CHAPTER
Three

Two full days passed.

Gabrielle tried to put the horror of what she had witnessed in La Notte’s alleyway out of her mind. What did it matter, anyway? No one had believed her. Not the police, who had yet to send anyone to see her as they had promised, and not even her friends.

Jamie and Megan, who had seen the thugs in leather harassing the punker inside the club, said the group left without incident sometime during the course of the night. Kendra had been too involved with Brent—the guy she picked up on the dance floor—to notice any trouble elsewhere in the club. According to the cops at the station Saturday night, the story had been the same from everyone their dispatched patrol had questioned at La Notte. A brief scuffle at the bar, but no reports of violence in or outside of the club.

No one had seen the attack she reported. There had been no hospital or morgue admissions. Not even a damage report filed by the cabbie at the curb.

Nothing.

How could that be? Was she seriously delusional?

It was as if Gabrielle’s eyes were the only ones truly open that night. Either she alone had witnessed something unexplainable, or she was losing her mind.

Maybe some of both.

She couldn’t deal with all the implications in that idea, so she sought solace in the one thing that gave her any joy. Behind the sealed door of her custom-built darkroom in the basement of the townhouse, Gabrielle submerged a sheet of photo paper in the tray of developing solution. From pale nothingness, the image began to take shape beneath the surface of the liquid. She watched it come to life—the ironic beauty of strong ivy tentacles spreading over the decayed brick and mortar of an old Gothic-style asylum she had recently discovered outside the city. It came out better than she had hoped, teasing her artist’s fancy with the potential of an entire series centered on the haunting, desolate place. She set it aside and developed another photo, this one a closeup of a pine sapling sprouting from between a crack in the crumpled pavement of a long-abandoned lumberyard.

The images made her smile as she lifted them out of the solution and clipped them to the drying line. She had nearly a dozen more like these upstairs on her worktable, wry testaments to the stubbornness of nature and the foolishness of man’s greed and arrogance.

Gabrielle had always felt something of an outsider, a silent observer, from the time she was a kid. She chalked it up to the fact that she had no parents—no family at all, except the couple who had adopted her when she was a troubled twelve-year-old, bounced from one foster home to another. The Maxwells, an upper-middle-class couple with no children of their own, had kindly taken pity on her, but even their acceptance had been at arm’s length. Gabrielle was promptly sent to boarding schools, summer camps, and, finally, an out-of-state university. Her parents, such as they were, had died together in a car accident while she was away at college.

Gabrielle didn’t attend the funeral, but the first serious photograph she took was of two maple-shaded gravestones in the city’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. She’d been taking pictures ever since.

Never one to mourn the past, Gabrielle turned off the darkroom light and headed back upstairs to think about supper. She wasn’t in the kitchen two minutes before her doorbell rang.

Jamie had generously stayed over the past two nights, just to make sure Gabrielle was all right. He was worried about her, as protective as a big brother she never had. When he left that morning, he had offered to come by again, but Gabrielle had insisted she would be fine by herself. She was actually in need of some solitude, and as the doorbell sounded again, she felt a niggle of mild annoyance that she might not have any alone time tonight, either.

“Be right there,” she called from inside the apartment’s foyer.

Habit made her check the peephole, but instead of seeing Jamie’s blond sweep of hair, Gabrielle found the dark head and striking features of an unfamiliar man waiting on her stoop. A reproduction gaslight stood on the sidewalk just off her front steps. The soft yellow glow wrapped itself around the man like a golden cloak draped over night itself. There was something ominous, yet compelling, about his pale gray eyes, which were staring straight into the narrow cylinder of glass as if he could see her on the other side, too.

She opened the door, but thought it best not to remove the chain lock. The man stepped in front of the wedge of open space and glanced at the tight chain length that stretched taut between them. When his eyes met Gabrielle’s again, he gave her a vague smile, as if he thought it amusing she would expect to bar him so easily if he truly wanted in.

