Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [729]
“You mean, other than walking around all the time with that Agency-installed stick shoved up his ass?” Kade drawled, looking at the big warrior who’d been recruited into the Order out of Detroit around the same time he’d come in from Alaska.
It wasn’t that Kade didn’t like Sterling Chase—or Harvard, as he was sometimes referred to, on account of his fancy Ivy League pedigree. Chase was a competent enough warrior, one of the best, in fact. He was a crack shot and one hell of a man to have at your back in combat, but on the personal side, he was as cold as a glacier.
“I don’t know what his deal is,” Brock said. “But he’d better watch his step, is all I’m saying. He strikes me as the kind who’s got one foot in the grave and the other one eager to follow. He just doesn’t give a shit about anything, and that is dangerous. Not only to himself, but to anyone who needs to count on him.”
Kade considered that as he glanced out across the bar and dance floor.
A couple of young females were heading over from a table nearby. Brock gave them his knockout grin, the one that never failed to net him the hottest woman in any gathering. The guy had moves, no doubt about it. Not that Kade was any kind of slouch. He eyed the pair of lovelies as they sauntered through the crowd, locked on to the two vampires like laser-guided missiles.
“You can have the blonde,” he murmured, setting his own sights on the brunette with the legs that went on forever under her short red leather miniskirt.
It took all of three seconds for Brock and him to talk the ladies into stepping outside with them. Unfortunately, once they were out in the parking lot, it only took another three for Kade’s nose to twitch with the prickling of his Breed senses coming online with a vengeance.
He smelled blood.
Fresh blood, and a lot of it, coming from somewhere around the rear of the club.
A glance to Brock told him that the other vampire hadn’t missed the coppery tang of spilled human red cells, either. They broke into a tandem jog, leaving the women complaining in their wake as the two of them hauled ass to the back of the building.
Nothing there.
The lone working security light mounted to the roof of the place shone down on empty concrete and sparse, weed-choked grass. But the scent of blood permeated the air, particularly strong for Kade and any of his kind.
“There,” he said, spotting the dark stain in the dirt a few feet away from him.
Spatters in close proximity to each other soaked the dry earth near a leaning stretch of ragged chain-link fence. The bleeding human took the worst of his damage over there, and the trail of hemoglobin on the ground made it clear that whatever had happened, the victim wasn’t going to get too far before he or she bled out completely.
“This isn’t only human blood,” Brock said, his deep bass voice grim. “The attacker was Breed. He spilled some of his own blood in the process.”
Now that the warrior mentioned it, Kade’s nose also picked up on something other than basic Homo sapiens cells. “Not a Rogue,” he guessed, detecting none of the foul odor left behind by the addicts of their race. “Who else would be idiot enough to feed this carelessly and let his Host stagger off like a stuck pig?”
Brock shook his head, but suspicion darkened his steady, obsidian gaze. Although he didn’t say it, Kade read the quiet doubt in the big male’s eyes.
“Chase?” Kade scoffed. “No fucking way.”
“Something’s not right with him, man.”
“Not this,” Kade said. The ex-agent was no Mr. Rogers, but to bleed out a human and break one of the Breed’s most essential laws? When he said he had an itch that needed scratching, he sure as hell couldn’t have meant something like this …
Brock nodded gravely. “Maybe we’d better go have a look, just to be sure.”
They took off, following the blood trail across a vacant lot and down a narrow alley. The deeper they went, the more serious the blood spill became. Spatters turned to pools, some of them spread wide and smeared from where the victim had apparently fallen