When was the last time he'd fed?

He couldn't recall. It had been a while. Several days, at least, and not enough to last him. He 'd thought to curb some of his hunger-both the carnal and the systemic-with Gabrielle Maxwell last night, but that idea had taken a quick turn south. Now he was shaking with the urge to feed, and too far gone to consider anything but the necessity of his body's basic needs.

"Lucan." Dante pressed his fingers to the man's neck, feeling for a pulse. The vampire's fangs were extruded, sharp from the battle and the physiological reaction to the scent of pooling crimson life. "If we wait much longer, the blood will be dead, too."

And no use to them, for it was only fresh blood, pumping through human veins, that could quench the vampires ' hunger. Dante waited, even though it was obvious he wanted nothing more than to drop his head and take his fill of the human who had been too stupid to flee when he had the chance.

But Dante would wait, even to the point of wasting prey, for it was an unwritten protocol that later generation vampires did not feed in the presence of an elder, particularly when that elder was Gen One Breed and starving.

Unlike Dante, Lucan's sire was one of the Ancients, one of eight alien warriors who came from a distant, dark planet only to crash-land thousands of years ago on unforgiving, inhospitable Earth. To survive, they had fed on the blood of humans, decimating entire populations with their hunger and savagery. In rare instances, these foreign conquerors had successfully bred with human females-the first Breedmates-who sp.a.w.ned a new generation of the vampire race.

Those savage, otherworldly forebears were all gone now, but their progeny lived on, in Lucan and a few scattered others. They were the closest things to royalty in vampire society-respected, and not a little feared. The vast majority of the Breed were younger, born of second, third, and some countless dozens later generations.

The hunger was strongest in Gen Ones. So was the propensity to give in to Bloodl.u.s.t and turn Rogue. The Breed had learned to live with the danger. Most had learned to manage it, taking blood only when needed, and in the smallest quant.i.ties required to sustain. They had to, for once lost to Bloodl.u.s.t, there was no coming back.

Lucan's slitted eyes fell to the twitching, shallowly breathing human on the pavement. The animal snarl he heard came from his own dry throat. As Lucan strode toward the scent of spilled, life-giving blood, Dante gave a slight but deferential bow of his dark head and backed off to let his elder feed.

CHAPTER Five

He hadn't even bothered to call and leave her a message last night.

Typical.

Probably had a big date with his remote control and ESPN, or maybe after he left her place the other evening, he 'd met someone else and gotten a more interesting offer than schlepping Gabrielle 's cell phone back out to Beacon Hill. h.e.l.l, he might even be married, or involved with someone. Not that she'd asked, and not that asking would have guaranteed he'd have told her the truth. Lucan Thorne probably wasn't any different than any other guy.

Except he was... different.

He struck her as being very different from anyone she had ever met before. A very private man, almost secretive. Definitely dangerous. She could no more see him sitting in a recliner in front of the television than she could envision him tied down with a serious girlfriend, let alone a wife and family. Which brought her back to the idea that he must have gotten a better offer elsewhere and decided to blow her off, an idea that stung a lot more than it should have.

"Forget about him," Gabrielle scolded herself under her breath as she edged her black Cooper Mini to the side of the quiet rural road and cut the ignition. Her camera bag and gear sat beside her in the pa.s.senger seat. She gathered it up, grabbed a small flashlight from the glove compartment, pocketed her keys in her jacket, and got out of the car.

She closed the door quietly and cast a quick look around. Not a soul in sight, not surprising given that it was just nearing 6 A.M.

and the building she was about to enter illegally and photograph had been shut down for about twenty years. She walked along the empty stretch of cracked pavement and cut a sharp right, heading down through a ditch then up into a pine -and-oak wooded lot that stood like a thick curtain wall around the old asylum.

Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon. The lighting was eerie and ethereal, a misty haze of pink and lavender shrouding the Gothic structures with an otherworldly glow. Even bathed in soft pastels, the place held an air of menace.

The contrast was what had brought her out to the location this morning. Shooting it at dusk would have been the more natural choice, capitalizing on the haunted quality of the abandoned structures. But it was the juxtaposition of warm dawn light against a cold, sinister subject that appealed to Gabrielle as she paused to retrieve her camera from the bag slung over her shoulder. She snapped off a half-dozen shots, then clapped the lens cap back on, and continued her trek toward the ghostly buildings.

A tall wire security fence loomed in front of her, barricading the property against nosy explorers like herself. But Gabrielle knew its hidden weakness. She had found it the first time she had come to the place to take exterior pictures. She hurried along the line of the fence until she reached the southwest corner, then squatted down near the ground. Here, someone had discreetly severed the links with a wire cutter, creating a breach just large enough for a curious adolescent to wriggle through-or a determined female photographer who tended to view No Trespa.s.sing and Authorized Personnel Only signs more as friendly suggestions rather than enforceable laws.

