Ashes of Midnight (6 page)

 

For a second, Roth kept his foot heavy on the accelerator, thinking he would just fly past her like she wasn’t there—give her a reminder of how he detested her unique talent and had long ago forbade her to use it on him. But as the Jag roared up the fast lane and Claire’s face came into the light of his high beams, he realized she was upset about something. Visibly stricken. Not at all typical of the otherwise calm, cool, and collected female.

 

She lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the headlights, and Roth took the opportunity to vanish his dreamtime plaything. The naked blonde he’d conjured from the cheap porno film that was running as he’d dozed off disappeared with just a thought; the fierce erection he was sporting from the fly of his unzipped Armani trousers wouldn’t go away quite that easily. Not that Claire would question him about it if she noticed. She’d learned her place years ago, and after all, it wasn’t as if he could be held accountable for where his mind went when he was sleeping.

 

Precisely the reason he’d given her for barring her from dreamwalking around him.

 

That and the fact that it simply pissed him off to have his privacy invaded in any form.

 

Annoyed, Roth tucked himself back into his pants as he brought the car to a smooth halt right in front of his anxious Breedmate. She didn’t wait for him to address her, didn’t apologize for the interruption.

 

“Wilhelm, something terrible has happened.” She gripped the edge of the driver’s side door, her dark eyes intense with worry. “There’s been an attack at the country house.”

 

Roth felt his jaw go tense with anger more than surprise. “An attack? When?”

 

“Last night. A few hours ago.”

 

And he was just hearing about this now? Through her, and not his guards?

 

Roth scowled. “Tell me what happened.”

 

“It was awful,” she said, closing her eyes as though the memory pained her. “There were fires everywhere … explosions in the woods near the house and on the road. So much smoke and ash. We tried to leave, but we were too late.”

 

His anger spiked. “Where are you now?”

 

“At home… well, at my home. I’m still at the country house.”

 

“All right.” Roth nodded vaguely. “What about the men on watch there? Why is it they’ve left you to tell me all of this when they’re the ones who owe me the explanation?”

 

“They’re dead, Wilhelm.” Her voice faltered, dropping to a whisper. “Everyone else who was here tonight is dead.”

 

Roth bit off a ripe curse. “Very well. Stay put. I’ll contact the Hamburg Darkhaven and arrange for an envoy to pick you up and bring you back into the city.”

 

Claire was shaking her head before he had a chance to
complete the thought. “Wilhelm… haven’t you heard? The Hamburg Darkhaven. It’s gone.”

 

“What?”

 

“The Darkhaven came under attack first. There’s nothing left of it. No survivors, other than one Enforcement Agent who escaped the fires to warn us that we were likely in danger, as well.”

 

Roth absorbed this news in grim silence. He didn’t have a lot of kin—no sons of his own to want to oust him from power, no brothers of any generation who’d managed to live as long as he had. The Darkhaven community he shepherded in Hamburg consisted only of a few nephews, who’d never been good for much; various household staff; plus a small garrison of guards on loan from the Agency. He hardly knew any of them, in truth, and frankly, he had more important things to consider than wasting any time mourning the loss.

 

“I’m sorry, Wilhelm,” Claire was saying now, sentiment he dismissed with a curt wave of his hand.

 

He supposed he had to know something like this was going to happen. He did know, in fact. He’d known from the moment he’d been informed of the first Enforcement Agency death at the Berlin office several weeks past—the up-close-and-personal killing of an agent who reported directly to him on covert, often unofficial, operations. When the second violent murder within his private contingent occurred, then the third and fourth, it left little question that someone was out for blood.

 

The only trouble with that theory being the fact that the someone in question was dead. At least that had been the report coming out of the Agency. At the time, Roth hadn’t had the opportunity or the inclination to doubt the intel; more important business had already called him away to
Montreal. That business was still his chief priority, but this assault on his personal holdings could not go unmet.

 

“I will take care of the matter,” he told Claire. “And you needn’t worry, I’ll call in a few favors to find you temporary shelter in the region until I am able to return.”

 

“Where exactly are you, Wilhelm? One of your guards told me you’re not in Germany.” She looked around at the dream landscape, her gaze clearly taking note of the jags of steep granite that flanked some of the stretch of rural highway his mind had manufactured. “Are you in New England?”

 

Too clever, his Yankee-born Breedmate. And far too inquisitive now for her own good. Roth neither confirmed nor denied his whereabouts. “Stay put, Claire. You’ll be fine.”

 

“Wilhelm,” she said slowly. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious about who attacked us last night? I would think you’d want to know who’s responsible … and why.”

 

Roth stared at her.

 

“Andreas Reichen,” she said, watching him much too closely for his reaction.

 

He was careful to give her nothing, not so much as a blink of his eyes or a kick of his pulse. He frowned after a moment, feigning confusion. “You speak of a ghost, Claire. Andreas Reichen perished with the rest of his kin this past summer when his Darkhaven burned to the ground.”

 

In fact, Roth thought with private disappointment, the arrogant son of a bitch should have been dead long before then.

 

Claire shook her head. “He’s alive. He’s… changed, Wilhelm. He has a terrible rage inside him—a power I can barely comprehend. The fires and explosions here and in
Hamburg? He made them. They came out of him. I saw it with my own eyes.”

 

Roth listened, both incredulous and concerned.

 

“Wilhelm, he says he intends to kill you.”

 

He scoffed. “The bastard will never get close enough to try.”

 

“He’s here, Wilhelm.” Claire’s gaze was imploring. “He is here, in the house with me, passed out in the cellar. I don’t know what to do.”