“Miss Maxwell?” His voice stroked her senses like rich, dark velvet.

“Yes?”

“My name is Lucan Thorne.” The words rolled past his lips in a smooth, measured timbre that eased some of her anxiety at once. When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “I understand you had some difficulty a couple of nights ago at the police station. I wanted to come by and make sure you were all right.”

She nodded.

Evidently the police hadn’t completely blown her off after all. Since it had been a couple of days with no word from them, Gabrielle had not expected to see anyone from the department, despite the promise to send a patrol out to look in on her. Not that she could be certain this guy, with his sleekly styled black hair and chiseled features, was a cop.

He looked grim enough, she supposed, and apart from his dark, dangerous good looks, he didn’t seem intent on causing her any harm. Still, after what she’d been through, Gabrielle thought it wise to err on the side of caution.

“Have you got ID?”

“Of course.”

With deliberate, almost sensual movements, he opened a thin leather billfold and held it up to the crack of space at the door. It was nearly dark outside, which was likely why it took a second for Gabrielle’s eyes to focus on the shiny policeman’s badge and the picture identification card next to it, bearing his name.

“Okay. Come in, Detective.”

She freed the chain lock, then opened the door and let him enter, watching as his broad shoulders filled the doorway. His presence seemed to fill the entire foyer, in fact. He was a large man, tall and thickly hewn beneath the drape of his black overcoat, his dark clothes and silky jet hair absorbed the soft light of the pendant lamp overhead. He had a confident, almost regal bearing about him, his expression gravely serious, as if he would be better suited to commanding a legion of armored knights than schlepping out to Beacon Hill to handhold a hallucinatory female.

“I didn’t think anyone was going to come. After the reception I got down at the station this weekend, I figured Boston’s finest had written me off as a nutcase.”

He didn’t acknowledge or deny it, merely strode into her living room in silence and let his gaze roam freely over the place. He paused at her worktable, where the roughs of some of her latest images had been arranged. Gabrielle trailed after him across the room, casually watching for his reaction to her work. One dark brow quirked as he perused the photographs.

“Yours?” he asked, turning his pale, piercing eyes on her.

“Yes,” Gabrielle replied. “They’re part of a collection I’m calling Urban Renewal.”

“Interesting.”

He looked back to the array of images and Gabrielle felt herself frown slightly at his careful, yet indifferent response. “They’re just something I’m playing around with right now—nothing I’m ready to exhibit yet.”

He grunted, still considering the photographs in silence.

Gabrielle moved closer, trying to get a better handle on his reaction, or lack thereof. “I do a lot of commissioned work around the city. In fact, I’ll probably be taking some pictures of the governor’s place on the Vineyard later this month.”

Shut up, she admonished herself. Why was she trying to impress this guy?

Detective Thorne didn’t seem overly impressed. Saying nothing, he reached out, and with fingers entirely too elegant for his profession, gently rearranged two of the images on the table. Inexplicably, Gabrielle found herself imagining those long, deft fingers touching her bare skin, splaying into her hair, cupping the back of her skull…guiding her head back until it rested on his strong arm and his cool gray eyes drank her in.

“So,” she said, snapping herself back to reality. “I’ll bet you’d rather have a look at the pictures I took outside the club Saturday night.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she walked to the kitchen and grabbed her cell phone off the counter. She flipped it open, brought up an image, and held the device out to Detective Thorne.

“That’s the first shot I took. My hands were shaking, so it’s a little blurry. And the light from the flash washed out a lot of the detail. But if you look closely, you’ll see six dark shapes huddled low to the ground. That’s them—the killers. Their victim is that lump they’re tearing at in front of them. They were…biting him. Like animals.”

Thorne’s eyes held fast to the image; his expression remained grim, unchanging. Gabrielle clicked to the next photograph.

