Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [820]
It was obvious that his father hadn’t yet heard about the recent slayings. Kade didn’t mention them, nor did he speak of the mission that was sending him north. Instead, Kade cleared his throat and asked the question that had been burning in his gut since the moment he heard there had been trouble in Alaska.
“How’s Seth doing? Is everything all right with him?”
Kade’s blood went a bit cold in the hesitant silence that preceded his father’s reply. “He is well. Why do you ask?”
Kade heard the suspicion in his father’s voice, the mild disapproval that always had a way of creeping into the elder male’s voice whenever Kade dared to question matters concerning his brother. “Just wondering if he might be around, that’s all.”
“Your brother had Darkhaven business to attend to for me in the city” came the terse reply. “He left a few weeks ago.”
“A few weeks,” Kade echoed. “That’s a long time for him to be away. Have you heard from him at all recently?”
“Not recently, no. Why?” On the other end of the line, his father seemed to go silent with impatience. “What exactly is this about, Kade? A year without any contact from you, and now you want to interrogate me about your brother’s comings and goings. What is it you want?”
“Forget it,” Kade said, instantly regretting that he’d made the call in the first place. “Just forget I called. I gotta go.”
He didn’t wait for his father’s reply. Frankly, he didn’t need to hear it.
Kade ended the call without another word, his thoughts swirling with the grisly images he’d seen in the tech lab a short time ago and the knowledge that his brother had not been accounted for in potentially a number of weeks.
His brother, who shared the same dark talent as Kade.
The same dangerously seductive wildness—the violent power—that could so easily slip out of control. And had, at least once, Kade acknowledged with grim recollection.
“Goddamn it, Seth.”
He tossed the phone onto the bed. Then, with a furious growl, he whirled on his heel and slammed his fist into the nearest wall.
CHAPTER
Four
The Arctic storm had pounded the Alaskan interior for two days straight, dumping three feet of snow on the small town of Harmony and its far-flung neighbors along the river and plunging daytime temperatures all over the region to fifteen below zero. Ordinarily, weather like that tended to do one of two things to folks: keep them knuckled down at home, or send them flocking to Pete’s, the local restaurant and tavern.
Today, despite the howl of the wintry wind and the skin-biting cold as the third and final hour of sunlight faded into midday dusk, nearly all of Harmony’s ninety-three residents were packed into the log-cabin Congregational church for an impromptu town hall meeting. Alex sat beside Jenna in the second row of pews, trying as hard as everyone else to make sense of the recent carnage in the bush, which had brought six dead, brutally savaged bodies into makeshift cold storage at Harmony’s airstrip and put the whole town into a state of anxious unrest.
Alex knew that Zach Tucker had tried to keep the news of the attack on the Toms settlement quiet, but despite the vastness of the interior, word traveled fast—faster still, in this isolated eleven-square-mile chunk of land that hugged the shore of the Koyukuk. Bad news, particularly the kind involving multiple unexplained deaths of a violent nature, tended to reach folks’ ears as if flown there on a raven’s wings.
In the forty-eight hours since Alex’s discovery of the killings, and Zach’s decision to transport the bodies from the crime scene into Harmony to await the clearing of the weather so the Staties in Fairbanks could come in and take over the investigation, the feeling around town had gone from one of shock and dismay to one of suspicion and dangerous, mounting hysteria. Forty-eight hours had been all the townspeople could take without demanding some answers about just who—or what—had so viciously attacked Pop Toms and his family.
“I simply don’t understand,