Gabrielle pushed open the flap of snipped fence, shoved her gear inside, and scrambled spiderlike on her belly through the low opening. A shiver of apprehension coursed along her limbs as she came up on the other side of the fence. She should be used to this type of covert, solitary exploration; her art often depended on her courage to seek out desolate, some might argue dangerous, places. This creepy asylum could certainly cla.s.sify as the latter, she thought, her gaze drifting to graffiti spray-painted next to an exterior door that read, BAd VIBeS. "You can say that again," she whispered under her breath. As she brushed the dirt and dried pine needles off her clothes, her hand drifted automatically to the front pocket of her jeans for her cell phone. It wasn't there, of course, still in the possession of Detective Thorne. Just one more reason to be p.i.s.sed at him for standing her up last night.

Maybe she should cut the guy a little slack, she thought, suddenly eager to focus on something other than the ominous feeling that pressed down on her now that she was inside the asylum grounds. Maybe Thorne had been a no-show because something bad happened to him on the job.

What if he'd been injured in the line of duty and didn't come by as promised because he was incapacitated in some way? Maybe he hadn't called to apologize or to explain his absence because he physically couldn't.

Right. And maybe she had checked her brain into her panties from the second she first laid eyes on the man.

Scoffing at herself, Gabrielle picked up her things and walked toward the soaring architecture of the main building. Pale limestone climbed skyward in a steep central tower, capped by peaks and spires worthy of the finest gothic cathedral. Surrounding this was a sprawling compound of red-brick walled and tile-roofed outbuildings arranged in a batwing layout, connected by covered walk- ways and cloisterlike arches.

But as awe-inspiring as the structure was, there was no dismissing its air of slumbering menace, as if a thousand sins and secrets loomed behind the chipped walls and smashed mullioned-gla.s.s windows. Gabrielle strode to where the light was best and took a few pictures. There was no current point of entry here; the main door had been bolted shut and boarded up tight. If she wanted to get inside to take interior shots-and she definitely did-she had to go around to the back and try her luck with a ground-level window or bas.e.m.e.nt door.

She skirted down a sloping embankment, toward the anterior of the building and found what she was looking for: wooden shutters concealed three windows that likely opened into a service area or crawl s.p.a.ce of the structure. The shutter's rusty latches were corroded but not locked, and they broke away easily with a little encouragement from a rock Gabrielle found nearby. She pulled the wooden covering away from the window, lifted the heavy gla.s.s panel, and propped it open with the window brace.

After a perfunctory sweep of her flashlight to make sure the place was empty and not about to cave in on her head, she shimmied through the opening. As she hopped down from the window cas.e.m.e.nt, the soles of her boots crunched broken gla.s.s and years of acc.u.mulated dust and debris. The foundation of gray cinderblock bricks ran about four yards in, disappearing into the gloom of the unlit bas.e.m.e.nt. Gabrielle shot the thin beam of her flashlight into the shadows at the other end of the s.p.a.ce. She ran it back along the wall, holding the light steady when she came across a battered old service door bearing the stenciled words No General Access.

"Wanna bet?" she whispered as she approached the door and found it unlocked.

She opened it and shone some light around the other side into a long, tunnel-like corridor. Broken fluorescent light fixtures hung down from the ceiling; some of the panel coverings had fallen to the industrial -grade linoleum floor, where they lay shattered and dust-coated. Gabrielle stepped into the dark s.p.a.ce, not certain what she was looking for, and a bit apprehensive of what she might find in the deserted bowels of the asylum.

She pa.s.sed an open room off the corridor and her flashlight skimmed across a red vinyl dentist 's chair, a little worse for wear, and poised in the center of the room as if awaiting its next patient. Gabrielle removed her camera from its case and took a couple of quick shots. She moved on, pa.s.sing more examination and treatment rooms in what must have been the medical wing of the building. She found a stairwell and climbed two flights, pleased to find herself in the central tower where tall windows brought in generous amounts of soft morning light.

Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and limestone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow. It was strange looking out from the confines of a building that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie silence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the patients, people who had not been able to simply walk away like she could now. People like her birth mother, a woman Gabrielle had never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through hushed conversations between social workers and the foster families who would, eventually, one by one, return her into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places she 'd been sent to live, but the complaints against her when she was bounced back were always the same: restless and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunctional with self-destructive tendencies. She'd heard the same labels applied to her mother, along with the added distinctions of paranoid and delusional.