“The flash startled them. I don’t know—I think it might have blinded them or something. When I clicked these next few shots, some of them stopped to look at me. I can’t really make out features, but that’s the face of one of them. Those weird slits of light are the reflection of his eyes.” She shuddered, recalling the yellow glow of vicious, inhuman eyes. “He was looking right at me.”

More silence from the detective. He took the cell phone from Gabrielle’s fingers and clicked through the remaining pictures.

“What do you think?” she asked, hoping for confirmation. “You can see it, too, can’t you?”

“I see…something, yes.”

“Thank God. Your buddies at the precinct tried to make me think I was crazy, or that I was some drugged-out loser who didn’t know what I was talking about. Not even my friends believed me when I told them what I saw that night.”

“Your friends,” he said with careful deliberation. “Do you mean someone other than the man you were with at the station—your lover?”

“My lover?” She laughed at that. “Jamie is not my lover.”

Thorne looked up from the cell phone’s image display to meet her gaze. “He spent the past two nights with you alone, here in this apartment.”

How did he know that? Gabrielle felt a jolt of outrage at the prospect of being spied on by anyone, including the police, who probably would have done so more out of suspicion than as a means of protecting her. But as she stood beside Detective Lucan Thorne in her living room, some of that anger seeped out of her, replaced by a feeling of calm acceptance. Of subtle, languid cooperation. Strange, she thought, but found herself fairly unfazed by the idea.

“Jamie stayed with me for a couple of nights because he was concerned about me after what happened this weekend. He’s my friend, that’s all.”

Good.

Thorne’s mouth didn’t move, but Gabrielle felt certain she had heard his reply. His unspoken voice, his pleasure at her denial of a lover, seemed to echo from somewhere deep inside of her. Wishful thinking, maybe. It had been a long time since she’d had anything close to a boyfriend, and merely being in the presence of Lucan Thorne was doing strange things to her head. Or rather, her body.

As he stared at her, Gabrielle felt a pleasant knot of warmth begin to pool in her belly. His gaze penetrated like heat itself, physical and intimate. A picture suddenly formed in her mind: she and him, naked and writhing together in the moonlit dark of her bedroom. An instant blast of heat flooded her. She could feel his hard muscles beneath her fingertips, his firm body moving over her…his thick shaft filling her, stretching her, exploding deep within her.

Oh, yes, she thought, practically squirming where she stood. Jamie was right. She really had been celibate for too long.

Thorne blinked slowly, his thick black lashes shuttering stormy silver eyes. Like a cool breeze skating over flushed bare skin, Gabrielle felt some of the tightness in her limbs dissipate. Her heart was still pounding; the room still seemed oddly warm.

He turned his head away from her, and her eyes were drawn to the base of his scalp, where his hair met the collar of his tailored shirt. He had a tattoo on his neck—at least, she thought it was a tattoo. Intricate swirls and geometric-looking symbols rendered in ink just a few shades darker than his skin came up the back of his neck and around the side, disappearing beneath the thick growth of his dark hair. She wondered what the rest of it looked like, and if there was some special meaning to the beautiful pattern.

She had an almost irrepressible urge to trace the interesting markings with her fingertip. Maybe her tongue.

“Tell me what you told your friends about the attack you witnessed at the club.”

She swallowed on a dry throat, shaking her head to bring herself back to the conversation. “Yes. Right.”

God, what was wrong with her? Gabrielle dismissed the peculiar race of her pulse and focused on the events of the other night. She recounted the story for the detective, as she had for the other officers, and, later, her friends. She told him every horrific detail, and he listened carefully, letting her relay it all uninterrupted. Under the cool acceptance of his gaze, Gabrielle’s memory of the slaying seemed more precise now, as if the lens of her recollection had been sharpened, the details magnified.

When she finished, she found Thorne clicking through the pictures on her cell phone once more. The line of his mouth had gone from grim to grave.

“What exactly do you think these images show, Miss Maxwell?”

She glanced up and met his look, those wise, piercing eyes of his boring into her. In that instant, a word skated through Gabrielle’s head—incredible, laughable, terrifyingly clear.

