Kiss of Midnight(64)

Lucan growled, forced to remember her horrified expression again and again since he’d slain the Minion.

He could still see her take a faltering step backward, her eyes wide with terror and revulsion. She had seen him for what he truly was—had even flung the word at him in accusation the instant before she’d fled.

He hadn’t tried to stop her, not with words or by force.

All he’d known in that moment was the pure rush of fury as he drained his prey dry. Then he’d dropped the body like the rubbish it was, feeling a further surge of rage when he considered what might have happened to Gabrielle had she fallen into Rogue hands. Lucan had wanted to tear the human apart—nearly had, he acknowledged, vividly recalling the savagery he had wrought.

He, the cool one, so fierce in his control.

What a fucking joke.

His carefully held mask had been slipping from the moment he had first met Gabrielle Maxwell. She made him weak, exposed his flaws.

Made him want things he could never have.

He stared up at that second-floor window, chest heaving as he battled a fierce urge to leap up there, smash his way in, and take Gabrielle someplace where he could keep her all to himself.

Let her fear him. Let her despise him for what he was, so long as he could press her warm body down beneath him, easing his pain as only she could do.

Yes, the beast within him snarled, knowing only want and need.

Before the impulse to have her could win out, Lucan fisted his hand and brought it down hard on the hood of the off-duty police officer’s car. The vehicle alarm howled, and as curtains parted in every nearby window at the disturbance, Lucan leaped off the curb and jogged into the shadows of the waning night.



“Everything’s okay,” Megan’s boyfriend said, coming back into her apartment after he’d gone out to investigate the sudden trip of his car alarm. “Damn thing’s always had a hair trigger. Sorry ’bout that. Not like we needed any added tension tonight, eh?”

“Probably just kids causing trouble,” Megan added from beside Gabrielle on the sofa.

Gabrielle nodded in vague agreement at her friend’s attempt to soothe her, but she didn’t believe it for a second.

It was Lucan.

She had felt him outside with an inner sense she couldn’t begin to describe. It wasn’t fear or dread, just a marrow-deep awareness that he was close by.

That he needed her.

Wanted her.

God help her, but she had actually been hoping he’d come to the door, haul her out of there, and help her make sense of the horror she had witnessed a short while ago.

He was gone now, however. She felt his absence as strongly as she’d known he had followed her to Megan’s.

“Are you warm enough, Gabby? Would you like more tea?”

“No, thanks.”

Gabrielle held on to the tepid cup of chamomile with two hands, feeling a chill inside of her that no amount of blankets or hot water could chase away. Her heart was still racing, her head still reeling from confusion and stark disbelief.

Lucan had torn open that guy’s throat.

With his teeth.

He’d put his mouth to the wound and drank the blood that gushed out over his face.

He was a monster, like something out of a nightmare. Like those same fiends who attacked and killed the punker outside the nightclub—something that seemed so far in her past now that she could hardly believe it happened.

But it had, just as tonight’s slaying had happened, too: this time with Lucan at the center of it.

Gabrielle had gone to Megan’s out of desperation, needing to be somewhere familiar, yet too afraid to go to her own apartment in case Lucan’s friend might be waiting for her there. She had told Megan and her boyfriend, Ray, how she’d been accosted on the street by the psycho from the police station. She’d relayed the facts that he’d also been spying on her a few days earlier, and when he’d confronted her tonight, he did so with a gun in his hand.

She wasn’t sure why she’d left Lucan entirely out of the story, crucial as his presence was. She supposed it was partly because regardless of his methods, he had killed tonight in order to protect her, and she felt a need to offer some of the same consideration to him.

Even if he was a vampire.

God, it sounded ridiculous even to think it.

“Gab, honey. You need to report what happened. The guy sounds seriously unhinged. The police need to hear about this, they need to get him off the street. Ray and I can take you. We’ll go downtown and find your detective friend—”

“No.” Gabrielle shook her head, setting her cold tea onto the sofa table with only the slightest quiver in her hands. “I don’t want to go anywhere tonight. Please, Megan? I just need to rest for a little while. I’m so tired.”