Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [885]
And flanking him like an obedient hound was another Breed male. If the one dressed like a Wall Street banker was formidable simply for the purity of his bloodline, then the individual standing with him trumped him by roughly a mile. Armed to the fangs and dressed from head to toe in black combat gear, his head shaved bald, covered with dense glyphs, this was a new enemy that Kade and the rest of the Order had only recently become familiar with.
Through the wolf’s eyes, he saw the gleaming black collar that ringed the assassin’s neck—an electronic collar rigged with an explosive device that ensured the vampire’s loyalty to his creator’s deviant initiatives.
“Ah, fuck,” Kade muttered aloud as he remotely observed the scene from his lupine helper’s eyes. “Dragos has sent one of his assassins here.”
“Who?” Alex whispered from beside him. “Assassins? Oh, my God. Kade, tell me what you see.”
He shook his head, unable to explain things adequately while his gut was churning with sudden dread and suspicion.
Why would Dragos send a lieutenant of his operations and one of his personal stock of born-and-bred Gen One killers to the middle of the frigid Alaskan interior?
What the hell were they doing here?
Once the vampires were gone inside another building, Kade directed the wolf to change position, to find a safe, concealed spot to dig beneath the perimeter fence and creep inside. He needed a better look at the cargo containers, particularly the one that the Minion workers seemed to take little interest in—the one, he noticed now, that bore huge dents in its sides and smashed, twisted hinges on the double doors at its rear.
He waited, heart pounding in time with the wolf’s as she dug her claws into the snow and burrowed deep, then wedged her body beneath the fence. She pulled herself through and began a stealthy crawl, knowing instinctively to keep to the shadows. As she neared the freight containers, Kade’s muscles tensed.
He had guessed he would find bad news inside the wrecked cargo hold. He’d been more than right about that. As the courageous wolf poked her head into the gaping ruin of the doors, peering into what had been a refrigerated space, Kade made instant, grim sense of the objects that held little meaning to her.
He saw the smashed, large steel-and-concrete box that sat inside, its lid torn off and reduced to broken rubble. He saw the bloodstains that had dried nearly black on the floor and walls of the hold—bloodstains that reeked of his own kind as the wolf drew the trace scent into her sensitive nostrils. He saw the titanium restraints that had once encircled the thick wrists and ankles of a creature that most of the Breed population believed had been driven to extinction centuries ago … a creature that the Order knew firsthand did, in fact, still live.
The Ancient.
One of the alien forefathers who’d sired the entire Breed race on Earth.
The powerful, savage otherworlder that Dragos had been using to further his insane goals.
Had Dragos and his associates moved it north after the Order’s recent strike on Dragos’s hidden lair? Had they thought to relocate the Ancient as far from the Order’s reach as possible, transferring it to the old mine?
Or had that been the plan, until the Ancient somehow found a way to escape his captivity?
Kade thought back on the recent killings in the bush and on today’s brutal attack on the two men from Harmony.
Neither Seth nor Rogues had been to blame.
Now he knew that with the gravest certainty. It had been something much worse.
“Jesus Christ,” Kade hissed. “It’s out here somewhere. On the loose.”
He commanded the wolf to abandon her prowl at once, and stayed with her as she made a quick escape from the mining company grounds. As her dark silver shadow vanished into the nearby forest, Kade broke their mental connection and reached for Alex’s hand.
“We have to get out of here. Now.”
She nodded at his urgent tone and ran with him, wasting no precious time on questions. He would explain everything to her, but first, he needed