Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [549]
He’d been through a similar song-and-dance twice already tonight at other clubs, seeking out the places where members of the Breed tended to gather and hunt for blood, looking for someone who could point him toward a vampire elder named Sergei Yakut.
It wasn’t easy finding someone who didn’t want to be found, especially a secretive, nomadic individual like Yakut. He was in Montreal, that much Nikolai was sure of. He’d spoken to the reclusive vampire by phone as recently as a couple of weeks earlier, when he’d tracked Yakut down to inform him of a threat that seemed aimed at the Breed’s most powerful, rarest members—the twenty or so individuals still in existence who were born of the first generation.
Someone was targeting Gen Ones for extinction. Several had been slain within the past month, and for Niko and his brothers in arms back in Boston—a small cadre of highly trained, highly lethal warriors known as the Order—the business of rooting out and shutting down the elusive Gen One assassins was mission critical. For that, the Order had decided to contact all of the known Gen Ones remaining in the Breed population and enlist their cooperation.
Sergei Yakut had been less than enthusiastic to get involved. He feared no one, and he had his own personal clan to protect him. He’d declined the Order’s invitation to come to Boston and talk, so Nikolai had been dispatched to Montreal to persuade him. Once Yakut was made aware of the scope of the current threat—the stunning truth of what the Order and all of the Breed were now up against—Nikolai was certain the Gen One would be willing to come on board.
First he had to find the cagey son of a bitch.
So far his inquiries around the city had turned up nothing. Patience wasn’t exactly his strong suit, but he had all night, and he’d keep searching. Sooner or later, someone might give him the answer he was looking for. And if he kept coming up dry, maybe if he asked enough questions, Sergei Yakut would come looking for him instead.
“I need to find someone,” Nikolai told the four Breed youths. “A vampire out of Russia. Siberia, to be exact.”
“That where you’re from?” asked the soul-patched mouthpiece of the group. He’d evidently picked up on the slight tinge of an accent that Nikolai hadn’t lost in the long years he’d been living in the States with the Order.
Niko let his glacial blue eyes speak to his own origins. “Do you know this individual?”
“No, man. I don’t know him.”
Two other heads shook in immediate denial, but the last of the four youths, the sullen one who was slouched low in the booth, shot an anxious look up at Nikolai from across the table.
Niko caught that telling gaze and held it. “What about you? Any idea who I’m talking about?”
At first, he didn’t think the vampire was going to answer. Hooded eyes held his in silence, then, finally, the kid lifted one shoulder in a shrug and exhaled a curse.
“Sergei Yakut,” he murmured.
The name was hardly audible, but Nikolai heard it. And from the periphery of his vision, he noticed that an ebony-haired woman seated at the bar nearby heard it too. He could tell she had from the sudden rigidity of her spine beneath her long-sleeved black top and from the way her head snapped briefly to the side as though pulled there by the power of that name alone.
“You know him?” Nikolai asked the Breed male, while keeping the brunette at the bar well within his sights.
“I know of him, that’s all. He doesn’t live in the Darkhavens,” said the youth, referring to the secured communities that housed most of the Breed civilian populations throughout North America and Europe. “Dude’s one nasty mofo from what I’ve heard.”
Yeah, he was, Nikolai acknowledged inwardly. “Any idea where I might find him?”
“No.”
“You sure about that?” Niko asked, watching as the woman at the bar slid off her stool and prepared to leave. She still had more than half a cocktail in her glass, but at the mere mention of Yakut’s name, she seemed suddenly in a big hurry to get out of the place.
The Breed youth shook his head.