Veil of Midnight (11 page)

Lex grunted. “My father chooses such a life because he believes himself above the law.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s why I’m here,” Lex said. “I have information. Critical information that needs to be acted on quickly. Covertly.”

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Edgar Fabien leaned back against the cushions of the settee. “Has something…happened out at the lodge?”

“It’s been happening for a long time,” Lex admitted, feeling a queer sense of freedom as the words spilled out of his mouth.

He told Fabien everything about his father’s illegal activities, from the blood club and the boneyard full of his victims’ remains, to the keeping and frequent killing of his human Minions. Lex explained, not quite truthfully, how it had been eating him up to keep this secret for so long and how it was his own sense of morality—his sense of honor and respect for Breed law—that compelled him to seek out Fabien’s help in putting a stop to Sergei Yakut’s private reign of terror.

It was excitement—thrill at the depth of his courage—that put a quiver in Lex’s voice, but if Fabien took it for regret, so much the better.

Fabien listened, his expression carefully schooled, sober. “You understand, I’m sure, that this is no small matter. What you’ve described is…problematic. Disturbingly so. But there will be certain factors that will come into play on this type of investigation. Your father is Gen One. There will be questions for him to answer, protocols that will need to be observed—”

“Investigation? Protocol?” Lex scoffed. He shot to his feet, awash in both fear and fury. “That could take days or even weeks. A fucking month!”

Fabien nodded apologetically. “It could, yes.”

“There’s no time for that now! Don’t you get it? I am handing my father to you on a platter—all the evidence you would need for an immediate arrest is right there on his property. For fuck’s sake, I am risking my goddamn life just by standing here!”

“I am sorry.” The Darkhaven leader held up his hands. “If it’s any comfort to you, we would be more than willing to offer you protection. The Agency could remove you once the investigation begins, take you someplace safe—”

Lex’s sharp bark of laughter cut him off. “Send me into exile? I’ll be dead long before then. Besides, I’m not interested in going into hiding

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like a whipped dog. I want what I deserve. I want what I am due, after all these years of waiting for handouts from that bastard.” It was impossible to mask his true feelings now. Lex’s rage was on a full boil. “You want to know what I really want from Sergei Yakut? His death.”

Fabien’s gaze narrowed shrewdly. “That’s very dangerous talk.”

“I’m not the only one to think it,” Lex replied. “In fact, someone even had the balls enough to attempt it just last week.”

Narrower and narrower went those cunning little eyes. “What do you mean?”

“He was attacked. An assailant stole into the lodge and tried to sever his head with a length of wire, but in the end he failed. Of all the damned luck,” Lex added under his breath. “The Order feels it’s the work of a professional.”

“The Order,” Fabien repeated airlessly. “How are they involved in any of what you’ve described?”

“They sent a warrior here tonight to meet with my father. Apparently they are trying to warn the Gen Ones about the recent slayings among the population.”

Fabien’s mouth worked for a second without forming words, as if he wasn’t sure what question to tackle first. He cleared his throat. “There is a warrior here in Montreal? And what is this about recent slayings?

Whatever are you talking about?”

“Five dead Gen Ones, between North America and Europe,” Lex said, recalling what Nikolai had told him. “Some one seems hell-bent on picking off the whole remaining first generation, one by one.”

“My word.” Fabien’s face was the picture of astonishment, but something about him was bothering Lex.

“You didn’t know anything about the killings?”

Fabien rose slowly, shook his head. “I am stunned, I assure you. I had no idea. What a terrible thing.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Lex remarked.

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As he stared at the Darkhaven leader, Lex noticed a sudden stillness coming over the vampire—so still he had to wonder if Fabien was actually breathing. There was a subdued but rising panic in his raptorlike eyes. Edgar Fabien held his body in check with rigid precision, but from the look in his shifting gaze, he looked as though he wanted to bolt from the room.

How intriguing.

“You know, I would have expected you to be better informed, Fabien. Your reputation around the city paints you as quite the player. With all your Enforcement Agency friends, are you trying to tell me that none of them clued you in? Maybe they don’t trust you, eh? Maybe they have good cause.”

Now Fabien met Lex’s gaze. Amber sparks flashed in his irises, a telltale sign of a pricked nerve. “Just what kind of game are you trying to play here?”

“Yours,” Lex said, sensing an opportunity and pouncing on it. “You know about the Gen One slayings. The question is, why would you lie about it?”

“I don’t publicly discuss Agency issues.” Fabien all but spat his reply, puffing out his thin chest with self-righteous indignation. “What I know or do not know is my own business.”

“You knew about the attack on my father before I mentioned it, didn’t you? Were you the one who called for his death? What about the others who’ve been killed?”

“Good Christ, you are mad.”

“I want in,” Lex said. “Whatever scheme you’re involved with, Fabien, I want in.”

The Darkhaven leader expelled his breath sharply, then gave Lex his back as he casually walked over to one of the tall bookcases built into the silk-papered wall. He smoothed his hand along the polished wood, chuckling idly. “As illuminating and entertaining as our conversation has been, Alexei, perhaps it should end here. I think it best if you go away and calm yourself before you say anything more foolish.”

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Lex charged forward, determined to convince Fabien of his worth.

“If you want him dead, I am willing to help get it done.”

“Unwise” came the hissed reply. “I can snap my fingers and have you held on suspicion of intent to commit murder. I may still, but right now you’re going to leave and neither one of us will speak another word of this conversation.”

