, but at this distance, that wasn’t enough to matter. The target was stationary, but armed. Not a problem. Law enforcement snipers were trained to go for the head shot, to immediately incapacitate a subject holding a weapon, if necessary. It was a shot she’d made a hundred times on the range. No hesitation, no nerves. Just line up the shot and take it.

Kathryn heard the go-ahead come over her radio. She exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger.

“And bye-bye terrorist!
Kathryn, baby, you are the best!” Eduardo Saver, her friend and the day’s range supervisor, said over the radio, confirming what she already knew. She’d hit the target dead on. His enthusiastic reaction wasn’t exactly protocol, but there were only the two of them on the range this afternoon, so he’d gone for friendship instead of professionalism. Kathryn grinned as her heart started pumping again, and she felt the rush of adrenaline begin to fade. Her body didn’t care that this was just another practice shoot in a long line of practices. Once she got behind the scope, everything narrowed down to the crosshairs and the annihilation of her target.

“Thanks, Eduardo,” she said as he came up behind her.

“
You going
out with the rest of us later?” Eduardo asked. “Time to let some hair down,
chica
. All work and no
play .
 . .”

Kathryn turned as she sat up from her prone position, her hand going self-consciously to her hair in its tight French braid. She forced a laugh.
“Maybe.
The usual place?”

“Naturally,” Eduardo said. He looked down at her with a leering grin. “I’ll be waiting.”

“Uh huh.”
She rolled her eyes at him. Eduardo wasn’t interested in her that way. She was too tall and too pale for his tastes. “I’ve got to stow this,” she said, indicating her weapon. “But maybe I’ll see you there.”

She
stood,
reaching automatically for the cell phone on her belt and switching it back on. It was always off during range exercises. The phone vibrated almost at once, and she pulled it off her belt one-handed, frowning at the message she saw there.

“Problem?”

She looked up. “I don’t think so. It’s Penelope Bateman, my brother’s agent. He’s on one of his solitary photo adventures, and she’s probably just calling with a message from him. He does that sometimes if he can’t get a hold of me.”

Eduardo touched her arm to get her attention. “See you at the bar.”

“Yeah,” she agreed absently, giving him a brief glance before returning to the call log on her phone. Penny had called several times in the last hour.

She placed her weapon on the wood plank table and popped the magazine, checking automatically to be certain the weapon was empty. She then wiped it down and used a soft brush on the scope lenses before placing it in the custom-made hard shell case. After closing the case, she made a few notes in her field book, mostly range and target information, since shooting conditions had been as close to ideal as they ever got. As she wrote, she bemoaned, as always, that so far she’d never had a chance to fire her weapon anywhere
except
on the range. She was a skilled shooter, but since 9/11, the FBI’s emphasis was all about terrorism. She spent far more of her time sitting at a desk than she did out in the field, and had begun to regret the
Quantico
posting she’d been so excited about a few years ago.

She sighed and tucked the field book away, then pulled out her cell phone and hit the call back on Penny’s last message.

“Kathryn!” Penny answered almost before the phone had stopped ringing the first time.

“What’s up, Penny, did you—”

“Something
terrible’s
happened! Danny’s missing!”

Chapter One

Two Weeks Later

Near the Minnesota/Wisconsin Border

The huge SUVs were three black blurs of speed as they roared through the night. Lucas
Donlon
sat in the middle seat of the second SUV, listening to the chatter of his vampires, both around him and through his headset for those in the other trucks. They were hyped and ready for action, almost
too
hyped after the hours of travel to get this far. Even with a private jet, it took time.

But they were here now, and Lucas was with his warriors in feeling the rush of impending battle, the pump of adrenaline as he prepared to fight to the death. It was a rare thing in this civilized world, with its laws and cameras everywhere. But tonight’s confrontation would mark the beginning of a war between vampires—something this continent hadn’t seen in nearly a century.
And how better to start a war than with the death of a traitor?
Alfonso
Heintz
didn’t know they were coming for him, but he would soon, and his fear would taste just as sweet as his blood. Maybe better.

The trucks rolled down the unlit rural roads, running dark. The vampire drivers didn’t need the lights to see by, and Lucas didn’t want to advertise his presence to anyone yet, human or vampire. Not until he had his prey cornered. Alfonso
Heintz
was sworn to Lucas, but had recently moved his entire household just over the border into
Wisconsin
, near the small college town of
River
Falls. It was no more than 30 miles from
Minneapolis
, but crossing the border between
Minnesota
and
Wisconsin
took him out of Lucas’s
Plains
Territory
and into the
territory
of
Lucas
’s enemy, the Lord of the
Midwest
,
Klemens
.

Had Lucas needed it,
Heintz’s
move over the border would have confirmed the vampire’s guilt. But he already knew the vampire was guilty and needed no more evidence. In truth, if the traitor had known his betrayal had been discovered, he’d have moved much farther than a few miles over the border. As if a few miles, or a few
thousand
miles, would ever stop Lucas from exacting the justice he was due. This was war. Boundaries no longer mattered.

But whether or not
Heintz
realized he’d been discovered, he would surely have a guard or two on lookout. Unfortunately for
Heintz
, most of the vampires hiding away with him were also sworn to Lucas, a fact that he clearly didn’t fully appreciate, in terms of its ramifications for security. Lucas could drop any vampire sworn to him with nothing more than a thought. It was likely, of course, that one or two of
Klemens’s
people would be in the house tonight, and they’d require close up killing. But then, Lucas had no intention of winning this battle from a distance. He intended to punish the traitors in a very up close and personal fashion. In fact, he hoped
Heintz
and his fellow miscreants put up one hell of a fight, because Lucas and his people were ready to rock and roll.