Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [25]
Unlike Dante, Lucan’s sire was one of the Ancients, one of eight alien warriors who came from a distant, dark planet only to crash-land thousands of years ago on unforgiving, inhospitable Earth. To survive, they had fed on the blood of humans, decimating entire populations with their hunger and savagery. In rare instances, these foreign conquerors had successfully bred with human females—the first Breedmates—who spawned a new generation of the vampire race.
Those savage, otherworldly forebears were all gone now, but their progeny lived on, in Lucan and a few scattered others. They were the closest things to royalty in vampire society—respected, and not a little feared. The vast majority of the Breed were younger, born of second, third, and some countless dozens later generations.
The hunger was strongest in Gen Ones. So was the propensity to give in to Bloodlust and turn Rogue. The Breed had learned to live with the danger. Most had learned to manage it, taking blood only when needed, and in the smallest quantities required to sustain. They had to, for once lost to Bloodlust, there was no coming back.
Lucan’s slitted eyes fell to the twitching, shallowly breathing human on the pavement. The animal snarl he heard came from his own dry throat. As Lucan strode toward the scent of spilled, life-giving blood, Dante gave a slight but deferential bow of his dark head and backed off to let his elder feed.
CHAPTER
Five
He hadn’t even bothered to call and leave her a message last night.
Typical.
Probably had a big date with his remote control and ESPN, or maybe after he left her place the other evening, he’d met someone else and gotten a more interesting offer than schlepping Gabrielle’s cell phone back out to Beacon Hill. Hell, he might even be married, or involved with someone. Not that she’d asked, and not that asking would have guaranteed he’d have told her the truth. Lucan Thorne probably wasn’t any different than any other guy.
Except he was…different.
He struck her as being very different from anyone she had ever met before. A very private man, almost secretive. Definitely dangerous. She could no more see him sitting in a recliner in front of the television than she could envision him tied down with a serious girlfriend, let alone a wife and family. Which brought her back to the idea that he must have gotten a better offer elsewhere and decided to blow her off, an idea that stung a lot more than it should have.
“Forget about him,” Gabrielle scolded herself under her breath as she edged her black Cooper Mini to the side of the quiet rural road and cut the ignition. Her camera bag and gear sat beside her in the passenger seat. She gathered it up, grabbed a small flashlight from the glove compartment, pocketed her keys in her jacket, and got out of the car.
She closed the door quietly and cast a quick look around. Not a soul in sight, not surprising given that it was just nearing 6 A.M. and the building she was about to enter illegally and photograph had been shut down for about twenty years. She walked along the empty stretch of cracked pavement and cut a sharp right, heading down through a ditch then up into a pine-and-oak wooded lot that stood like a thick curtain wall around the old asylum.
Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon. The lighting was eerie and ethereal, a misty haze of pink and lavender shrouding the Gothic structures with an otherworldly glow. Even bathed in soft pastels, the place held an air of menace.
The contrast was what had brought her out to the location this morning. Shooting it at dusk would have been the more natural choice, capitalizing on the haunted quality of the abandoned structures. But it was the juxtaposition of warm dawn light against a cold, sinister subject that appealed to Gabrielle as she paused to retrieve her camera from the bag slung over her shoulder. She snapped off a half-dozen shots, then clapped the lens cap back on, and continued her trek toward the ghostly