Kiss of Midnight

He smelled it now as well, a delicate note that clung to the night, teasing his senses and calling to something primitive within him. His gums ached with the sudden stretching of his fangs, a physical reaction to need - carnal, or otherwise - that he was powerless to curb. He scented her, and he hungered, little better than his Rogue brethren.



Lucan tipped his head back and dragged the essence of the woman deeper into his lungs, tracking her across the city with his keen sense of smell. The sole witness to the Rogues' attack, it was more than unwise to let her keep the memory of what she had seen. Lucan would find the female and take whatever measures were necessary to ensure the protection of the Breed.



And in the back of his mind, an ancient conscience whispered that whoever she was, she already belonged to him.



"I'm telling you, I saw the whole thing. There were six of them, and they were tearing at the guy with their hands and teeth - like animals. They killed him!"



"Miss Maxwell, we've been over this numerous times already tonight. Now, we're all tired and the night is only getting longer."



Gabrielle had been at the police station for more than three hours, trying to give her account of the horror she witnessed outside La Notte. The two officers she spoke with had been skeptical at first, but now they were getting impatient, almost adversarial. Soon after she had arrived, the cops had sent a squad car around to the club to check out the situation and recover the body Gabrielle had reported seeing. The call had come up empty. No reports of a gang altercation and no evidence whatsoever of anyone having met with foul play. It was as if the entire incident had never happened - or had been miraculously swept clean.



"If you would just listen to me... if you would just look at the pictures I took - "



"We've seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times already. Frankly, nothing you've said tonight checks out - not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable images from your cell phone."



"I'm sorry if the quality is lacking," Gabrielle replied, acidly. "The next time I'm witnessing a bloody slaughter by a gang of psychos, I'll have to remember to bring my Leica and a few extra lenses."



"Maybe you want to rethink your statement," suggested the elder of the two officers, his Boston accent tinged with the Irish brogue of a youth spent in Southie. He stroked a chubby hand over his thinning brow, then slid her cell phone back across the desk. "You should be aware that filing a false police report is a crime, Miss Maxwell."



"This is not a false report," she insisted, frustrated and not a little angry that she was being treated like the criminal here. "I stand by everything I've said tonight. Why would I make this up?"



"That's something only you can answer, Miss Maxwell."



"This is unbelievable. You have my 911 call."



"Yes," agreed the officer. "You did, indeed, make a call to emergency dispatch. Unfortunately, all we have is static on the recording. You didn't say anything, and you didn't respond to the dispatcher's requests for information."



"Yeah, well, it's hard to find the words to describe seeing someone get their throat ripped out."



He gave her another dubious look. "This club - La Notte? It's a wild place, I hear. Popular with the goths, the ravers..."



"Your point being?"



The cop shrugged. "Lotta kids get into some weird shit these days. Maybe all you saw was a little fun getting out of hand."



Gabrielle exhaled a curse and reached for her cell phone. "Does this look like fun getting out of hand to you?"



She clicked the picture recall button and looked again at the images she had captured. Although the snapshots were blurry, diffused by the flash, she could still plainly see a group of men surrounding another on the ground. She clicked forward to another image and saw the reflective glow of several eyes staring back at the lens, the vague outlines of facial features peeled back in animal fury.



Why didn't the officers see what she did?



"Miss Maxwell," interjected the younger police officer. He strolled around to the other side of the desk and sat on the edge before her. He had been the quieter of the two men, the one listening in careful consideration where his partner spewed nothing but doubt and suspicion. "It's obvious that you believe you saw something terrible at the club tonight. Officer Carrigan and I want to help you, but in order for us to do that, we have to be sure we're all on the same page."



She nodded. "Okay."



"Now, we have your statement, and we've seen your pictures. You strike me as a reasonable person. Before we can go any further here, I need to ask if you would be willing to submit to a drug test."



"A drug test." Gabrielle shot out of her chair. She was beyond pissed off now. "This is ridiculous. I am not some tripped out crackhead, and I resent being treated like one. I'm trying to report a murder!"



