"Taxi!"
As the empty cab navigated across the lanes of nighttime traffic and roared up beside her, the doors of the nightclub burst open with the force of a hurricane.
"Hey, man! What the fuck!" Behind Gabrielle on the steps, a male voice rose to an octave just north of fear. "Touch me again, and I'll fuckin' - "
"You'll fuckin' what?" taunted another voice, this one low and deadly, and flanked by several others that were chuckling in amusement.
"Yeah, tell us, you little asswipe punker piece of shit. What're ya gonna do?"
Her fingers gripping the door handle of the cab, Gabrielle swiveled her head, half in alarm, half in knowing dread of what she would see. It was the gang from the bar, the bikers or whatever they were, in black leather and shades. The six of them circled the punker boyfriend like a pack of wolves, taking turns jabbing at him, toying with him like prey.
The kid threw a swing at one of them - missed - and the situation went from bad to worse in the blink of an eye.
All at once, the scuffle came crashing toward Gabrielle. The gang of thugs threw the punker up against the hood of the cab, slamming their fists into the kid's face. Blood splattered like raindrops from his nose and mouth, some of it hitting Gabrielle. She took a step back, stunned and horrified. The kid scrabbled to get away but his attackers stayed on him, beating him with a fury Gabrielle could hardly fathom.
"Get off my goddamn car!" the cabbie shouted out his open window. "Jesus Christ! Take it somewhere else, you hear me!"
One of the assailants turned his head toward the cabbie, smiled a terrible smile, then brought his large fist down on the windshield, shattering the glass into a spiderweb of cracks. Gabrielle saw the cabbie cross himself, his mouth working soundlessly within the car. There was a grinding of gears, then a piercing screech of tires as the taxi jerked into reverse, dislodging the burden from its hood.
"Wait!" Gabrielle screamed, too late.
Her ride home - her escape from this brutal scene - was gone. With a cold lump of fear lodged in her throat, she watched the cab speed off, careering into the street and its taillights disappearing into the dark.
And on the curb, the six bikers were showing their victim no mercy, too preoccupied with beating the punker senseless to give Gabrielle more than a passing thought.
She turned and bolted up the steps to La Notte's entrance, all the while fishing in her pocketbook for her cell phone. She found the slim device, flipped it open. Punched in 911 as she threw open the doors of the club and skidded into the vestibule, panic rising in her breast. Above the din of music and voices, and the thundering pulse of her own heart, Gabrielle heard only static on the other end of her cell. She pulled the phone away from her ear -
Signal faded.
"Shit!"
She tried 911 again. No luck.
Gabrielle ran for the main area of the club, shouting into the noise in desperation.
"Someone, please help! I need help!"
No one seemed to hear her. She tapped people's shoulders, tugged on sleeves, practically shook the arm of a tattooed military-looking guy, but no one paid any attention. They didn't even look at her, merely continued dancing and talking as if she wasn't even there.
Was this a dream? Some twisted nightmare where only she was aware of the violence taking place outside?
Gabrielle gave up on strangers and decided to search out her friends. As she wended through the dark club, she kept hitting Redial, praying for a decent signal. She couldn't get one, and she soon realized she would never find Jamie and the others in the thick crowd.
Frustrated and confused, she ran back to the club's exit. Maybe she could flag down a motorist, find a cop, anything!
Frigid night air hit her face as she pushed open the heavy doors and stepped outside. She dashed down the first set of concrete steps, panting now, uncertain what she was walking into, a woman alone against six, probably drugged-out gang members. But she didn't see them.
They were gone.
A group of young clubbers came strolling up the steps, one of them playing air guitar while his friends talked about hitting a rave later that night.
"Hey," Gabrielle said, half expecting them to walk right past her. They paused, smiling at her, even though at twenty-eight she was likely a decade older than any of them.
The one in the lead nodded his head at her. "'Sup?"
"Did any of you - " She hesitated, not certain she should be relieved that this was not, evidently, a dream after all. "Did you happen to see the fight that was going on out here a few minutes ago?"
"There was a fight? Awesome!" said the headbanger of the group.