By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervision of a state - appointed psychologist. She'd had zero expectations and even less hope that she might actually make another foster situation stick.

Frankly, she'd been past the point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emotional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a handful of court doc.u.ments pertaining to her mother.

The young woman had been a teenage Jane Doe, presumably homeless, with no ID, and no known family or acquaintances, except for the newborn baby girl she had left, squalling and distressed, in a city garbage bin late one August night. Gabrielle 's mother had been brutalized, bleeding from deep puncture wounds in her neck that had been made worse by her hysteria and panicked clawing at the injury. While she was being treated at the emergency room, she slipped into a catatonic state and never recovered.

Rather than prosecute her for the crime of abandoning her infant, the courts had deemed the woman incompetent and sent her away to a facility probably not much different from this one. Not a month into her inst.i.tutionalization, she had hanged herself with a knotted bedsheet, leaving behind countless questions that would never have answers.

Gabrielle tried to shake off the weight of those old hurts but standing there, looking out the hazy gla.s.s windows, brought her past into tighter focus. She didn't want to think about her mother, or the misfortune of her birth, and the dark, lonely years that had followed. She needed to concentrate on her work. That's what always got her through, after all. It was the one constant in her life, sometimes all she truly had in this world.

And it was enough.

Most of the time, it was enough.

"Get a few shots and get the h.e.l.l out of here, " she scolded herself, bringing the camera up and taking a couple more photos through the subtle metalwork that was meshed between the double panes of gla.s.s in the window.

She thought about leaving the same way she had come in, but wondered if she might find another exit somewhere on the main floor of the central building. Going back down to the dark bas.e.m.e.nt was not exactly appealing. She was creeping herself out with thoughts about her crazy mother, and the longer she lingered in the old asylum, the more her skin was beginning to crawl. She opened the stairwell door and felt a little better to see dim light filtering in through windows in some of the empty rooms and at the end of the adjacent hallway.

Evidently the "bad vibes" graffiti artist had made it in here, too. On each of the four walls, strange scroll -like symbols had been rendered in deep black paint. Probably gang markings, or the stylized signatures of the kids who 'd been here before her. A discarded spray-paint canister lay in the corner, along with a smattering of cigarette b.u.t.ts, broken beer bottles, and other debris.

Gabrielle took out her camera and looked for a good angle for the shot she had in mind. The light wasn 't great, but with a different lens it might prove interesting. She fished around in her bag for her lens cases, then froze when she heard a distant whirring noise coming from somewhere beneath her feet. It was faint, but it sounded impossibly like an elevator. Gabrielle stuffed her gear back into the bag, her ears tuned to the vague sounds around her, every nerve flooded with a chilling sense of foreboding.

She was not alone in here.

And now that she was thinking about it, she felt eyes on her from somewhere nearby. The p.r.i.c.kling awareness raised the fine hairs at the back of her neck and sent a spray of gooseb.u.mps along her arms. Slowly, she pivoted her head and looked behind her.

It was then that she saw it: a small closed-circuit video camera mounted in the shadowed upper corner of the corridor, monitoring the stairwell door she had just come through a few minutes before. Maybe it wasn't working, just a leftover from the days when the asylum was still in operation. It might have been a comforting thought, except the camera looked too well -maintained and compact to be anything less than current issue, state -of-the-art surveillance. To test that idea, Gabrielle took a long step toward it, placing herself almost directly beneath the camera. Soundlessly, its base mount tilted, angling the lens until it was staring Gabrielle in the face.

s.h.i.t, she mouthed into that black, unblinking eye. Busted.

From deep within the empty compound, she heard the metal creak and crash of a heavy door. Evidently the abandoned asylum wasn't quite abandoned after all. They had security at least, and the Boston PD could take a few response-time lessons from these folks.

Footsteps pounded at a steady clip as whoever was on guard started coming for her. Gabrielle turned back into the stairwell and took off sprinting down the steps, her gear bouncing against her hip. As she descended, light grew scarce. She gripped the flashlight in her hand, but hated to use it for fear of creating a beacon for security to follow. She hit the last stair, pushed open the metal door, and plunged into the dark of the lower-level corridor.

Back on the stairs, she heard the monitored door swing open with a bang as her pursuer thundered down behind her, running hard and gaining on her fast.

Finally, she reached the service door at the end of the corridor. Throwing herself against the cold steel, she rushed into the dank bas.e.m.e.nt, and raced for the small window that was open to the outside. A blast of fresh air gave her strength as she slapped her hands onto the cas.e.m.e.nt and hoisted herself up. She vaulted through the window and tumbled onto the pebbled earth outside.