Vampire.

“I don’t know,” she said lamely, speaking over the rising whisper in her head. “I mean, I’m not sure what to think.”

If the detective didn’t suspect she was nuts yet, he would if she blurted out the word that was now swimming through her mind, chilling her to the bone. It was the only explanation she had for the gruesome slaying she witnessed that night.

Vampires?

Christ Jesus. She really was crazy.

“I’ll need to take this device, Miss Maxwell.”

“Gabrielle,” she offered. Her smile felt awkward. “Do you think forensics, or whoever does that sort of thing, will be able to clean up the images?”

He gave her a slight incline of his head, not quite a nod, then pocketed her cell phone. “I will return it to you tomorrow evening. You will be home?”

“Sure.” How was it he could make a simple question sound more like an order? “I appreciate you coming by, Detective Thorne. It’s been a rough few days.”

“Lucan,” he said, studying her for a moment. “Call me Lucan.”

Heat seemed to reach out to her from his eyes, along with a stoic understanding, as if this man had seen more horrors than she could ever comprehend. She could not name the emotion that passed through her in that moment, but it sped her pulse and made the room feel sapped of all its air. He was still looking at her, waiting, as if expecting her to comply at once with his request to speak his name.

“All right…Lucan.”

“Gabrielle,” he replied, and the sound of her name on his lips sent a quiver of awareness shooting through her veins.

Something on the wall behind her caught his attention. He glanced to where one of Gabrielle’s most acclaimed photographs hung. His mouth pursed slightly, a sensual quirk of his lips that hinted at amusement, perhaps surprise. Gabrielle pivoted to look at the image of an inner city park that was frozen and desolate beneath a blanket of thick December snow.

“You don’t like my work,” she guessed.

He mildly shook his dark head. “I find it…intriguing.”

She was curious now. “How so?”

“You find beauty in the most unlikely of places,” he said after a long moment, his attention focused now on her. “Your pictures are full of passion….”

“But?”

To her bewilderment, he reached out, stroked a finger along the line of her jaw. “There are no people in them, Gabrielle.”

“Of course there…”

She started to blurt out a denial, but before the words reached her tongue, she realized that he was right. Her gaze lit on each framed photograph she kept in her apartment, her memory touching on all the others that hung in galleries and museums and private collections around the city.

He was right. The images, no matter their subjects were all empty places, lonely places.

Not one of them contained a single face or even a shadow of human life.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, stunned at the revelation.

In just a few moments, this man had defined her work as no one ever had before. Not even she had seen the obvious truth in her art, but Lucan Thorne had inexplicably opened her eyes. It was as if he had peered into her very soul.

“I must go now,” he said, already making his way to the door.

Gabrielle followed him, wishing he would stay longer. Maybe he would come back later. She nearly asked him to, but forced herself into maintaining at least a modicum of cool control. Thorne was halfway out the door when he abruptly paused on the threshold. He turned toward her, too close in the cramped space of the foyer. His large body crowded her, but Gabrielle didn’t mind. She didn’t so much as breathe.

“Is something wrong?”

His fine nostrils flared almost imperceptibly. “What kind of perfume are you wearing?”

The question flustered her. It was so unexpected, so personal. She felt heat rise to her cheeks, though why she should be embarrassed she had no idea. “I don’t wear perfume. I can’t. I’m allergic.”

“Really.”

His mouth curved into a harsh smile, as if his teeth had suddenly become too full for his mouth. He leaned toward her, slowly bending his head down until it was hovering at her neck. Gabrielle heard the soft rasp of his breath—felt it caress her skin in coolness then in warmth—as he drew her scent into his lungs and released it through his lips. Heat seared her throat, and she could have sworn she felt the swift pressure of his mouth brushing over her pulse, which lurched into an erratic beat as the dark head lingered so intimately close to her. She heard a low growl rumble near her ear, something very near a curse.

