Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [29]
She couldn’t hear her pursuer now. Maybe she had lost him in the dark twisting hallways. God, she hoped so.
Gabrielle shot to her feet and ran for the breached corner of the perimeter fence. She found it quickly. Diving to her hands and knees, she scrambled under the snipped section of wire, heart pounding in her ears, adrenaline jetting through her veins. She was too panicked: in her haste to flee, she scraped the side of her face on a rough edge of wire. The cut burned her cheek and she felt the hot trickle of blood running near her ear. But she ignored the searing sting and the bruising crush of her camera case as she wriggled on her belly through the fence and out toward freedom.
Once clear of the fence, Gabrielle leaped up and made a mad dash across the wide, rough lawn of the outer grounds. She spared only the barest glance behind her—long enough to see that the huge security guard was still there, having exited from somewhere on the ground floor and was now bounding after her like a beast straight out of hell. Gabrielle swallowed a knot of sheer panic at the sight of him. The guy was built like a tank, easily 250 pounds and all of it muscle, capped off by a large square head, his hair buzzed military style. The big man ran up to the tall fence and stopped at last, smashing his fist against the links as Gabrielle sped into the thick cover of trees separating the property from the road.
Her car was on the side of the quiet stretch of pavement, right where she had left it. With trembling hands, Gabrielle fumbled with the locked door, petrified that G.I. Joe on steroids might catch up to her yet. Her fear seemed irrational, but that didn’t stop the adrenaline from pouring through her. Dropping down into the leather seat of the Mini, Gabrielle slammed the key into the ignition and turned over the engine. Heart racing, she threw the little car into drive, stomped on the gas pedal, and ripped out onto the road, making her escape in a screech of spinning tires and burning rubber.
CHAPTER
Six
At midweek in the height of the summer tourist season, Boston’s parks and avenues were clotted with humanity. Commuter trains sped people in from the suburbs, to workplaces and museums, and to the countless historic sites located around the city. Camera-toting gawkers clambered onto excursion buses and horse-drawn carriages to putter around town, while others lined up to board over-priced, overcrowded charter tours that would haul them by the hundreds out to the Cape.
Not far from the daytime bustle, secreted some three-hundred feet beneath a heavily secured mansion outside the city, Lucan Thorne leaned over a flat-panel monitor in the Breed warriors’ compound and muttered a ripe curse. Vampire identification records scrolled up the screen’s display with machine-gun speed as a computer program searched a massive international database for matches against the photos Gabrielle Maxwell had taken.
“Anything yet?” he asked, slanting an impatient look at Gideon, the machine’s operator.
“Zip, so far. But my search is still clocking. IID’s got a few million records to scan.” Gideon’s sharp blue eyes flashed over the rims of sleek silver shades. “I’ll get a lock on your suckheads, don’t worry.”
“I never do,” Lucan replied, and meant it. Gideon had an IQ that was off the charts, compounded by a streak of tenacity that ran a mile wide. The vampire was as much relentless bloodhound as he was flat-out genius, and Lucan was damned glad to have him on his side. “If you can’t flush them out, Gideon, no one can.”
Beneath his crown of cropped, spiky blond hair, the Breed’s computer guru bared a cocky, confident grin. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
“Yeah, something like that,” Lucan said, drawing away from the screen’s nonstop roll of information.
None of the Breed warriors who had signed on to protect the race from the scourge of the Rogues did so for any kind of payback. They never had, not from the first forming of their alliance in what was mankind’s medieval era to now. Each warrior had his reasons