Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [851]
“Stanley Elmer Arnold!” she screamed, banging on his door. “Do you have any idea what time it is? You worthless piece of shit! How dare you stay out all goddamn night, making me worry about you, only to drag your sorry ass back home at the crack of dawn and wake me out of a dead sleep! You’re nothing but a loser and a—”
Skeeter was at the door and in the hallway with her, his hand clamped punishingly around her throat and cutting her off before the words had a chance to shriek out of her mouth.
“Be quiet, bitch,” he told her harshly. “I’m working in here.”
If she’d uttered even one syllable as his hand peeled away from her, Skeeter would have killed her, right then and there. And she knew it, by God. She understood that things would be different now.
Soundless, she stepped back from him, wobbling just a little in her ratty slippers and matted terry housecoat. Slowly she turned around and walked carefully back up the hallway where she’d come from.
Skeeter Arnold cocked his head at her retreating bulk, then smiled as he returned to the more important tasks that awaited him in the shithole apartment he called home.
CHAPTER
Eleven
It was strange being back in his old quarters at his father’s Darkhaven, as though he’d somehow walked into a distant, remembered dream of home that no longer seemed to fit him quite the same way. True to her word, however, Kade’s mother had made sure nothing was out of place since he’d left a year ago. After the long night he’d had in Harmony, he could appreciate the thick, engulfing cushion of his leather mission-style recliner, which was perfectly situated in front of the massive, river-rock fireplace that roared with freshly laid logs.
Kade leaned back and chuckled into his satellite phone as Brock caught him up on everything he was missing in Boston the past couple of nights.
“I’m telling you, man, if we aren’t careful, these females around here are gonna show our asses up. The way they’ve been tackling daytime missions topside, they’re starting to make the rest of us look bad.”
Since Kade had phoned in to the Order’s compound headquarters a few minutes ago, Brock had been regaling him with stories about some of the other warriors’ Breedmates and their current efforts to assist in what had been, until very recently, something of an all-boys club. Now Order missions had become all-hands-on-deck kinds of operations—solely devoted to stopping a power-hungry Breed maniac named Dragos from unleashing his personal brand of hell on both humankind and Breed alike.
Dragos’s resources were as deep as his pockets and, so it happened, as black as his plans. His most heinous act had been the capture and imprisonment of an unknown number of Breedmates, whom he’d been collecting for decades and using to give birth to an army of savage assassins. With Dragos’s headquarters sacked by the Order just a few weeks ago, his operation had been disrupted—disassembled and diverted, the Order suspected.
Finding the captive Breedmates before he could harm any more of them was the Order’s primary objective now. Because timing could mean the difference between lives lost or saved, Lucan had agreed to utilize every weapon in the Order’s arsenal, which included the very special, uniquely gifted, females who’d taken some of the warriors as their mates.
There was Rio’s mate, Dylan, who had the ability to see the spirits of other Breedmates who’d passed and, when she was lucky, obtain critical information from them. There was Elise, who was mated to Tegan and who had a talent for hearing corrupt, dark human intentions. She accompanied Dylan to area shelters, private homes, and flophouses, her ability helping her assess the motives of the folks they met with along the way.
Gideon’s mate, Savannah, used her tactile skill for reading the history of an object, hoping to find traceable links to some of the missing. Nikolai’s mate, Renata, whose power to mind-blast even the strongest vampire made her a formidable ally on any mission, provided armed bodyguard service to the other Breedmates