Thorne came away at once, and did not meet her startled gaze. He didn’t offer any excuse or apology for his strange behavior, either.

“You smell like jasmine,” was all he said.

And then, without looking at her, he stepped out the door and strode into the darkened street outside.

It was wrong to pursue the woman.

Lucan knew this, even as he had waited on Gabrielle Maxwell’s apartment steps that evening, showing her a detective’s badge and photo ID card. It wasn’t his. It wasn’t real, in fact, only a hypnotic manipulation that made her human mind believe he was who he had presented himself to be.

A simple trick for elders of his kind, like himself, but one he seldom stooped to use.

Yet now, here he was again, some time past midnight, stretching his slim personal code of honor even thinner as he tried the latch on her front door and found it unlocked. He knew it would be; he’d given her the suggestion while he had talked with her that evening, when he had shown her what he wanted to do with her and read the surprised, but receptive, response in her soft brown eyes.

He could have taken her then. She would have Hosted him willingly, he was certain, and knowing the intense pleasure they would have shared in the process had nearly been his undoing. But Lucan’s first duty was to his Breed and the warriors who had banded together with him to combat the growing problem of the Rogues.

Bad enough that Gabrielle had witnessed the nightclub slaying and reported it to the police and her friends before her memory of the event could be erased, but she had also managed to take pictures. They were grainy, almost unreadable, but damning just the same. He needed to secure the images, before she had a chance to show them to anyone else. He’d made good on that, at least. By rights, he should be back at the tech lab with Gideon, IDing the Rogue who had escaped outside La Notte, or riding shotgun around the city with Dante, Rio, Conlan, and the others as they hunted down more of their diseased brethren. And so he would be, once he finished this last bit of business with lovely Gabrielle Maxwell.

Lucan slipped inside the old brick building on Willow Street and closed the door behind him. Gabrielle’s tantalizing scent filled his nostrils, leading him to her now as it had the night outside the club and at the police station downtown. He silently navigated her apartment, through the main level and up the stairs to her bedroom loft. Skylights in the vaulted ceiling summoned the moon’s pale glow, which played softly over Gabrielle’s graceful curves. She slept nude, as though awaiting his arrival, her long legs wrapped in twisted sheets, her hair spread out around her head on the pillow in luxurious waves of burnt gold.

Her scent enveloped him, sweet and sultry, making his teeth ache.

Jasmine, he thought, curling back his lips in a smile of wry appreciation. An exotic flower that opens its fragrant petals only under the coaxing of night.

Open for me now, Gabrielle.

But he wouldn’t seduce her, he decided, not like this. He wanted only a taste tonight, just enough to satisfy his curiosity. That was all he’d permit himself. When he was through here, Gabrielle would have no memory of meeting him, nor of the horror she had witnessed in the alley a few nights ago.

His own need would have to wait.

Lucan went to her and eased his hip onto the mattress beside her. He stroked the burnished softness of her hair, brushed his fingers along the slender line of her arm.

She stirred, moaning sweetly, rousing at his light touch. “Lucan,” she murmured sleepily, not quite awake, yet subconsciously aware that he had joined her in the room.

“Just a dream,” he whispered, astonished to hear his name on her lips when he had used no vampire guile to place it there.

She sighed deeply, settling against him. “I knew you would come back.”

“Did you?”

“Mm-hmm.” It was a purr of sound in her throat, raspy and erotic. Her eyes remained closed, her mind still caught in the web of her dreams. “I wanted you to come back.”

Lucan smiled at that, tracing his fingers over her placid brow. “You do not fear me, beauty?”

She gave a small shake of her head, nuzzling his palm against her cheek. Her lips were slightly parted, small white teeth gleaming in the scant light overhead. Her neck was graceful, proud, a regal column of alabaster above the fragile bones of her shoulders. How sweet she would taste, how soft against his tongue.

