Kiss of Midnight(6)

“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.