"Nah, man," answered another. "We just got here. We ain't seen nothin'."
They passed by, climbing the rest of the steps while Gabrielle could only watch, wondering if she was losing her mind. She walked down to the curb. There was blood on the pavement, but the punker and his attackers had vanished.
Gabrielle stood under a streetlamp and rubbed a chill from her arms. She pivoted to look down both sides of the street, searching for any sign of the violence she had witnessed a few minutes before.
Nothing.
But then... she heard it.
The sound drifted from a narrow alley to her right. Flanked by a concrete shoulder-high wall that acted as an acoustic aid, the almost lightless walkway betrayed its occupants whose faint animal-like grunts carried out to the street. Gabrielle could not place the sick, wet sounds that froze her blood in her veins and tripped off instinctual alarms in every nerve in her body.
Her feet were moving. Not away from the source of those disturbing sounds, but toward it. Her cell phone was like a brick in her hand. She was holding her breath. She didn't realize she wasn't breathing until she had walked a couple of paces into the alleyway and her gaze had settled on a group of figures up ahead.The thugs in leather and sunglasses.
They were crouched down on their hands and knees, pawing at something, tearing at it. In the scant light from the street, Gabrielle glimpsed a tattered scrap of fabric lying near the carnage. It was the punker's tank top, shredded and stained.
Gabrielle's finger, poised over the Redial button of her cell phone, came down silently onto the tiny key. There was a quiet trill on the other end, then the police dispatcher's voice shattered the night like cannon fire.
"911. What is your emergency?"
One of the bikers swung his head around at the sudden disturbance. Feral, hate-filled eyes pinned Gabrielle like daggers where she stood. His face was bloody, slick with gore. And his teeth! They were sharp like an animal's - not teeth at all, but fangs that he bared to her as he opened his mouth and hissed a terrible-sounding foreign word.
"911," said the dispatcher once again. "Please state your emergency."
Gabrielle couldn't speak. She was so shaken, she could hardly breathe. She brought the cell phone up to her mouth, but could not make her throat form words.
Her call for help was wasted.
Knowing this with a certain, bone-deep dread, Gabrielle did the only logical thing that came to her. With trembling fingers, she turned the device toward the gang of sadistic bikers and clicked the image-capture button. A small flash lit up the alley.
They all turned toward her now, raising their hands to shield their sunglass-shaded eyes.
Oh, God. Maybe she still had a chance of escaping this hellish night. Gabrielle clicked the picture button again and again and again, all the while making her retreat back up the alley to the street. She heard murmured voices, snarled curses, the movement of feet on pavement, but she didn't dare look back. Not even when a sharp hiss of steel rang out behind her, followed by unearthly shrieks of agony and rage.
Gabrielle raced into the night on adrenaline and fear, not stopping until she reached a standing taxi on Commercial Street. She jumped in and slammed the door. She was panting, out of her mind with fear.
"Take me to the nearest police station!"
The cabbie slung his arm over the back of the seat and turned around to stare at her, frowning. "You okay, lady?"
"Yeah," she replied automatically. Then, "No. I need to report a - "
Jesus. What did she intend to report? A cannibalistic feeding frenzy by a pack of rabid bikers? Or the only other possible explanation, which wasn't any more believable?
Gabrielle met the cabbie's anxious eyes. "Please hurry. I just witnessed a murder."
Chapter Two
Vampires.
The night was thick with them. He had counted more than a dozen in the dance club, most of them trolling the half-dressed, undulating crowds, selecting - and seducing - the women who would Host their thirst that night. It was a symbiotic arrangement that had served the Breed well for more than two millennia, a peaceful cohabitation that depended on the vampires' ability to scrub the memories of the humans on whom they fed. Before the sun came up, a good deal of blood would be spilled but in the morning, the Breed would be returned to their Darkhavens in and around the city, and the humans they had enjoyed tonight would be none the wiser.
But that was not the case in the alley outside the nightclub.
For the six blood-gorged predators there, their unsanctioned kill would be their last. They were careless in their hunger; they hadn't detected that they were being watched. Not when he was observing them in the club, nor when he had trailed them outside, surveilling them from the ledge of a second-story window of the converted church.
