Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [806]
His father was still awake.
A lamp burned in the living room, the glow from the curtained window reaching out to the surrounding darkness like a spotlight. If his father was up, he had to know that Teddy wasn’t home. And as soon as Teddy walked in, his father was going to see that he’d been partying. Which meant Teddy was in some pretty deep shit.
“God-d-dammit,” Teddy muttered as he killed the snowmachine’s headlight then steered off the main trail and cut the engine. He climbed off and stood for a minute, staring over at his house while he let his drunken legs get used to holding him upright.
Nothing he said was going to get him out of trouble. Still, he tried to come up with a reasonable excuse for where he’d been and what he’d been doing the past several hours. He was a grown man, after all. Sure, he had a responsibility to lend his father a hand where he could, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a life of his own outside the settlement. If his father gave him any shit about that, Teddy would just have to set him straight.
But as he got closer to the house, his courage began to desert him. Each careful step he took crunched loudly in the snow, amplified by the utter stillness that hung in the air. The cold swept down the collar of his parka, adding a chill to his already trembling spine. A bracing gust rolled through the center of the group of homes, and as the icy wind hit him full in the face, Teddy felt such a deep sense of dread, it made the hairs at the back of his neck rise.
He paused, glancing around him. Seeing nothing but moonlit snow and the dark silhouettes of the forest, Teddy continued on past his father’s log-cabin shop that supplied the family and the handful of other folks scattered in the surrounding region. He peered ahead, trying to determine if there might be a way for him to sneak into the house unnoticed. His breath sawed in and out of his lungs, the only sound he could hear.
Everything seemed so quiet. Lifelessly, unnaturally quiet.
It was then that Teddy stopped walking and glanced down at his feet. The snow beneath his boots was no longer white but dark—nearly black in the moonlight, a huge, horrific stain. It was blood. More spilled blood than Teddy had ever seen in his life.
There was more a few yards away. So much blood.
Then he saw the body.
To his right, lying just near the edge of the tree line. He knew that large shape. Knew the bulky heft of the shoulders beneath the thermal undershirt that was ripped and dark with more blood.
“Dad!” Teddy raced to his father and knelt down to help him. But there was nothing to be done. His father was dead, his throat and chest shredded. “Oh, no! Dad! Oh, God, no!”
Horror and grief choking him, Teddy scrambled to go find his uncle and two older cousins. How could they not know what had happened here? How was it possible that his father had been attacked like this and left to bleed in the snow?
“Help!” Teddy screamed, his throat raw. He raced next door and pounded on the jamb, calling for his uncle to wake up. Nothing but silence answered. Silence in the entire cluster of cabins and outbuildings that squatted on this tiny parcel of land. “S-s-someone! Anyone! Help me, p-p-please!”
Blinded by tears, Teddy raised his fist to bang on the door and scream again for help, but he froze in midmotion as the door drifted open. Just inside lay his uncle, as savaged and bloody as his father. Teddy peered into the darkness and saw the broken forms of his aunt and cousins.
They weren’t moving. They’d been killed, too. Everyone he knew—everyone he loved—was gone.
What the hell had happened here?
Who—or what—in God’s name could have done this?
He drifted into the center of the settlement, numb and disbelieving. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. For a split second, he wondered if the shit Skeeter had made him smoke had caused him to hallucinate. Maybe none of this was happening. Maybe he was tripping out, and