Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [788]
Dylan came out of the vehicle and circled around to grab her by the arms. “Claire, please, get back inside. You can’t—”
“This is the same woods I saw in Mira’s eyes,” she cried, sick with certainty. The same location where she’d felt the anguish of losing Andreas in that pile of smoking rubble and ash. “The explosion, Dylan. This is exactly what Mira showed me. It’s really going to happen. Oh, my God… no!”
Tearing loose of the other Breedmate’s hold, Claire raced into the darkened woods, her heart breaking, about to burst from her chest, and Andreas’s name a desperate prayer on her lips.
Every cell in Reichen’s body screamed for him to unleash the full power of his fury on Wilhelm Roth. It would be the matter of an instant to render the bastard nothing but ashes to be trampled under his boots.
But incinerating Roth with a single blast of rage was far too merciful. Evil like him deserved to suffer, especially after the cowardice he’d just shown in activating explosives that none of the warriors trapped in the UV cage below had any hope of escaping. His friends should not have to die as part of this bad blood between Roth and himself.
It was that thought, more than any other, that gave Reichen the ability to ignore his hatred of Roth and loose his rage on the control panel that encompassed the entire back wall of the viewing room. He threw one bolt of flame after another at the gauges and monitoring devices, until finally there was a loud pop and the entire space went dark.
He didn’t see Roth moving until the son of a bitch had managed to scramble through a side door. Reichen pivoted to the blown-out window and glanced down at the warriors leaping off the cell’s deactivated platform.
“Reichen!” It was Tegan’s deep voice calling up to him, although Reichen’s vision was swamped with amber and rippling with the heat that was escalating ever hotter inside him. “Reichen, come on! Leave the son of a bitch. He’s dead if he stays in here.”
True enough, Reichen thought. But the way his body felt now, the way his veins were seething lava and his mind fixed on one thing—destruction—he realized that the moment he’d dreaded for so long had finally arrived.
He was too far gone. The fires were intensifying within him, no longer his to control.
“Reichen, goddamn it!” Tegan shouted, hesitating when the rest of the warriors were wisely rushing to evacuate. “Forget Roth and let’s haul ass out of this place before it fucking blows!”
“Take care of her for me,” he somehow managed to say, his throat feeling as dry as kindling, scraping with each syllable. “Get her somewhere safe… do that for me, Tegan.”
He didn’t wait to hear the dark curse that shot up from the room below. Reichen took off after Wilhelm Roth, trusting the warrior—his friend—to carry out his request. If he could be certain of Claire’s safety, he didn’t need anything else.
Nothing but the knowledge that Wilhelm Roth was dead.
He stalked through the anterior hallway where Roth had run, hearing the bow of metal bending, the steel and concrete reinforcements of the underground bunker protesting his presence. Empty metal supply carts sagged as he passed them, glass windows in doors and offices shattering from the sheer intensity of the white-hot flames that ringed his limbs and torso like an impenetrable, living cocoon of energy.
“Wilhelm Roth!” he roared, coming up on the vampire from a few dozen yards away.
Roth had been running like the vermin he was, but now he slowed, then stopped. No doubt he sensed the futility in trying to escape the death that was coming to him, either by Reichen’s hand or his own, when he’d smashed that detonator switch some three minutes ago.
Roth slowly turned around to face him. “You surprise me, Reichen. I would have thought your love for my faithless mate was stronger than your hatred of me.”
Reichen grunted. He wasn’t about to discuss Claire or his feelings for her with this offal. Roth had to know that with less than three minutes on the detonator, neither one