Veil of Midnight (14 page)

“Well, what the hell then?” A note of panic edged the stale air, a sudden kick of human adrenaline that Lex’s heightened senses easily detected. “You sure as shit didn’t bring me here for a little polite conversation.”

“No,” Lex agreed pleasantly.

“Okay. So, what the fuck do I look like to you, asshole?”

Lex smiled. “Bait.”

With movements so fast not even the soberest human eye could track them, he reached out and hauled the junkie up off the floor. Lex had a knife in his hand. He stuck it into the human’s gaunt belly and ripped a slash across his midsection.

Blood surged out of the wound, hot and wet and fragrant.

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“Oh, Jesus!” the human screamed. “Oh, my fucking God! You stabbed me!”

Lex drew back and let the man fall back limply onto the floor. It was all he could do to keep himself from lunging after him in a blind thirst.

Lex’s physical transformation was swift, brought on by the sudden presence of fresh, flowing blood. His vision sharpened with the narrowing of his pupils, an amber glow washing over the room as his eyes changed to that of a predator. His fangs stretched long behind his lips, saliva gushing into his mouth as the urge to feed swelled.

The junkie was sobbing now, sputtering pathetically as he clutched at the gaping wound in his belly. “Are you crazy, you fucking asshole?

You might have killed me!”

“Not yet,” Lex replied thickly around his fangs.

“I have to get out of here,” the man murmured. “Gotta get help—”

“Stay,” Lex ordered him, smiling as the feeble human mind wilted under his command.

He had to force himself to keep his distance. Let the situation play out as he intended it to. A gut wound would bleed hard, but death would come slowly. Lex needed him alive for a while, long enough for his scent to travel out onto the street and into the surrounding alleyways.

The human he’d bought tonight was merely chum to be tossed into the water. Lex was looking to attract bigger fish.

He knew as well as any other member of the Breed that nothing drew a vampire faster, or more surely, than the prospect of bleeding human prey. This deep into the underbelly of the city, where even the dregs of human society rushed about in an unspoken state of terror, Lex was counting on the presence of Rogues.

He wasn’t disappointed.

The first two came sniffing around the crack house in mere minutes. Rogues were hopeless addicts, as much as the junkie now curled up in a

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fetal position and weeping quietly on the floor as his life slowly leeched out of him.

Although few of the Breed lost themselves to Bloodlust—the permanent, insatiable thirst for blood—the ones who did rarely, if ever, came back from it. They lived in the shadows, savage, rootless monsters whose only purpose in living was to feed their hunger.

Lex slid back into the corner of the room as the two predators crept inside. They immediately fell upon the human, tearing at him with fangs that never receded, eyes burning with the color and heat of fire.

Another Rogue found the room. This one was larger than the others, more brutal as he threw himself into the carnage and began to feed. A scuffle broke out among the feral vampires. The three of them turned on each other like snarling, rabid dogs. Fists pounding, fingers tearing, fangs ripping through flesh and bone, each powerful male fought viciously to win his prey.

Lex watched transfixed. Giddy from the violence, and drunk from the scent of so much spilled blood, human and Breed.

He watched, and he waited.

The Rogues would fight one another to the death, like the base animals they were. Only one of them would prove the strongest in the end.

And that was the one Lex needed.

* * *

After a whole day of waiting for nightfall, now he had another two hours to kill before he could catch his ride back to Boston.

Nikolai seriously considered skipping the airport rendezvous and heading out on foot instead, but even with his Breed stamina and hyperspeed, he would hardly clear the state of Vermont before sunrise drove him into hiding again. And frankly, the idea of bunking down in some low-country barn with a bunch of agitated livestock didn’t exactly have him dying to strap on a pair of Nikes and hit the open road.

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So, he would wait.

Damn it.

He and patience had never been the closest of friends. He’d been just about batshit with boredom by the time the sun had finally set and he was able to get out of the mausoleum shelter.

He supposed it was that same boredom that led him into the humid tenderloin of Montreal, where he hoped to find something diverting to do while he cooled his heels. He didn’t much care how he used the time, but he’d deliberately sought out the one area of the city where the odds of finding a reason to burn off steam with his knuckles or his weapons were better than good.

In this particular block of rat-infested alleys and low-rent slums, his immediate choices were limited to crack-heads, traffickers—be they dealers in narcotics or skin—and vacant-eyed streetwalkers of both genders. More than one idiot eyeballed him as he strode the block in no particular direction. Someone was even stupid enough to flash the business end of a blade at him as he passed, but Niko just paused and gave the toothless scumbag a dimpled, fang-tipped grin of invitation and the threat was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

Although he wasn’t opposed to confrontation in any form, fighting humans was a bit beneath him. He preferred more of a challenge. What he really itched to find right now was a Rogue. Last summer, Boston had been knee-deep in blood-addicted vampires. The fighting had been hard and heavy—with at least one tragic loss on the Order’s side—but Nikolai and the rest of the warriors had made it their mission to sweep the city clean.

Other metropolitan areas still lost the occasional civilian to Bloodlust, and Niko would have bet his left nut that Montreal was no different. But aside from the pimps, pushers, and prostitutes, this stretch of brick and asphalt was feeling about as dead as the crypt where he’d been forced to spend the day.

“Hey, baby.” The female smiled at him from a shadowed doorway as he walked past. “You lookin’ for something specific, or just windowshoppin’?”

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Nikolai grunted, but he paused. “I’m a specific kind of guy.”

“Well, maybe I got what you need.” She grinned at him and hopped off her perch on the concrete stoop. “Matter of fact, I’m sure I got just exactly what you need, sugar.”

