Kiss of Midnight

He scowled as though her mistrust wounded him. "The change cannot be forced. It is a physiological one that comes on with hunger, or during times of intense emotion."



"So, how much of a head start will I have before you decide to rip open my jugular and go for broke? A couple of minutes? A few seconds?"



His eyes flashed at her provocation, but his voice remained level. "I will not hurt you, Gabrielle."



"Then why are you here? To fuck me again, before you turn me into something awful like you?"



"Jesus," he ground out harshly. "That's not how it - "



"Or are you going to make me your personal vampire slave, like that one you killed last night?"



"Gabrielle." Lucan's jaw went rigid, as if his teeth were clenched hard enough to shatter steel. "I came here to protect you, goddamn it! Because I need to know that you are safe. Maybe I'm here because I see that I've made mistakes with you, and I want to try to fix this somehow."



She stood immobile, absorbing his unexpected candor, and watching the play of emotion on his harsh features. Anger, frustration, desire, uncertainty... she read all of it in his penetrating gaze. God help her, but she felt all of that and more churning like a tempest within herself as well.



"I want you to leave, Lucan."



"No, you don't."



"I never want to see you again!" she cried, desperate for him to believe her. She raised her hand to slap him, but he caught her easily, before she could strike. "Please. Just get out of here, now!"



Ignoring her completely, Lucan took the hand that would have lashed out at him, and brought it tenderly to his mouth. His lips parted slowly as he pressed her palm into his hot, sensual kiss. She felt no bite of fangs, only the tender heat of his mouth, the moist caress of his tongue as it teased the sensitive flesh between her fingers.



Her head swam with the delicious feel of his lips on her skin.



Her legs weakened beneath her, her limbs, and her resistance, beginning a slow meltdown that started at her core.



"No," she said, hurling the word at him as she pulled her hand out of his loose grip and shoved him away from her. "No. I can't let you do this to me, not now. Everything between us has changed! It's all different now."



"The only thing different, Gabrielle, is that you see me now with your eyes open."



"Yes." She forced herself to look at him. "And I don't like what I see."



His smile held no mercy whatsoever. "You only wish you could say the same about how I make you feel."



She wasn't sure how he did it - how he could move so fast in the time it took for her to blink - but in that same instant, Lucan's breath was skating close below her ear, his deep voice rumbling along her neck as he pressed his body against hers.



It was too much to process: this terrifying new reality, the questions she didn't even know how to begin asking. And then there was the other disorientation brought on by the exquisite power of Lucan's touch, his voice, his lips softly grazing her tender skin.



"Stop it!" She tried to push him, but he was a wall of muscle and cool, dark purpose. He withstood her anger, and the futile blows she threw at his massive chest didn't seem to faze him in the least. His placid expression remained as unmoving as his body. She backed away from him in frustration, in anguish. "God, what are you trying to prove here, Lucan?"



"Only that I am not the monster you want to believe I am. Your body knows me. Your senses tell you that you are safe with me. You need only listen to them, Gabrielle. And listen to me, when I tell you that I did not come here to frighten you. I will never strike you, nor will I ever take your blood. On my honor, I will never harm you."



She let out a choked laugh, a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a vampire possessing anything close to honor, let alone pledging it to her now. But Lucan was unwavering, solemn. Maybe she was crazy, because the longer she held his silver stare, the weaker her grasp on the doubt she wanted so desperately to cling to.



"I am not your enemy, Gabrielle. For centuries, my kind and yours have needed each other to survive."



"You feed on us," she whispered brokenly, "like parasites."



Something dark moved across his features, but he did not rise to the contempt in her accusation. "We have protected you as well. Some of my kind have even cherished yours, sharing life together as blood-bonded mates. It is the only way the vampire race continues. Without human females to bear our young, we would eventually be extinct. It is how I came to be, and how all those like me came into being as well."



"I don't understand. Why can't you... mix with women of your own kind?"



"Because there are none. Through a genetic failure, Breed offspring are solely male, from the very first of the line, down through hundreds of generations."



This last revelation, among all the other astonishing news she was hearing, gave her pause. "So, that means your mother is human?"



Lucan gave a slight nod. "She was."



"And your father? He was..."



Before she could say the word vampire, Lucan replied. "My father, and the seven other Ancient Ones like him, were not of this world. They were the first of my kind, beings from another place, very different from this planet."



It took her a second to absorb what she had heard, particularly on the heels of everything else she was coming to grips with at the moment. "What are you saying - they were aliens?"



"They were explorers. Savage, warminded conquerors, in fact, who crash-landed here a very long time ago."



Gabrielle stared at him. "Your father was not only a vampire, but an alien besides? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?"



"It is the truth. My father's people did not call themselves vampires but, by human definition, that is what they were. Their digestive systems were too advanced for Earth's crude protein. They could not process the plants or animals as humans did, so they learned to take their nourishment from blood. They fed without restraint and wiped out entire populations in the process. You've heard of some of them, no doubt: Atlantis. The Mayan kingdom. Countless other unnamed, unrecorded civilizations that vanished seemingly overnight. Many of the mass deaths historically attributed to plagues and famine were not that at all."



Good Lord.



"Assuming you can be taken seriously about any of this, you're talking about thousands of years of carnage." A chill spread over her limbs when he said nothing to deny it. "Do they they... do you - God, I can't believe I'm having this conversation. Do vampires feed on any living thing, like each other maybe, or are we humans the main course?"



Lucan's expression was grave. "Human blood alone contains the specific combinations of nutrients we need in order to survive."



"How often?"



"We must feed every few days, a week sometimes. More is required if we are injured and need strength to heal from wounds."



