Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [283]
Elise ran the last block to her apartment and raced up the concrete steps. The main door used to be keyed access, but someone broke the lock five weeks ago and the building super hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet. Elise pushed the door open and dashed down the first floor hallway to her unit. She unlocked the deadbolt and slipped inside, immediately flipping on all the lights.
The stereo and television went on next—neither tuned to anything in particular, but both playing loudly. No longer needing the MP3 player she wore on her hunt that day, Elise pulled it off and set it down on the chipped yellow kitchen counter, along with the dead Minion’s cell phone. She ditched her ruined parka on the floor next to her treadmill, her stomach turning as the bare bulb hanging from the combination dining-living room ceiling washed over the dark red stains from the Minion’s blood. It was on her hands too; her fingers were sticky with gore.
And her head was still pounding, the usual vicious migraine that came in the wake of any prolonged period of using her skill. It wasn’t as bad as it would be soon. She still had time to clean up and try to get herself to bed before the worst of it hit her.
Elise dragged herself into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Her fingers were trembling as she unfastened the empty leather knife sheath from her thigh and placed it on the sink. She’d lost the titanium blade in the snow when the Rogue kicked it out of her grasp, but she had others. A lot of the money she’d left the Darkhavens with had gone into weapons and training equipment—things she had never wanted to know anything about but now considered necessities. How drastically her life had changed in just four months. She could never go back to what she was.
The person she had been all the time she’d lived under the protection of the Breed was gone now, dead, like her beloved mate and her son. The pain of those losses had been a furnace that devoured her old life, reduced it to cinder. She was what was left—the phoenix that rose out of the ash. Elise glanced up into the fogging mirror and met her own haunted gaze in the glass. Blood smeared her cheek and chin, grime smudged her brow, all of it like war paint. There was a feral glint in the weary eyes staring back at her.
God, she was tired…so tired. But so long as she could stand, she could fight. So long as her heart still ached for vengeance, she would use the psychic gift that had for so long been her greatest weakness. She would endure any hardship, face any risk. Whatever it took to have justice.
Tegan wiped his bloodied blade on the dead Rogue’s jacket and idly observed the swift disintegration of the last body in the alley. He blew out a curse, his senses still quivering with the heat of combat. Battle-sharpened eyes lit on the knife Elise had lost in her struggle. Tegan walked over and retrieved the weapon, which was not some dainty dagger a lady might carry for protection but a serious-looking bit of hardware. It was seven inches long, serrated near the upward jut of the tip, and unless he missed his guess, the metal was not your basic carbide steel but Rogue-eating titanium.
Which only begged the question again: What the hell was the Darkhaven female doing out on the streets alone, covered in blood, and toting warrior-grade weapons on her person?
Tegan lifted his head and sniffed at the air, searching for her scent. It didn’t take long to find it. His senses were always sharp, predatorily acute; combat lit them up like Roman candles. He pulled the heather-and-roses scent of the Breedmate into his lungs, and let it guide him deeper into the city.
The scent trailed off at a shit-hole apartment building in one of the seedier sections of the low-rent area of town. Not at all the kind of place he’d expect to find a genteel Darkhaven-raised