She wasn’t a beauty, with her brittle, teased-up brassy hair, dull eyes, and sallow skin, but then again Nikolai didn’t expect he was going to be spending much time looking at her face. She smelled clean, if deodorant soap and hairspray could be considered clean-smelling scents. To Niko’s acute senses, the woman reeked of cosmetics and perfumes, with an undercurrent of recent narcotic use that seeped from her pores.

“Whattaya say?” she asked, sidling up to him now. “You wanna go someplace for a little while? If you got twenty bucks, I’ll give you half an hour.”

Nikolai stared at the pulse point ticking in the woman’s neck. It had been several days since he’d last fed. And he did have two hours of donothing ahead of him…

“Yeah,” he said, giving her a nod. “Let’s take a walk.”

She took his hand and led him around the corner of the building and down an empty alley.

Nikolai didn’t waste any time. As soon as they were secluded from potential onlookers, he took her head in his hands and bared her neck for his bite. Her startled cry was squashed the instant he sank his fangs into her carotid and began to drink.

The woman’s blood was unremarkable—the usual copper heaviness of human red cells, but laced with a bittersweet tang of the speedball she’d had before stepping out for her night’s work. Nikolai gulped down several mouthfuls, feeling the blood’s energy course through his body in a low vibration. It wasn’t unusual for a Breed male to get aroused by the act of feeding. The response was purely physical, an awakening of cells and muscles.

That his cock was fully erect now and straining for relief didn’t surprise him at all. It was the fact that his head was swimming with thoughts of a certain raven-haired female—a female he had no intention of seeing ever again—that made Niko rear back in alarm.

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“Mmm, don’t stop,” his human companion moaned, pulling his mouth back to the wound at her neck. She too was feeling the effects of the feeding, enthralled as all humans became when held under the bite of the Breed. “Don’t stop, baby.”

Nikolai’s vision was swamped with amber fire as he clamped back down on her throat. He knew she wasn’t Renata, but as his hands skimmed up the woman’s bare legs and under the short denim skirt she wore, he pictured himself caressing Renata’s long, beautiful thighs. He imagined it was Renata’s blood that fed him. Renata’s body that responded so eagerly to his touch.

It was Renata’s fevered gasps that drove him as he ripped at the cheap thong panties with one hand and worked to free himself with the other.

He needed to be inside her.

He needed—

Holy hell.

A light breeze eddied through the alleyway, carrying with it the stench of vampires gone Rogue. And there was spilled blood too. Human blood. A damned lot of it, mixed with the vile odor of bleeding Rogues.

Nikolai froze with his hand still on his fly, shocked stupid in one blinding instant.

“Jesus Christ.”

What the fuck was going on?

He yanked the woman’s skirt back down and swept his tongue over her neck wound, sealing up his bite.

“I said, don’t st—”

Niko didn’t give her a chance to finish the thought. With a glance of his palm over her brow, he scrubbed her mind of the entire thing. “Get out of here,” he told her.

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He was already jogging up the alley by the time she shook out of her daze and started moving. He followed his nose to a dilapidated building not far from where he’d been. The stench emanated from inside, a couple floors off the street.

Nikolai climbed the lightless stairwell to the second floor. His eyes were practically watering from the overwhelming stink of death that rolled out from under a closed door. His hand on the gun holstered at his hip, Niko approached the place. There was no sound on the other side of the battered, graffiti-tagged door. Only death, human and Breed. Niko turned the loose knob and braced himself for what he would find.

It had been a massacre.

An apparent junkie lay in a supine sprawl amid discarded syringes and other trash that littered the blood-soaked floor and a fouled mattress. The body was so ruined it was hardly recognizable as human, let alone a distinguishable gender. The other two bodies were savaged as well, but definitely Breed—without question, both of them Rogues judging by the size and stench of them alone.

Nikolai could guess what might have happened here: a lethal struggle over prey. This fight was fresh, maybe only minutes old. And the two dead suckheads wouldn’t have been able to shred each other so thoroughly before one or the other went down.

There had been at least one more Rogue involved in this scuffle.

If Niko was lucky, the victor might still be in the area, licking his wounds. He hoped so, because he’d love to give the diseased bastard a taste of his 9mm’s custom rounds. Nothing said “Have a nice day” like a Rogue’s corrupted blood system going into allergic meltdown from a dose of poisonous titanium.

Nikolai went to the boarded-up window and tossed the crudely nailed panels aside. If he was looking for action, he’d just found it in spades. Below, on the street, stood an enormous Rogue. He was bloodied and battered, looking like ten kinds of hell.

But holy shit…he wasn’t alone.

Alexei Yakut was with him.

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Incredibly, Lex and the Rogue walked toward a waiting sedan and got in.

“What the fuck are you up to?” Niko murmured under his breath as the car roared up the street.

He was about to leap out the open window and follow on foot when a shrill scream sounded behind him. A woman had wandered into the carnage and now gaped at him in terror, an accusing, shaky finger pointed in his direction. She screamed again, loud enough to wake every crackhead and dealer in the neighborhood.

Nikolai eyed the witness and the bloody evidence of a struggle that looked anything but human.

“Damn it,” he growled, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Lex’s car disappear around the corner. “It’s all right,” he told the shrieking banshee as he left the window and approached her. “You didn’t see a thing.”

He wiped her memory and shoved her out of the room. Then he took out a titanium blade and stuck it into the remains of one of the dead Rogues.

As the body began to sizzle and dissolve, Niko set about cleaning up the rest of the mess that Lex and his unlikely associate had left behind.

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