"And you... kill when you feed?"



"Not always, seldom, in fact. Most of the race feeds from willing human Hosts."



"People actually volunteer to let you torture them?" she asked, incredulous.



"There is no torture involved, unless we will it. When a human is relaxed, the bite of a vampire can be very pleasurable. When it's over, the Host recalls nothing because we leave no memory of ourselves behind."



"But you do kill sometimes," she said, finding it hard not to sound accusing.



"At times, it is necessary to take a life. The Breed shares an oath never to prey on the innocent or infirm."



She scoffed. "How noble of you."



"It is noble, Gabrielle. If we wanted to - if we gave ourselves over to that part of us that is still the warring conqueror of our forebears, we could enslave all of mankind. We could be kings, with every human existing only to feed and amuse us. That very idea is at the core of a long, deadly battle between my kind and our enemy brothers, the Rogues. You saw some of them yourself, that night outside the dance club."



"You were there?"



As soon as she said it, she knew he had been. She recalled the striking face and sunglass-shaded eyes that had watched her through the crowd. She'd felt a connection to him even then, in that brief glance that had seemed to reach out to her through the smoke and darkness of the club.



"I'd been tracking that group of Rogues for about an hour," Lucan said, "watching for the prime opportunity to move in and take them out."



"There were six of them," she remembered vividly, seeing in her mind the half-dozen terrible faces, their glowing, feral eyes and snapping fangs. "You were going to confront them by yourself?"



His shrug seemed to say that it was not unusual odds, him against many. "I had some help that night - you and your cell phone camera. The flash surprised them, gave me the chance to strike."



"You killed them?"



"All but one. I'll get him, too."



Looking at his fierce expression, Gabrielle had no doubt that he would. "The cops sent a squad car out to the club after I reported the killing. They didn't find anything. No evidence at all."



"I made sure they wouldn't."



"You made me look like a fool. The police insisted I was making all of it up."



"Better that, than tipping them off to the very real battles that have been taking place on human streets for centuries. Can you imagine the wide-scale panic if substantiated reports of vampire attacks were to start making news around the world?"



"Is that what's happening? These kinds of killings are going on all the time, everywhere?"



"More and more, lately. The Rogues are a faction of blood addicts that care only about their next fix. At least, that had been their mode until very recently. Something's going on now. They're preparing. Becoming organized. They've never been more dangerous than they are now."



"And thanks to the pictures I took outside that club, these Rogue vampires are coming after me."



"The incident you witnessed brought you to their attention, no doubt, and any human makes good sport for them. But it is the other pictures you've taken that have likely put you in the most jeopardy."



"What other pictures?"



"That one."



He indicated a framed photograph hanging on the wall of her living room. It was an exterior shot of an old warehouse in one of the sketchier parts of town.



"What made you decide to photograph that building?"



"I don't know, exactly," she said, not even sure why she had decided to frame the picture. Just looking at it now gave her a little chill down her spine. "I never would have set foot in that part of town, but I remember I'd taken a wrong turn that night and ended up lost. Something just drew my eye to the warehouse - nothing I can really explain. I was nervous as hell to be there, but I couldn't leave without taking a few shots of the place."



Lucan's voice was gravely serious. "I, along with several other Breed warriors who work with me, raided that location a month and a half ago. It was a Rogue lair, housing fifteen of our enemies."



Gabrielle gaped at him. "There are vampires living in that building?"



"Not anymore." He strode past her to the kitchen table, where a few other shots lay, including some from the abandoned asylum, taken just a couple of days ago. He picked up one of the photographs and held it out to her. "We've been surveilling this location for weeks. We have reason to believe it might be one of the largest colonies of Rogues in New England."



"Oh, my God." Gabrielle stared at the image of the asylum, a slight tremble in her fingers as she set it back down on the table. "When I took these pictures the other morning, a man found me there. He chased me off the property. You don't think he was - "



Lucan shook his head. "Minion, not a vampire, if you saw him after dawn. Sunlight is poison to us. That much of the old folklore is true. Our skin burns quickly, like yours would if you held it under a very powerful magnifying glass at the height of morning."



"Which is why I've only seen you in the evening," she murmured, thinking back on each of Lucan's visits, from that very first time when he began his deception with her. "How could I have been so blind when all the clues were right in front of me?"



"Maybe you didn't want to see them, but you knew, Gabrielle. You suspected that the slaying you witnessed was something more than what your human experiences could explain. You nearly said as much to me, the first time we met. On some level of your consciousness, you knew it was a vampire attack."



She did know, even then. But she had not suspected that Lucan was a part of it. Part of her still wanted to reject the idea.



"How can this be real?" she moaned, dropping into the nearest chair. She stared at the pictures scattered on the table in front of her, then looked back up at Lucan's grim face. Tears threatened, burning in her eyes, a knot of desperate denial forming in her throat. "This can't be real. God, please tell me that this is not really happening."



Chapter Nineteen



He had laid a lot on her to deal with - not everything, but more than enough for one night.



Lucan had to give Gabrielle credit. Aside from a bit of irrationality with the garlic and holy water, she had maintained an amazingly level head through a conversation that was, no doubt, pretty hard to swallow. Vampires, ancient alien arrivals, the rising war with the Rogues, who, by the way, were gunning for her now, too.



She had taken it all in with a stalwartness that most human men would not possess.



Lucan watched her struggling to process the information as she sat at the table with her head in her hands, stray tears only just beginning to stream down her cheeks. He wished there was a way to make her path easier. There wasn't. And things were going to go from bad to worse for her, once she learned the full truth of what lay ahead of her.