 

Roth’s furious curse was punctuated by an electronic bleating that pierced the fabric of his dream. His surroundings warped and vibrated. The ribbon of dark pavement and the perfect starlit sky above trembled, the vision of Claire starting to fade out with the sound waves that were rousing him from sleep.

 

“My mobile is ringing,” he said, ready to be done with her anyway. As he spoke, the Jaguar he’d been sitting in vaporized, leaving him standing on the strip of moonlit pavement beside her. “I have to take this call now—”

 

Claire’s filmy image reached for him. “What about Andreas?”

 

He ground his molars together at the apparent easy familiarity she still seemed to feel toward the other male, even after decades of separation. “Keep the son of a bitch contained at the house while I make arrangements to deal with him.”

 

“You want me to stay here with him?” She stared, uncertain. “For how long?”

 

“As long as it takes. I’ll send another Agency detail to remove him at sunset.”

 

“Remove him into Agency custody, you mean? You won’t let your men hurt him, will you?”

 

Her apparent concern was thoroughly pissing him off.
“My men are professionals, Claire. They know how to handle a situation like this. You needn’t worry about the details.”

 

The jangle of his ringing phone came again, pulling him further away from her, back to consciousness.

 

“What about me, Wilhelm?” Claire murmured. “How am I supposed to keep Andreas here until your men arrive?”

 

“Do whatever you must,” Roth replied flatly. “You know him better than most, after all. Intimately, if memory serves. I’m sure you’ll think of some way to detain him.”

 

He didn’t wait for her to say anything more. The phone rang again and Roth’s eyes snapped open, severing his thready connection to Claire.

 

He grabbed the mobile from the table next to his bed. “Yes.”

 

“Herr Roth,” said a nervous Breed male on the other end of the line. “This is Agent Krieger from the Berlin office, sir. There’s been a murder here last night—Agent Waldemar’s body was just discovered in his residence. His neck was broken. And… there’s more, sir. It seems there was an incident at your Darkhaven in Hamburg, as well.”

 

Roth scoffed, full of sarcasm. “You don’t say.”

 

“Sir?”

 

“Assemble a combat team and send them to my country house as soon as the sun sets. The unit on-site has been attacked and eliminated. Now my Breedmate is there without any cover. She’s alone, and she’s holding Andreas Reichen for you.”

 

“Reichen?” asked the agent. “I don’t understand, sir. Wasn’t he killed in that freak accident at his Darkhaven some time ago?”

 

Roth’s fingers tightened on the thin case of the mobile phone. “Apparently the bastard is very much alive … for the moment. Instruct the team that I want him taken out on sight. Make him dead, agent.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
Five

 

 

R
eichen stood over her in silence, his hands braced on the arms of a moss green wingback chair in one of the estate’s receiving rooms, where Claire had fallen asleep. For a moment, when he’d first come to alone in the pitch-dark cellar, he hadn’t the first clue where he was or how he’d gotten there. Nor could he immediately recall why it was that most of his body was recovering from UV burns. It was like that for him sometimes, after the pyrokinetic energy faded. Hard to remember details. Hard to make sense of his surroundings.

 

Hard to know anything except the fierce blood thirst that overtook him once his inner fire had a chance to cool.

 

He had been disoriented when he first regained
consciousness in the cellar, but then he’d breathed in the softest trace scent of vanilla and warm spices.

 

Claire.

 

Her blood scent had drawn him out of the dark and up the flight of stone steps, into the room where she dozed now. He breathed her in as he loomed over her, tempted to close his eyes and savor the memory of what had been, but instead he barely blinked. He watched the quick, darting movement of her eyes beneath her closed lids.

 

She was dreaming.

 

Reichen wondered how long she’d been sleeping, or where her dreams had carried her that her pulse would be beating as rapidly as a skittish hare’s. His thirsting gaze drifted down from the delicate beauty of her face to the smooth golden brown skin of her throat. Ticking frantically at the right side of her neck, her artery beat beside a small scarlet-colored birthmark. Reichen’s fangs were already filling his mouth, but now they throbbed, his eyes rooted on that tender patch of flesh with its diminutive teardrop-and-crescent-moon symbol riding so close to Claire’s pulse.

 

Jesus, he was parched.

 

His belly was tight and empty, his limbs heavy and fatigued. He licked his lips, hardly able to keep himself from leaning in a bit closer, until the light beat of her pulse was banging in his own veins as loud and demanding as a drum.

 

God, he thirsted… so deeply that the need was primal, animal, urging him to sweep in and take his fill like the predator he truly was.

 

That it was Claire beneath him was the only thing that made him pause. How long had he wondered what she would taste like? How many times had he come this
close—hell, even closer than this—to pressing his fangs into her buttery soft skin and drinking from her vein? He’d wanted that more than anything at one time. But it was the one thing he’d never done, not even in their most fevered moments together.

 

As much as he’d hungered to taste her, to bond her to him through blood, he had never taken his need for Claire that far. She was a Breedmate. Unlike the larger percentage of
Homo sapiens
females walking the planet, she was one of a small number bearing unusual blood and DNA properties.

 

Claire and those like her, born with the crimson stamp somewhere on their bodies, were also uniquely gifted with extraordinary psychic abilities. And, unlike other human women, they had the ability to form an unbreakable bond with members of the Breed and bear their young. When a Breedmate offered her blood to one of Reichen’s kind, it was a precious gift—the most sacred of all. It forged a bond that could be severed only by death.

 

Reichen couldn’t lie to himself and pretend that he’d never been tempted. But he’d hardly been the kind to settle down, especially then. For all his libertine ways, and as laughable as it seemed to him now, his honor had prevented him from taking something from Claire that could never be called back. One sip of her blood meant she would live in him for as long as he drew breath. He would be bound to her always, drawn to her always, regardless of any vow she’d made to another male.