"Gab? Gabby!"



From somewhere behind her in the station, Gabrielle heard Jamie's voice. She had called her friend soon after she arrived, needing the comfort of familiar faces after the horror she had witnessed.



"Gabrielle!" Jamie dashed up to her and surrounded her in a warm hug. "I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner, but I was already home when I got your message on my cell. Jesus, sweetie! Are you all right?"



Gabrielle nodded. "I think so. Thanks for coming."



"Miss Maxwell, why don't you let your friend here take you home," said the younger officer. "We can continue this at another time. Maybe you'll be able to think more clearly after you get some sleep."



The two policemen rose, and gestured for Gabrielle to do the same. She didn't argue. She was tired, bone weary, and she didn't think even if she stayed at the station all night she'd be able to convince the cops of what she witnessed outside La Notte. Numbly, Gabrielle let Jamie and the two officers escort her out of the station. She was halfway down the steps to the parking lot when the younger of the men called her name.



"Miss Maxwell?"



She paused, looking back over her shoulder to where the officer stood beneath the floodlight of the station.



"If it will make you rest any easier, we'll send someone around to check in on you at your home, and maybe talk to you a bit more, once you've had some time to think about your report."



She didn't appreciate his coddling tone, but neither could she find the anger to refuse his offer. After what she had seen tonight, Gabrielle would gladly take the security of a police visit, even a patronizing one. She nodded, then followed Jamie out to his waiting car.



From a quiet corner desk in the precinct house, a file clerk hit the print key on his computer. A laser printer whirred into action behind him, spitting out a single page report. The clerk drained the last swallow of cold coffee from his chipped Red Sox mug, rose from his rickety, putty-colored chair, and casually retrieved the document from the printer.



The station was quiet, emptied out for the midnight shift break. But even if it had been hopping with activity, no one would have paid any attention to the reserved, awkward intern who kept very much to himself.



That was the beauty of his role.



It was why he'd been chosen.



He wasn't the only member of the force to be recruited. He knew there were others, though their identities were kept secret. It was safer that way, cleaner. For his part, he couldn't recall how long it had been since he first met his Master. He knew only that he now lived to serve.



With the report clutched in his hand, the clerk shuffled down the hallway in search of privacy. The break room, which was never empty no matter the time of day, was currently occupied by a couple of secretaries and Carrigan, a fat, loud-mouthed cop who was retiring at the end of the week. He was bragging about the primo deal he had gotten on some backwater Florida condo while the women basically ignored him, the two females lunching on day-old, frosted yellow party cake and washing it all down with Diet Coke chasers.



The clerk ran his fingers through his pale brown hair and walked past the open doorway, toward the restrooms at the end of the corridor. He paused outside the men's room, his hand on the battered metal handle, as he casually glanced behind him. With no one there to see him, he moved to the next door down, the station's janitorial supply closet. It was supposed to be kept locked, but seldom was. Nothing much worth stealing in there anyway, unless you had a thing for industrial-grade toilet paper, ammonia cleanser, and brown paper towels.



He twisted the knob and pushed the old steel panel inward. Once inside the dark closet, he clicked the pushbutton lock from within and retrieved his cell phone from the front pocket of his khakis. He pressed speed dial, calling the sole number that was stored in the untraceable, disposable device. The call rang twice, then fell into an ominous silence as his Master's unmistakable presence loomed on the other end of the line.



"Sire," the clerk breathed, his voice a reverent whisper. "I have information for you."



He spoke quickly and quietly, divulging all of the details of the Maxwell woman's visit to the station, including the specifics of her statement about a gang killing downtown. The clerk heard a growl and the soft hiss of breath skating across the cell phone's receiver as his Master absorbed the news in silence. He sensed fury in that slow, wordless exhalation, and it chilled him.



"I ran her personal data for you, Sire - all of it," he offered; then using the dim glow of the cell's display, he recited Gabrielle's address, unlisted phone number, and more, the servile Minion so very eager to please his dreaded and powerful Master.



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.