She couldn't hear her pursuer now. Maybe she had lost him in the dark twisting hallways. G.o.d, she hoped so.

Gabrielle shot to her feet and ran for the breached corner of the perimeter fence. She found it quickly. Diving to her hands and knees, she scrambled under the snipped section of wire, heart pounding in her ears, adrenaline jetting through her veins. She was too panicked: in her haste to flee, she sc.r.a.ped the side of her face on a rough edge of wire. The cut burned her cheek and she felt the hot trickle of blood running near her ear. But she ignored the searing sting and the bruising crush of her camera case as she wriggled on her belly through the fence and out toward freedom.

Once clear of the fence, Gabrielle leaped up and made a mad dash across the wide, rough lawn of the outer grounds. She spared only the barest glance behind her-long enough to see that the huge security guard was still there, having exited from somewhere on the ground floor and was now bounding after her like a beast straight out of h.e.l.l. Gabrielle swallowed a knot of sheer panic at the sight of him. The guy was built like a tank, easily 250 pounds and all of it muscle, capped off by a large square head, his hair buzzed military style. The big man ran up to the tall fence and stopped at last, smashing his fist against the links as Gabrielle sped into the thick cover of trees separating the property from the road.

Her car was on the side of the quiet stretch of pavement, right where she had left it. With trembling hands, Gabrielle fumbled with the locked door, petrified that G.I. Joe on steroids might catch up to her yet. Her fear seemed irrational, but that didn 't stop the adrenaline from pouring through her. Dropping down into the leather seat of the Mini, Gabrielle slammed the key into the ignition and turned over the engine. Heart racing, she threw the little car into drive, stomped on the gas pedal, and ripped out onto the road, making her escape in a screech of spinning tires and burning rubber.

CHAPTER Six

At midweek in the height of the summer tourist season, Boston's parks and avenues were clotted with humanity. Commuter trains sped people in from the suburbs, to workplaces and museums, and to the countless historic sites located around the city. Camera- toting gawkers clambered onto excursion buses and horse-drawn carriages to putter around town, while others lined up to board over-priced, overcrowded charter tours that would haul them by the hundreds out to the Cape.

Not far from the daytime bustle, secreted some three-hundred feet beneath a heavily secured mansion outside the city, Lucan Thorne leaned over a flat-panel monitor in the Breed warriors' compound and muttered a ripe curse. Vampire identification records scrolled up the screen's display with machine-gun speed as a computer program searched a ma.s.sive international database for matches against the photos Gabrielle Maxwell had taken.

"Anything yet?" he asked, slanting an impatient look at Gideon, the machine's operator.

"Zip, so far. But my search is still clocking. IID's got a few million records to scan." Gideon's sharp blue eyes flashed over the rims of sleek silver shades. "I'll get a lock on your suckheads, don't worry."

"I never do," Lucan replied, and meant it. Gideon had an IQ that was off the charts, compounded by a streak of tenacity that ran a mile wide. The vampire was as much relentless bloodhound as he was flat -out genius, and Lucan was d.a.m.ned glad to have him on his side. "If you can't flush them out, Gideon, no one can."

Beneath his crown of cropped, spiky blond hair, the Breed's computer guru bared a c.o.c.ky, confident grin. "That's why I get the big bucks."

"Yeah, something like that," Lucan said, drawing away from the screen's nonstop roll of information.

None of the Breed warriors who had signed on to protect the race from the scourge of the Rogues did so for any kind of payback. They never had, not from the first forming of their alliance in what was mankind's medieval era to now. Each warrior had his reasons for choosing this dangerous way of life, and some of them were, admittedly, more n.o.ble than others. Like Gideon, who had worked the field independently until seeking out Lucan after his twin brothers-little more than children-were killed by Rogues outside the London Darkhaven. That was three centuries ago, give or take a few decades.

Even then, Gideon's skill with a sword had been rivaled only by his rapier-sharp mind. He had slain many Rogues in his time, but much later, devotion and a private pledge to his Breedmate, Savannah, had made him give up combat in exchange for wielding the weapon of technology in service to the Breed.

Each of the six warriors who currently fought beside Lucan had their personal talents. They had their own personal demons as well, though none of them were the touchy-feely types looking to have Dr. Phil crawl up their a.s.s with a flashlight. Some things were better left to the dark, and probably the only one of them who felt that more than Lucan himself was the Breed warrior called Dante.