They were lost to the high of Bloodlust, the disease of addiction that had once been epidemic among the Breed, causing so many of their kind to turn Rogue. Like these, who fed openly and indiscriminately from the humans who lived among them.
Lucan Thorne had no particular affinity for humankind, but what he felt for the Rogue vampires before him was even less. To see one or two feral vampires in a single night's patrol of a city the size of Boston was not uncommon. To find several working in tandem, feeding in the open as these did, was more than a little troubling. The Rogues were growing in numbers again, becoming more bold.
Something had to be done.
For Lucan and several others of the Breed, every night was a hunting expedition aimed at routing out the diseased few who would jeopardize all that the vampire race had worked so hard to achieve. Tonight, Lucan tracked his prey alone, not caring that he was outnumbered. He had waited until the opportunity to strike was prime: once the Rogues had greedily fed the addiction that ruled their minds.
Drunk on more blood than they could safely consume, they had continued to savage and fight over the body of the young man from the club, snarling and snapping like a pack of wild dogs. Lucan had been poised to dispatch quick justice - and would have, if it hadn't been for the sudden appearance of a ginger-haired female in the darkened corridor. In an instant, she had thrown the entire night off course: following the Rogues to the alley, then unwittingly drawing their attention away from their kill.
As the light from her cell phone's flash exploded in the dark, Lucan descended from the shadowed ledge of the window and landed on the pavement without a sound. Like the Rogues, Lucan's sensitive eyes were partially blinded from that sudden spark of light amid the dark. The woman fired a series of piercing flashes as she fled the carnage, those few panicked clicks likely all that spared her from the wrath of his savage kin.
But where the other vampires' senses were clouded and sluggish with Bloodlust, Lucan's were ruthlessly clear. From beneath his dark trenchcoat, he drew his weapons - twin blades wrought of titanium-edged steel - and swung to claim the head of the nearest Rogue.
Two more followed, the bodies of the dead thrashing as they began their swift cellular decomposition from oozing acidic pulp to incinerated ash. Animal shrieks filled the alleyway as Lucan severed the head of one more, then swung around to impale another Rogue through the torso. The Rogue hissed through bared, bloody teeth, its fangs dripping gore. Pale-gold eyes held Lucan in contempt, the huge irises swelled in hunger, swallowing up pupils that were narrowed to thin vertical slits. The creature spasmed, long arms reaching for him, its mouth stretched into a hideous, alien sneer as the specially forged steel poisoned its Rogue blood and reduced the vampire to smoldering stain on the street.
Only one remained. Lucan whirled to meet the large male, both blades raised to strike.
But the vampire was gone - fled into the night before he could slay it.
Damn.
He'd never let one of the bastards escape his justice before this. He shouldn't now. He considered chasing the Rogue down, but it would mean leaving the scene of the attack unsecured. That was the greater risk here, letting the humans know the full measure of the danger that lived among them. Because of the savagery of the Rogues, Lucan's kind had been persecuted and hunted by humans throughout the Old Times; the race might not survive a new age of retribution, now that man had technology on his side.
Until the Rogues were suppressed - better yet, eliminated entirely - humankind could know nothing of the existence of the vampires living all around them.
As he set about cleaning the area of all traces of the killing, Lucan's thoughts kept returning to the woman with the sunlit hair and sweet, alabaster beauty.
How was it she had been able to find the Rogues in the alley?
Although it was widely held among human folklore that vampires could disappear at will, the truth was only slightly less remarkable. Gifted with great agility and speed, they could simply move faster than human eyes could register, an ability that was augmented by the vampires' advanced hypnotic power over the minds of lesser beings. Oddly, this woman seemed immune to both.
Lucan had seen her in the club, he realized now. His gaze had been drawn away from his quarry by a pair of soulful eyes and a spirit that seemed nearly as lost as his own. She had noticed him, too, staring at him from where she sat with her friends. Even through the crowd and the stale odor of the club, Lucan had scented the trace notes of perfume on her skin - something exotic, rare.