Midnight Awakening(106)
Each Breed male also carried a sheathed broadsword strapped on his back—unconventional weaponry for modern warfare, but totally necessary hardware when you were dealing with something as nasty and powerful as the creature they were intending to rouse out of its slumber.
“That’s got be the place,” Dante said, pointing to the jagged silhouette of the mountains ahead of them. “The outline is a perfect match for the design in Kassia’s tapestry.”
“Probably take us a couple of hours to make the hike up there,” Niko put in. His cheeks dimpled with his eager grin, the white glint of his teeth bright against the cover of night. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go bag the motherfucker.”
Dante held him back with a firm hand, scowling at the young warrior’s zeal. “Hold up, all of you. This is not a fucking game. It’s not like any other mission we’ve done. That thing that was sealed away in this mountain is not your garden-variety vampire. You take Lucan and Tegan and put them together—shit, throw Marek in there too—and you still aren’t coming close to what this creature can do. He’s Gen One times a hundred.”
“But his head can be separated from his body, same as any one of us,” Rio pointed out in a low, deadly voice. “The fastest way to kill a vampire.”
Dante nodded. “And we’re gonna have one shot at him, no more. Once we find the crypt and get inside, first priority is putting three feet of razor-sharp steel through the bastard’s neck.”
“And we’ll need to do it before it has a chance to get up,” Chase added. “If we let this thing rouse before we’re in place and ready to kill it, there’s very good odds we won’t all make it out of there.”
“Someone remind me why I didn’t want to be an accountant when I grew up,” Brock drawled.
Niko chuckled. “Because accountants don’t get to make things go boom.”
“They don’t get to smoke many suckheads either,” Kade added, sharing in the joke.
Brock’s answering grin was big and bright white. “Oh, yeah. Now I remember.”
Dante let everyone settle in to the plan, the younger males blowing off nervous energy with humor and smacktalk. But as the team of them started up the wooded side of the rocky incline, they fell silent and serious. None of them were certain what lay at the end of this journey, but they were all prepared to meet it together.
Elise wasn’t sure how long they’d been driving. Easily hours. They navigated through each section of the city, the affluent and the derelict, stopping at regular intervals to let her listen to the darkened streets and alleyways. Waiting for her veins to prickle with the awareness—the fervent hope—that Tegan was near.
She didn’t want to give up.
Not even as the night began to wane toward dawn.
“We can make another circuit through town,” Lucan said, the Gen One warrior no more inclined to abandon Tegan than she was. Even though the coming daylight was as much a threat as any deadly enemy.
Elise reached over and touched the large hand that turned the steering wheel onto yet another street. “Thank you, Lucan.”
He nodded. “You love him a great deal, do you?”
“Yes, I do. He is…everything to me.”
“Then we’d better not lose him, eh?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, we’d better not…oh, my God…Lucan. Slow down. Stop the car!”
He braked at once, and pulled over near a tree-lined, elegant residential street. As the vehicle came to a halt, Elise put down her window. A cold February breeze rushed inside.
“Down here,” she said, her veins tingling.
She focused on the sensation, pulling it into her, trying to divine its source. It was Tegan; she had no doubt. And the heat that traveled her bloodstream was not a pleasant warmth, but an acid burn.
The searing heat of pain.
“Oh, God. Lucan, he’s being held somewhere on this street—I’m sure of it. And he’s hurting. He’s hurting…very badly.” She closed her eyes, feeling it even more now that the car was turning onto the pleasant drive. “Hurry, Lucan. He’s being tortured.”
She felt queasy, both with the idea of Tegan being abused, and with the twisting anguish coursing through every cell in her body. But she held on, searching for any sign that they were getting close. The white-hot spike of pain that hit her as they drew up on an old stone-and-timber manor house told her they had found him.
The house was set back from the street, quiet, but well tended. Obviously lived in. A white Audi sedan was parked at the carriage house garage. There was birdseed in the feeder hanging from a pine bough in the center of the yard. A kid’s sled lay on the snowy front walk.