And her breasts…Lucan could not resist the peachy dark nipple that peeked out from under the sheet draped haphazardly across her torso. He teased the little bud between his fingers, tugging it gently and nearly growling with need as it puckered into a tight bead, hardening at his touch.

He was hardening as well. He licked his lips, growing hungry, eager to have her.

Gabrielle squirmed languidly beneath the tangled sheet. Lucan slowly drew the cotton coverlet away, baring her to him completely. She was exquisite, as he knew she would be. Petite, yet strong, her body was lithe with youth, supple and fair. Firm muscle shaped her elegant limbs; her artist’s hands were slender and expressive, flexing mindlessly as Lucan trailed his fingers along her sternum and down to the concave dip of her belly. Her skin here was velvet and warm, too tempting to resist.

Lucan moved over her on the bed, and slid his palms beneath her. He lifted her to him, gently arching her up off the mattress. He kissed the sweet curve of her hip, then let his tongue play across the small valley of her navel. She gasped as he plumbed the shallow indentation, and the fragrance of her need wreathed his senses.

“Jasmine,” he rasped against her heated skin, his teeth dragging lightly as his kiss ventured lower.

Her moan of pleasure as his mouth invaded her sex sent a violent jolt of lust through his veins. He was already stiff and erect; his cock throbbed beneath the constricting barrier of his clothes. She was wet and slick against his lips, her cleft a heated sheath against his questing tongue. Lucan suckled her as he would sweet nectar, until her body convulsed with the coming of her release. And still he lapped at her, bringing her to the crest of another climax, and then another.

She’d gone slack in his arms, boneless and trembling. Lucan trembled as well, his hands shaking as he carefully eased her back down onto the bed. He’d never wanted a woman so badly. He wanted something more, he realized, bemused by the impulse that he had to protect her. Gabrielle panted softly as her last climax subsided, and she curled onto her side, as innocent as a kitten.

Lucan stared down at her in silent fury, heaving with the force of his need. Dull pain tightened his mouth as his fangs stretched out from his gums. His tongue was dry. Hunger knotted in his gut. His vision sharpened as lust for blood and release slung its seductive coils around him, and his pupils elongated to catlike slivers in his pale eyes.

Take her, urged that part of him that was inhuman, unearthly.

She is yours. Take her.

Just a taste—that was what he had vowed. He would not harm her, only heighten her pleasure as he took a bit of his own. She wouldn’t even remember this moment, come the dawn. As his blood Host, she would give him a sustaining sip of life, then awake later, drowsy and sated, but blissfully unaware of its cause.

It was a small mercy, he told himself, even as his body quickened with the urge to feed.

Lucan bent over Gabrielle’s languid form, and tenderly swept aside the riot of ginger waves concealing her neck. His heart was hammering in his chest, urging him to slake his burning thirst. Just a taste, no more. Only pleasure. He came forward, his mouth open, his senses swamped with her intoxicating female scent. His lips pressed down against her warmth, settling over the delicate pulse that beat against his tongue. His fangs grazed the velvet softness of her throat, throbbing now, like another demanding part of his anatomy.

And in the instant before his sharp teeth penetrated her fragile skin, his keen vision lit on a tiny birthmark just behind Gabrielle’s ear.

Nearly undetectable, the diminutive mark of a teardrop falling into the cradle of a crescent moon made Lucan rear back in shock. The symbol, so rare among human females, meant only one thing…

Breedmate.

He withdrew from the bed as though touched by fire, hissing a furious curse into the dark. Hunger for Gabrielle still pounded through him, even as he grappled with the ramifications of what he might have done to them both.

Gabrielle Maxwell was a Breedmate, a human gifted with unique blood and DNA properties that complemented those of his kind. She and the few numbers like her were queens among other human females. To Lucan’s kind, a race comprised solely of males, this woman was a cherished goddess, giver of life, destined to bond in blood and bear the seed of a new vampire generation.

And in his reckless lust to taste her, Lucan had nearly claimed her for his own.