Edge of Dawn (25 page)

“Might,” he said. “Might not.”

“I need to talk to Rooster, the sooner the better,” Mira told him. “And no one can know that I’m looking for him. No one.”

Rune’s hard stare bore into her, then slid to Kellan in what felt a lot like suspicion. “What about the Order?”

“No one,” Mira stated firmly.

It took the menacing Breed fighter a long moment to respond. When he did, it was with a curt inclination of his head. Agreement, even though he started closing the door on them again, in earnest this time. “If that’s all, I’ve got more important business to attend to.”

The sharp turn of the lock punctuated his exit. Then Kellan and Mira were standing alone in the passageway once more.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kellan said, taking her by the hand to make their way back up the stairwell to the club at street level.

They had no sooner cleared the back stairwell and were on their way through the noisy crowd, heading for the door, when a low voice sounded from behind them. “Thought you got the message a few nights ago when you were in here causing trouble, warrior.”

Kellan and Mira slowed to a halt, then together turned to face Cassian, La Notte’s proprietor. His eyes were the color of peridot, shrewd and hawklike beneath his dark brows and snowy crown of short-cropped hair. No small man in stature or build, he stood with arms crossed over his leather-and-buckle-clad chest, his long legs braced in a commanding stance.

“In case there was any doubt, you’re not welcome in my club.” His mouth curved in a smile that bordered on profane. “Or are you in here slumming with your friend?”

He wasn’t looking at Kellan when he said it, but Kellan’s hackles rose at the sight of the guy. Tension seeped into his limbs, tightened his grasp on Mira’s hand.

“We were just leaving,” she replied.

“Who’s this with you?” Cassian asked now. “New recruit?”

Kellan lowered his head as the man strolled toward them, moving with a rolling, pantherlike smoothness that belied that rough edges of the rest of his demeanor. Cassian’s bright green eyes pinned Kellan in a hard stare. “I know you.”

“Don’t think so,” Kellan growled, certain he’d never met the human. He would have recalled the arrogance and the none-too-subtle undercurrent of menace that vibrated around him.

That shock of silvery white hair seemed glacial under the swirling, colored lights from the stage behind them. A huge Faceboard monitor on the opposite wall flashed live coverage of a bloody human boxing match, no doubt meant to be an appetizer for the real fights set to take place later that night in the club’s basement. The monitor’s images illuminated Cassian’s angular face in harsh relief and shadows. “Yes,” he said, letting the word out slowly, almost a hiss. “It’s been some years, but I have seen you somewhere once before.”

Kellan dropped Mira’s hand because his were suddenly fisting of their own accord at his sides. “And I said you’re mistaken.”

“Let’s go.” Mira took his arm in both her hands as though she were prepared to drag him away from the confrontation with La Notte’s owner.

Cassian chuckled. “She likes you, wants to protect you. That’s intriguing. Figured she might’ve gone the other way . . . not that I didn’t find that thought intriguing too.”

The man had the poor judgment to take a step toward Mira, and Kellan’s hand shot out like a viper, blocking him. The chest that flattened against his palm was rock solid, unyielding. And where Cassian’s gaze was ice, his body was hot like coals beneath the leather, radiating a power Kellan could hardly reconcile.

As he held the man in place, physically keeping him from getting close to Mira, Kellan’s psychic gift roused awake inside him. It reached out through his touch on Cassian, searching for the truth of the human’s intentions.

And came up blank.

Utterly unreadable.

How the fuck could that be?

Cassian held his gaze for a second longer than Kellan liked, then the man simply stepped aside and strode toward the bar, where a group of inebriated, pretty young women were having trouble staying upright on their spiked heels.

Kellan was still trying to process what he’d just experienced, and he was surprised Mira didn’t have something to say about Cassian’s sudden lack of interest in them and their business at his establishment.

But Mira wasn’t looking at the man anymore.

She stared transfixed at the Faceboard monitor across the expanse of the place. Kellan followed her gaze. All the blood seemed to drain out of his head.

The monitor was no longer displaying the boxing match. On-screen now was a JUSTIS Department news alert, barely audible over the din of the crowd and the band still playing its set onstage. But the ticker scrolling across the huge monitor told Kellan all he needed to know.

Laboratory explosion in western Massachusetts today claims life of renowned scientist Jeremy Ackmeyer . . .

Second body recovered on-site, identified as Vincent DeSalvo, ex-convict with established ties to Boston area militant and rebel organizations . . .

Global Nations Council calling for thorough investigation into what it’s calling an act of conspiracy and premeditated murder . . .

“Kellan,” Mira murmured, her body unmoving, seeming frozen in place, even after he took her hand in his. “Oh, my God, Kellan . . . Jeremy Ackmeyer is dead.”

17

THE GRIM MOOD AT THE ORDER’S D.C. HEADQUARTERS HAD not improved in the hours since word of Jeremy Ackmeyer’s death at rebel hands had made headlines all over the world. As leader of the Order and the de facto public head of the Breed nation as a whole, Lucan Thorne’s mood was darkest of all those gathered.

Now, at sometime past midnight, most of the Order’s elder mem-bers based in the United States were present along with their mates, the group gathered in the drawing room of the mansion, situated just a few miles from the GNC headquarters at the National Mall. It was an odd juxtaposition: half a dozen long-lived, lethal Breed warriors more accustomed to combat gear and high-powered weapons, now seated in fancy, velvet-upholstered settees and delicate neoclassical armchairs.

Lucan wasn’t a particular fan of the frou-frou furnishings, but it made his Breedmate happy, so he’d been obliged to go with it. Gabrielle had insisted they preserve the architectural authenticity of the place, which included a small fortune in eighteenth-century artwork and Asian porcelains gifted to the mansion’s original owner, who’d served as a U.S. ambassador in the early 1900s.