Lucan acknowledged the young vampire as he strode into the tech lab from one of the compound's numerous chambers. Dante, wrapped in his standard basic black attire, was wearing biker's leathers and a fitted tank that showcased both his inked tattoos and his more elaborate Breed markings. His thick biceps were banded with intricate scrollwork, which, to human eyes would seem oddly abstract, a series of interlocking symbols and geometric designs rendered in deep henna hues. Vampire eyes would see the symbols for what they truly were: dermaglyphs, naturally occurring marks inherited from the Breeds' forebears, whose hairless skin had been covered in the changeable, camouflaging pigments. Glyphs typically were a source of pride for the Breed, unique indications of lineage and social rank. Gen Ones like Lucan bore the marks in greater numbers and deeper saturation. His own dermaglyphs covered his torso, front and back, stretched down onto his thighs and along his upper arms, with still more running up the back of his neck and onto his scalp. Like living tattoos, the glyphs changed hues according to a vampire's emotional state.

Dante's were currently deep russet-bronze, indicating satiation from a recent feeding. No doubt, once he and Lucan had parted company after hunting Rogues the night before, Dante had gone on to find the bed-and the ripe, juicy vein-of a willing female Host topside.

"How goes it?" he asked, dropping into a chair and putting one large booted foot up on the desk in front of him. "Figured you'd have those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds bagged and tagged for us already, Gid."

Dante's voice held the trace accent of his eighteenth-century Italian ancestry, but tonight the cultured tone bore a rough edge that said the vampire was restless and itching for action. As if to make the point, he drew one of his ever -present signature curved blades from the sheath at his hip and began idly toying with the polished claw of steel.

Malebranche, he called the arced blades, a reference to demons inhabiting one of the nine levels of h.e.l.l, though sometimes Dante wryly adopted the word as a surname for himself when he was out among humankind. That was about all the poetry the vampire had in his soul; everything else inside of him was unapologetic, cold, dark menace.

Lucan admired that about him, and had to admit watching Dante in combat with those ruthless blades was a thing of beauty, enough to put any artist to shame.

"Nice work last night," Lucan said, well aware that praise from him was rare, even when it was deserved. "You saved my a.s.s out there."

He wasn't talking about the confrontation with the Rogues, but what had happened afterward. Lucan had gone too long without feeding, starvation being something almost as dangerous to their kind as the addictive overindulgence that plagued the Rogues.

Dante's look said he understood the meaning, but he let the fact slide with his usual cool nonchalance.

"s.h.i.t," he replied, drawing the word out around a deep chuckle. "After all the times you've had my back? Forget it, man. Just returning the favor."

The lab's gla.s.s entry doors slid open with a smooth hiss as two more of Lucan 's brethren strode in. They were quite a pair.

Nikolai, tall and athletic, with sandy hair, strikingly angular features, and piercing ice-blue eyes a shade colder than the winter of his Siberian homeland. The youngest of the group by far, Niko had come of age during the height of the humans' so-called Cold War.

A gearhead right out of the cradle, he was a high-octane thrill-seeker and the Breed's first line of defense when it came to things like guns, gadgets, and everything in between.

Conlan, by contrast, was soft-spoken and serious, a consummate tactician. He was as graceful as a big cat next to Niko's brash swagger, a wall of bulky muscle, his copper hair shorn beneath the black triangle of silk that wrapped his skull. The vampire was late generation Breed-a youth by Lucan's standards-his human mother the daughter of a Scottish chieftain. The warrior carried himself with a bearing that was nothing short of regal.

h.e.l.l, even his beloved Breedmate, Danika, affectionately referred to the highlander as My Lord a lot of the time, and the five- eleven female was hardly the subservient type.

"Rio's on the way," Nikolai announced, his mouth widening into a sly grin that put twin dimples in his lean cheeks. He gave Lucan a nod of his head. "Eva said to tell you we can have her man only after she's done with him."

"If there's anything left," Dante drawled, holding out his hand to greet the others with a smooth grazing of palms, then a knock of briefly connected knuckles.

Lucan met Niko and Conlan with like respect, but he settled in with mild annoyance at Rio's delay. He didn't begrudge any vampire his chosen Breedmate, but Lucan personally saw no point in strapping himself down with the demands and responsibilities of a blood-bonded female. It was expected of the general population of the Breed to take a woman to mate and bear the next generation, but for the warrior cla.s.s-those select few males who willingly shunned the sanctuary of the Darkhavens in favor of a life of combat-Lucan saw the process of blood-bonding as sentimental at best.

At its worst, it was an invitation to disaster if a warrior was tempted to put feelings for his mate above his duty to the Breed.

"Where's Tegan?" he asked, his thoughts leading naturally to the last of their number at the compound.

"Not yet returned," Conlan answered.

"Has he called in his location?"

Conlan exchanged a look with Niko, then gave a slight shake of his head. "No word."