The drawing room door opened and four armed guards filed inside. At Fabien’s nod, the group of them surrounded Lex. Given no choice, he started to leave.

“I’ll be in touch,” he told Edgar Fabien with a light baring of his teeth. “You can count on that.”

Fabien said nothing, but his shrewd gaze remained fixed on Lex with grim understanding as he walked to the drawing room doors and gently closed them tight.

Once Lex was out on the street alone, his mind began to churn over his options. Fabien was corrupt. What a surprising, and sure to be useful, bit of information. With any luck, it wouldn’t be long before Fabien’s connections were Lex’s as well. He didn’t particularly care how he had to acquire them.

He glanced up at the beautiful Darkhaven mansion and all its pristine luxury. This was what he wanted. This kind of life—lifted high above the filth and degradation he’d known under his father’s boot heel. This was what he truly deserved.

But first he would need to get his hands dirty, if just one last time.

Lex strolled along the tree-lined, meandering road and headed back down into the city with renewed purpose.

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Ten

Nikolai woke up in total darkness, his head resting against the coffin of an apparently well-to-do Montreal man who’d been dead for sixtyseven years. The private mausoleum’s marble floor had made for a hard few hours of rest, but it served Niko well enough. The night had been creeping dangerously close to dawn when he’d left Yakut’s place, and he’d sure as hell slept the daylight off in worse places than the cemetery he found at the city’s northern edge.

With a groan, he sat up and flipped open his cell phone to check the display for the time. Shit, just after one P.M. He still had about seven or eight hours to wait in here before sundown, when it would be safe for him to be outside. Seven or eight more hours, and he was already feeling itchy from sitting idle for so long.

No doubt Boston was wondering about him by now. Niko hit the speed dial for the Order’s headquarters. Halfway through the second ring, Gideon picked up.

“Niko, for fuck’s sake. About time you reported in.” The warrior’s vague English accent sounded a bit rough. Not surprising, considering that Niko was calling in the middle of the day. “Talk to me. You good?”

“Yeah, I’m good. My objective here in Montreal is fucked ten ways to Sunday, but other than that, ’sall good.”

“No luck finding Sergei Yakut, I take it?”

Niko chuckled. “Oh, I found the bastard all right. The Gen One is alive and well and living north of the city like some kind of throwback to Ghengis Khan.”

He gave Gideon a quick rundown of everything that had happened since his arrival in Montreal—from the ass-kicking welcome he’d gotten from Renata and the other guards, to the strange handful of hours he’d spent at Yakut’s lodge, culminating with his discovery of the dead humans discarded out back and his subsequent ejection from the property.

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He described the recent failed attempt on the Gen One’s life and the incredible role Mira played in thwarting that attack. Niko left out the part about what he’d personally seen in Mira’s eyes. He saw no reason to share the details of a vision, which, despite Renata’s insistence that Mira was never wrong, had roughly zero chance—no, scratch that; it had
exactly
zero chance—of happening now.

It should have come as a relief to him to know that. The last thing he needed was to get mixed up with a female, especially a piece of work like Renata. Yakut’s blood-bonded mate. The thought still gnawed at him, far more than it should. And he wasn’t feeling particularly chipper about the fact that even the slightest recollection of that kiss with her was enough to render him as hard as the granite tomb that surrounded him.

He wanted her, and there had been a split second as he was leaving the lodge that he thought she might come after him. He had no reason to think it, but it had been a nudge in his gut, a sense that maybe Renata might run up behind him and ask him to get her out of there.

And if she had? Christ, he might have been just stupid enough to consider it.

“So,” he told Gideon, mentally steering himself back to reality. “The net of it is, we can’t count on any cooperation out of Sergei Yakut. He basically told me to shove it, and that was before I called him a sick fuck in need of a muzzle and choke collar.”

“Jesus, Niko,” Gideon sighed, probably, on the other end of the line, scrubbing his hand through his spiky blond hair in frustration. “You really said that to him—to a Gen One? You’re damn lucky he didn’t tear your tongue out before he sent you on your way.”

Probably true, Nikolai acknowledged to himself. And he’d have lost more than just his tongue if Yakut knew the kind of lust he had been feeling for Renata. “You know I’m allergic to ass-kissing, even if the ass in question happens to be Gen One. If this was a total public relations mission, you picked the wrong guy.”

“No shit.” Gideon chuckled around another low curse. “You coming back in to Boston, then?”

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“I see no reason to linger. Unless you figure Lucan will look the other way if I decide to go back and put a torch to Yakut’s house of horrors. Put him out of business, at least for a while.”

He was kidding…mostly. But Gideon’s answering silence told him that his fellow warrior knew the wheels were turning inside Niko’s head.

“You know you can’t do anything of the sort, my man. Way out of bounds.”

“And doesn’t that suck,” Nikolai muttered.

“Yeah, it does. But this kind of thing belongs to the Enforcement Agency, not us.”

“Tell me how Yakut is any different from the Rogues we take off the streets, Gid. Hell, from what I’ve seen of him, he’s worse. At least the Rogues can blame their savagery on Bloodlust. Yakut can’t even cling to blood addiction as his excuse for hunting those humans out there. He’s a predator, a killer.”

“He is protected,” Gideon said, firmly now. “Even if he wasn’t Gen One, he’s still a civilian, still a member of the Breed. We can’t touch him, Niko. Not without a lot of serious shit hitting the fan. So, whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”