Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [733]
She flew into the restroom, breathless and trembling. If she felt in her blood that Wilhelm was near, then he had to know that she was in the city now, too. The odds of him coming to look for her were too awful to consider. Conversely if Andreas were to force her to help him find Wilhelm through her blood bond? She would never forgive herself, or him.
And there was a larger, more troubling question, as well. What if Wilhelm Roth truly was involved in something bigger than she’d ever guessed—something related to Dragos? How could Andreas stand up to Wilhelm’s death squads and the greater evil of someone not even the Order had been able to defeat thus far?
Oh, God. She couldn’t let Andreas know that Wilhelm was in the area.
As much as he wanted his revenge, Claire wanted him alive even more. She could not be a party to his destruction, which was exactly what she was right now, so long as she remained in his company.
She had to get out of Boston.
She had to get far away from Andreas… before the bond she shared with Wilhelm Roth betrayed her and led him directly to his death.
“You sure that’s what you saw? Because this is some serious shit, and I need to be absolutely clear.” Lucan stopped his pacing of the tech lab to look at Kade and Brock, who’d just come in from patrol with one hell of a report. “There’s no doubt in either of your minds that it was Hunter.”
“Yeah,” Kade said, raking his fingers through the thicket of his spiky black hair. His dark-lashed, quicksilver eyes held Lucan’s gaze. “It was him. Hard to mistake those glyphs, and it’s not as if we run into Gen Ones every night on patrol.”
Lucan grunted. “And he saw you both—he recognized you, too?”
“Son of a bitch looked right at us before he disappeared into the city,” Brock replied. The black warrior bared his teeth in a scarcely contained snarl. “It was like he wanted us to see him. Like he wanted us to see what he had done.”
While Lucan absorbed that bit of happy news, the tech lab’s doors whisked open and Chase came stalking into the room. He smelled of gunpowder, adrenaline, and the metallic odor of coagulating human blood.
At the interruption, Gideon turned away from his computers as a screen full of hacked data scrolled behind him. “Jesus, Harvard. What the hell happened to you?”
The ex-agent dropped into a slouch in the nearest chair and swept off his black knit skullcap to toss it on the conference table in front of him. “I just spent the last hour disposing of a dead gangbanger over on the north side of town. Someone tore the bastard’s throat out and practically drained him. Left him lying where he dropped, right out in the open for anyone to find the body.”
Lucan caught Kade’s sidelong glance. The description of the injuries and the brazen manner of the attack was too damned similar to be coincidence. “You see any trace of the vampire who did it?”
Chase looked up and hesitated, as though he wasn’t sure he ought to speak his suspicions aloud. “I saw someone in the area, but he took off before I got a close enough look to positively ID him.”
“Yeah, well, we sure as shit got close enough,” Kade interjected.
Chase’s steely blue eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“After you left the club tonight, Brock and I ran across the same kind of thing in Dorchester. Human with a serious case of shredded larynx, trailing blood for about two blocks and left for dead in a public area. When we tracked the victim, his killer was still hanging close. Big bastard with Gen One glyphs and a shaved head.”
“Ah, fuck,” Chase said on a slow exhale. “So, it really was Hunter. I saw him, too, but my gut was telling me not to condemn him until I got a better look. Damn, I know the guy doesn’t have a lot of social skills, given his background, but this shit is psychotic.”
“Guess we don’t have to ask him what he likes to do in his spare time,” Gideon put in dryly.
Lucan shot his fellow warriors a dark look. “If anyone sees him or hears from him, I wanna know ASAP. And if any of you witness another human slaying like the ones tonight