Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [785]
For within the space on the other side of that door was a broad platform raised slightly off the floor. And on that platform was a large, pivotable chair rigged with heavy restraints built for an individual of immense size and strength. Ankle braces as thick as a woman’s thigh. Shackles for powerful wrists that must have supported hands big enough to crack an average human’s skull like a walnut.
“This is where he’s been keeping the Ancient,” Tegan said, the first of them able to form words. “Holy shit. He’s had the Ancient under his control all this time.”
“How?” Nikolai asked, then glanced down near their feet and exhaled a sober curse. “Ultraviolet light bars. Check the floor. The ceiling, too. The entire perimeter of this platform is circled by an array of UV light fixtures. When they’re activated, the UV bars would contain the Ancient inside better than the strongest, thickest kind of metal.”
The words were barely out of Niko’s mouth before a sudden, odd hum rent the air around them. Intense light exploded from all directions, so bright and hot, Reichen and the others had no choice but to cover their eyes with updrawn arms. He smelled the acrid taint of singed skin. At first, he worried that his pyro had awakened from out of nowhere. Then he realized this was something even worse.
Reichen squinted beyond the piercing blast of light, upward, toward a glassed-in viewing area he hadn’t noticed above the Ancient’s holding cell until that very moment.
Inside that viewing area stood Wilhelm Roth, grinning with smug satisfaction as Reichen, Tegan, and the rest of the warriors who’d come with them were hemmed in tight by the lethal vertical beams of ultraviolet light that surrounded them on all sides. Roth motioned to a pair of big males—black-clad, hard-eyed, and bristling with automatic weapons. Both males bore thick black polymer collars around their necks, their shaved heads and bare throats covered in Gen One glyphs, every massive, muscled inch of them seething deadly purpose. The two assassins exited both sides of the viewing area to twin landings at the top of a double flight of stairs.
They took aim on Reichen and the others trapped inside the UV light cage, then opened fire.
CHAPTER
Thirty
Claire’s heart slammed against her sternum at the sudden cacophony of gunfire that erupted over the comm device on the Rover’s dashboard. She’d been tensely monitoring the team’s progress inside Dragos’s lair along with Dylan and Rio, fear twisting like a serpent in her stomach with each step Andreas and the others took deeper into the horrible place.
Now her fear shot up her throat, exploding out of her in a scream as the sounds of ripping bullets, shouts, and chaos filled the vehicle.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, her blood freezing in her veins. “Oh, my God! No!”
She made a frantic lunge for the door handle beside her in the backseat, but Rio pivoted around from in front of her and clamped his hand down on her shoulder, keeping her in place.
“Stay, Claire. You can’t do anything to help them,” he said, his Spanish accent rolling, dark-fringed eyes grave. He hissed a curse as more gunfire cracked over the receiver.
Then, another disaster, this time from the ground level post near the barn’s entrance, where Renata and the male called Hunter were stationed.
Renata’s voice came into the vehicle in a breathless rush. “Ah, shit. We’ve got company. Four guards coming into view right now outside the old barn… Fuck, I think they’re Gen Ones—”
Blam! Blam! Blam!
More bullets began to fly the racket cutting Renata off and echoing from out of the forest like thunderclaps.
“Oh, Jesus,” Dylan whispered from her seat beside her mate in the front of the SUV as the Order came under attack both inside Dragos’s lair and outside on ground level. “Rio… what should we do?”
“Stay here, both of you,” he ordered them grimly, pulling a nasty-looking pistol out of its holster on his belt and loading the chamber. He threw open the driver-side door