She had, however, replaced a large, seventeenth-century English tapestry of Alexander the Great with another, far older one, which she said depicted a hero she much preferred to look at instead.

Lucan paced in front of that medieval-period artifact now, feeling the hand-rendered likeness of his own face judging him from within the woven threads of the tapestry that once hung in his quarters at the Order’s Boston compound. Gabrielle, Gideon and his mate, Savannah, Brock, Jenna, and several others gathered in the drawing room in prolonged silence as Lucan practically wore a track in the Oriental rug beneath his boots.

Rio and his Breedmate, Dylan, were less than an hour arrived from the Order’s base in Chicago. The Spanish warrior with the scarred face and normally easygoing demeanor was coiled forward where he sat, elbows resting on his knees, topaz eyes intense.

The other recent arrivals, Tegan and Elise, had come in from the base he commanded in New York City. The tawny-haired Gen One was one of the Order’s original members from the time of its founding—and within the past twenty years had become one of Lucan’s closest friends. Tegan and Elise had their own issues to contend with, namely, their twenty-year-old son, Micah, who was fresh out of warrior training and already embarking with his team on a black ops mission taking them to Budapest.

Elise was openly worried about letting her only surviving child out of her sight, but Micah was his father’s son, and Lucan knew as well as anyone that holding on too tight would only risk making the break that much more permanent when it came. He saw that in his own son every day, a weight that settled on him even in the midst of the more immediate problems he faced tonight.

The remaining members still due at the D.C. headquarters included Hunter and Corinne, coming in from New Orleans in a few more hours. Scheduled to arrive tomorrow night were Dante and Tess, now in charge of the Order’s base in Seattle, and Kade and Alex, overseeing the command center in Lake Tahoe. In light of the night’s events in Boston, Chase and Tavia were staying put there until the eve of the summit gala, when they’d be coming in to attend.

Across the elegant space now, Nikolai’s muttered curse was a hiss ripe with malice as his blond head swung away from his pregnant Breedmate and his glacial blue eyes hit Lucan. “Do we have any more intel about who these rebel bastards are and where they’re hiding?”

“Only what you already know from Nathan’s call tonight,” Lucan replied gravely. “Unfortunately, his best lead so far was the information that one of the rebels had defected from his fold, taking Ackmeyer with him for ransom bait. We all know how that turned out.”

Niko grunted. “And we have nothing on Mira. Not where she is or what they want with her. Or if she’s already been . . .”

That the Siberian-born, battle-hardened warrior had been unable to finish the thought told Lucan just how deeply Niko’s concern went. Renata’s too. The tough-as-nails female who’d become a valued, highly effective member of the Order’s combat missions these past two decades was slumped close to her mate, her jet-dark hair drooped into her face but not quite masking the lines of worry there. Renata’s mercilessly lethal hands trembled a bit where they rested on the pronounced bump of her late-term pregnancy.

“We don’t have anything more yet, but we will,” Lucan told them. “We’ll get her back safe and sound, I promise you.”

He considered the kill op he’d sent Nathan on, its purpose to recover Mira and the human and shut down their captors with a minimum of noise or attention. Nathan’s skill and suitability for the job would never be in question, but the laboratory explosion and the killing of Jeremy Ackmeyer had blown their mission objective to pieces.

And the fallout from that disastrous event was creating newer, bigger problems of its own.

In just the handful of hours since the news of the prominent human scientist’s death broke, there had been a swift, and extremely vocal, public outcry for justice. An outcry made all the more troubling when reports suggested not only that rebels were involved but that the Order was partially at fault for his abduction and resulting murder.

Lucan was still pissed that Ackmeyer’s uncle, GNC director Charles Benson, had immediately gone to investigators and the press with the fact that the Order had been enlisted—and had ultimately failed—to keep the civilian safe on what was supposed to have been a simple security escort to D.C. for the upcoming summit gala.

The already uneasy human population reacted with paranoia and suspicion, a few vitriolic prophets of doom warning that this failure only confirmed what they already feared: that the Breed, and the Order in particular, could not be trusted to value human life.

Peace, the worst of them were shouting to anyone who would listen, could never be had living alongside inhuman monsters.

The answering panic was widespread and quickly gaining ground. Riots in Boston had begun spreading to other cities. The small number of protesters that were commonplace in front of the Order’s D.C. headquarters had swelled to dozens in just a matter of hours. And while the civilians’ upset was trouble enough, militant groups around the world were now using the attack on Ackmeyer’s lab by suspected rebels as a rallying cry to vandalize and loot, to lash out at governments they deemed too willing to capitulate to the might and will of the Order and the rest of the Breed.

The current situation was, in a word, chaos.

With Lucan and the Order now standing squarely in the middle of it.

“We need to shut this shit down,” Lucan growled, anger spiking as the rumble of picketers outside the estate’s gates droned on. “We should be back on watch at our district command centers, in case the response to tonight’s news escalates from aggravating provocation to all-out anarchy.”

“Then again,” Gideon interjected, “it may be more important than ever for us to stand with the GNC, show the human public that their panic is without merit, and the Order is on their side. Show the world that we can be trusted as a partner in the effort toward peace between our races.”

Lucan saw Gabrielle and a few others nod in agreement. He knew they were probably right, but at the moment it was difficult to rein in the part of him that was ancient and answered to no one. The leader who, for centuries now, was accustomed to making the rules and, when called for, enforcing them with unstoppable might.

And right now, the last thing he gave a damn about was making a group public appearance at the summit, just to demonstrate solidarity with the GNC, whose members were apparently all too willing to throw the Order under the bus, or with the humans, who may never see the Breed as anything more than bogeymen just waiting for the opportunity to rip out their throats.