Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [682]
“Oh, God,” Claire whispered, leaning back against the closed library doors for support. “I don’t understand … Who could do something like that?”
The guard shook his head. “We don’t have a clear count of how many attackers were involved in the strike, but the surviving agent said the assault was like nothing he’d ever seen before—fire everywhere, as though hell itself had blown down the gates and swept through the place. There’s nothing left but cinders.”
Claire stood there, stricken and voiceless, trying to process everything she was hearing. It was impossible … unbelievable. It just didn’t make sense. God, so much of what had been happening lately made no good sense at all.
So much random violence.
So much senseless death.
So much pain and loss …
“We can’t delay,” the guard was saying now. “We have to get you evacuated before this location comes under attack, as well.”
“You really believe that whoever did this will come out here? Why?”
This time the guard didn’t pause to tell her anything more. His fingers clamped down hard around her arm and he started walking—quickly. The message in his brisk stride was plain enough: Claire could hurry to keep up with him, or he would drag her out of there. Either way, she was leaving the premises and doing so under heavily armed, grim-faced security.
There was no stopping for a coat or her purse. She fled with the guard, out of the house and into the chill of the late October evening. The cold autumn breeze bled through the fibers of her wine cashmere sweater and her gray wool pants as she ran alongside the guard to the paved drive, the soles of her suede loafers scuffing in her effort to keep up with the longer-legged gait of the agent dragging her along by the arm.
Claire was shown to the open back door of a Mercedes that idled in the center of a vanguard of four other vehicles.
“Get in,” the guard instructed her, and gently but urgently guided her inside ahead of him.
As he slid in next to her on the leather seat and closed the door, Claire tried to rub away the bone-deep chill that seemed to emanate from within her body rather than without. Everything was happening so fast. She was still trying to come to grips with the terrible news of the attack on the Darkhaven in Hamburg, let alone register the idea that not a few minutes ago her biggest worry was the proper placement of a garden bench or flower bed. Now the handful of Wilhelm’s relatives and personal guards who’d resided at the Darkhaven were dead and she was being removed from her home in the middle of the night, fleeing from an unknown, unfathomable evil.
Why?
The question wailed in her mind. It was the same thing she’d been asking herself some three months ago, when another Darkhaven had fallen to tragedy—a tragedy that also had left behind only ash and smoke in its wake. But that had been an accident, according to the investigating Enforcement Agents. A freak explosion so fierce and total that it likely killed all of the Darkhaven’s residents instantly.
And still the question haunted her, as painfully as it had when she first heard the awful news …
Why?
“We are in and rolling,” said the guard seated behind the wheel, radioing to the other vehicles. He stepped on the accelerator, and, like a fast-moving snake, the fleet of black sedans began to speed as one down the lengthy, forest-lined driveway.
Claire sat back, trying not to feel the anxiety that hung in the stale air of the car. The woods around them seemed darker than usual, so strangely quiet. Overhead, the thin moonlight was blotted out by the densely needled tops of the towering pines. The vanguard cleared the first bend in the nearly mile-long private drive. They sped up on the straightaway, all of the cars lurching into a higher gear as they gunned it for the main road.
There was no warning of the assault that hit the lead car in that next instant.
From out of the pitch-dark forest came a blinding