Midnight Awakening(117)

Rio felt her curiosity chill toward fear as she neared the crypt. Even her human instincts picked up on the evil that had once slept in that block of stone.

But she shouldn’t be there.

Rio couldn’t let her see any more than she already had. He heard himself snarl as he moved on the rocky jut overhead. The woman heard it too. She tensed with alarm. The beam of her flashlight ricocheted crazily off the walls as she made a panicked search for the cave’s exit.

Before Rio could command his limbs to move, she was already slipping away.

She was gone.

She’d seen too much, but soon it wouldn’t matter.

Once night fell, there would be no further trace of the crypt, the cave, or of Rio himself.





“What happened to you tonight, Elise? Did someone hurt you out there? Were you attacked before the Rogues discovered you in the alley?”

Her answer was long in coming. “No. I wasn’t attacked.”

“You want to explain all that blood on your coat over there?”

She held her head in her hands, her voice a rough whisper. “I don’t want to explain anything. Please, Tegan. I wish you hadn’t come here. Just, please…you have to leave now.”

He exhaled a sharp laugh. “I just saved your sweet little ass, female. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you tell me why I had to.”

“I didn’t mean to be out past dark. I know the dangers. Things just took…a little longer than I anticipated.”

“Things,” he repeated, not liking where this seemed to be heading. “We’re not talking about shopping or coffee with friends, are we?”

Tegan’s gaze went back to the kitchen counter, to the familiar design of the cell phone that lay there.

“Where’d you get this, Elise?”

“I think you know,” she replied, her voice quiet but defiant.

He turned to face her. “You took it off a Minion? By yourself? Jesus Christ…how?”

She shrugged, rubbing the side of her head as if it pained her. “I tracked him from the train station. I followed him, and when the chance was there, I killed him.”

It wasn’t often that Tegan was taken by surprise, but hearing those words coming out of the petite female hit him like a brick to the back of his head. “You can’t be serious.”

But she was. The level look she gave him left no doubt whatsoever.

Tegan dropped his ass onto the futon and raked his fingers through his hair. “Holy hell, woman. Have you lost your mind?”