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“Yeah. No worries,” Kade replied, but his mouth was on automatic pilot.

He’d left his family’s settlement in Alaska roughly a year ago to join the Order in Boston. It had been an abrupt departure, one spurred by the urgent summons he’d received from Nikolai, a warrior of the Order whom Kade had met decades past when his travels had taken him from Alaska’s frozen tundra to that of Niko’s Siberian homeland.

There were things Kade had left unfinished in Alaska. Things that haunted him still—worse, for the time and distance that had kept him away all these long months.

If anything had happened and he hadn’t been there to step in …

Kade pushed the thought from his head as he and Brock turned down one of the corridors that would lead them to the tech lab.

Lucan, the dark-haired Gen One, was waiting there in the compound’s glass-walled war room with Gideon, the blond, deceptively disheveled-looking resident genius who ran the Order’s extensive collection of technology. The pair stood together in front of a flat-screen monitor. Lucan raked his fingers over his sternly set jaw just as the lab’s transparent doors whisked open to permit Kade and Brock inside.

“How did the lead work out tonight in Roxbury?” he asked when the two warriors had entered the room.

Kade gave a brief rundown of what they found out from the skin trader, which wasn’t much. But as Kade spoke, he couldn’t keep his attention from drifting to the monitor behind Lucan. When the big male started to pace in that way he always did when he was either pissed off or deep in thought, Kade got his first good look at the image filling the computer screen.

It wasn’t pretty.

A blurry photo—or maybe it was a freeze-framed video image—splashed garish red and white across the monitor. Blood and snow. A brutal killing in the frozen wilds of Alaska. Kade knew it instinctively, and the knowledge cut through him like the edge of a blade.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice so wooden it sounded apathetic, wholly undisturbed.

“Nasty bit of video showed up on the Internet today,” Lucan said. “From what we can tell, this was captured by a cell phone camera a couple of days ago and uploaded from a Fairbanks ISP to a website that caters to crime-scene gawkers and other sick bastards who get off on viewing the dead.”

He gave a look to Gideon and with a click of the computer mouse, the frozen image onscreen came to vivid life. Over the excitable breathing and crunching footsteps of the person holding the camera, Kade watched as the crudely shot video showed the scene of what must have been a very brutal slaying.

A bloodied body lay dead on a snow-covered, gore-stained patch of land. The lens’s focus was shaky, but the operator managed to zoom in tight on the victim’s wounds. Shredded clothing and skin. A number of unmistakable tears and punctures that could only have been made by some very sharp teeth.

Or fangs.

“Jesus,” Kade muttered, struck by the savagery of the killing—the totality of it—as the video played past the four-minute mark and moved on to document no less than three more dead in the snow and ice.

“This looks like the work of Rogues,” Brock said, his deep voice as grim as his expression.

It was a sorry but unavoidable fact of life that there were members of the Breed population who could not—or simply would not—control their thirst for blood. While the majority of the vampire nation abided by laws and reasonable good sense, there were others who gave in to their hungers with no thought for the consequences. Those of the Breed who fed too much, or too frequently, soon found themselves addicted, lost to Bloodlust, the disease of the Rogues. Once a vampire tipped that scale, there was little hope for him to turn himself around.

Bloodlust was almost always a one-way ticket to madness … and death. If not by edict of the Order, then by the disease itself, which made even the most careful Breed male reckless. All a Rogue knew was his thirst. He would kill indiscriminately, take any