Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (2 page)

“To your room, boy,” she heard him say to Aaron with a demonstrative thrust of his index finger across the threshold. “I will deal with you presently.”

“Yes, sir.” She barely heard Aaron’s timid reply, then without as much as backward glance at Michel or the curricle, he darted indoors.

After a long moment in which Lamar stood at the top of the steps, glaring, and Michel stood at the bottom, unmoving, Michel said, “I hope you won’t be too hard on the boy,
monsieur.”

She watched the thin line of Lamar’s mouth turn downward all the more, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “I would thank you, Master Morin, to leave the rearing and disciplining of my son to me.”

“Of course,
monsieur,”
Michel demurred. “I meant to no disrespect.”

Lamar turned to walk inside, his posture rigid with barely suppressed rage. Just as Michel pivoted to return to the coach, Lamar’s voice stopped him.

“Tell me, Master Morin,” he called from the threshold of his house. “How fares Auguste Noble these days?”

Michel slowly turned back to face the older man. “He is fine, that I am aware of,” he replied, sounding tense, as if
choosing his words carefully.

“And that Trevilian strumpet he wedded and bedded…Eleanor, is it not? Is she likewise
fine,
that you are aware of?”
Lamar’s tone shifted, growing brittle and sharp. “Are her tits as sweet and
fine
as Auguste dreamed they be? Her cunt as tight and
fine
as his cock can manage? I would dearly hope that for all of the tides he had to move to claim her, the whore is as
fine
as he’d believed.”

Lamar’s tone had lost any pretense of courtesy or amiability, and when he replied, Michel’s had as well. “I believe she fucks him just fine,
monsieur
. Four or five times daily, at the least, or so he tells me. She likes it best from behind, I have heard tell, which gives them ample opportunity to go at it when and as they please, in their bedroom and well beyond.”

Naima shrank back on the floor of the coach, her eyes wide, her breath
frozen in frightened alarm. She’d never heard her grandfather speak so venomously before, or so coarsely. All at once, she wished she’d done as she’d been told, and remained at home, tending to her chickens.

“Get off my land,” she heard Lamar snap.

“I only return the insult you delivered first,” Michel replied.

“You dare to speak to me of insults?” Lamar said. “You, who turned his back and walked away while Victor lay dying on the dueling field?”

“I was Auguste’s second, and his wound was grave,” Michel said. “I could see from the point of impact there was no saving Victor.”

“You set that misbegotten son of yours, Mason, to let him die.”

“I gave no such dispatch. Mason is a competent physician.”

“Is that so?” At this, Lamar gave a snort of laughter and held up his cane, waggling it in the air at Michel in a demonstrative gesture Naima failed to understand.

“It is,” Michel replied evenly. “When he tells me he did all he could to preserve your son’s life, I believe him at his word.”

“I
however do not!” Now Lamar shouted; there was a slamming of a door, and Naima risked another peek. She saw he’d flung the front door closed, then hobbled down the steps toward Michel, leaning heavily against his cane, his face flushed bright red with fury. “Nor you! Auguste Noble may have fired the shot that pierced Victor’s breast, but it is on
your
head and hands that I lay the blame for his murder—and countless other insults delivered upon my clan! You and your boy—you have conspired against me all these years, all this while!”

“Lamar,
s'il vous plait,”
Michel entreated.
Please.
“You are overwrought. By my word, by my life, I tell you we have not. I cannot fathom the pain you must feel, the loss you have endured…”

“You are right, sir!” Lamar cut him short, jabbing his forefinger at him. “You are right—you cannot fathom, not now. Not yet. But you will.” He began to laugh, a cruel, bitter cackle that left the hairs along the nape of Naima’s neck standing on end.

He sounds as if his mind is broken.

“A brother for a brother, a son for a son,” Lamar seethed. “That’s what I mean to claim from you, Morin. There will be recompense for the wrongs you’ve committed, you and your boy. I’ll see
to that personally, and by Christ, I will not rest until I do.”

“You’re mad,” Michel told him, and there was no longer any anger in his voice, no venom. There was only that same sort of sadness Naima had seen in his face when he’d first
examined the wounds on Aaron’s back. “God help you, Lamar…you are mad.”

“I do not need God’s help!” Lamar roared as Michel strode back toward the coach. Again, Naima shied beneath the shelter of her cloak, as she felt the cab sway, shifting with Michel’s weight as he climbed up.

“I need nothing from God!” Lamar shouted, even as Michel snapped the reins and the horses took off. When Naima peeked, she could see Lamar shaking his cane in the air at them, his face twisted with murderous rage. “There’s nothing betwixt heaven and earth that I cannot see through with my own hands—and I will see to this, you son of a bitch!” he cried after them.
“I will see you suffer!”

CHAPTER ONE

Present day

Aaron
Davenant scaled the outer wall of the two-story building with only a sliver of moon and a solitary security light to guide his way. He was dressed all in black; his snugly fitted jacket had a hood he wore low on his brow, hiding his face in a veil of shadows. He wore shoes and gloves utilized by mountain climbers to maximize their gripping and foot-hold capacities. The fragrance of pine sap was strong and heady in the air, the scent of the rustic cedar siding tangy as he hooked his fingertips into miniscule nooks and crannies, climbing nimbly.

Balancing two stories off the ground
against a scrap of window ledge, he slipped a folding knife from a sheath on his belt, then slid the razor-keen edge of its four-inch long blade through the thin mesh of an exterior screen. The knife had been used in the past to punch through flesh and underlying fat and muscle, its serrated edge able to cleave through bone. The screen proved little obstacle, nor did the simple locking mechanism on the window just beyond. In less than ten seconds, he cut the screen, opened the window, and stole inside—as silent as a shadow.

As he stood by the window,
Aaron scanned the room slowly, but did not lower his hood. The pupils of his eyes expanded reflexively, opening so that to any outside observer, the dusky blue of his irises would seem swallowed by their ever-expanding circumferences. As they widened, his visual acuity and sensitivity to light likewise increased, and the shadow-draped room became more visible.

Although the exterior of the building was deceptively residential, t
he inside looked more like the hospital he’d been told it would be. The smell of antiseptic cleansers hung in the air, sterile and cold. The floors were smooth, nondescript tile, the walls painted a pale shade of grey to match. The overhead fluorescents had been darkened and the only illumination came from a small nightlight in the far corner of the room.

He had performed a perfunctory telepathic scan of both the building and surrounding grounds before he’d started his climb, and opened his mind, scanning again, confirming these preliminary results
.

O
ne woman in a nearby antechamber
. Her name, Aaron could clearly sense, was Karen Pierce. He found himself nearly disappointed to realize she was human, because although he’d never admit, Aaron had been excited by the prospect of coming to the Morin family compound on the shores of Lake Tahoe, if only for the slim chance of even catching a glimpse of others like himself—and especially a woman. He could count on one hand the number of female Brethren he’d seen in his more than 200 years of life—and that was if he held up his fist.

Ahead of him, a young
Brethren man lay in bed, surrounded by a bevy of machines that beeped, clicked and whirred softly. His name was Tristan Morin. And although he did not know it yet, these were to be the last moments of his life.

Make him answer for it,
his father had instructed. Little more than a withered husk, brittle, parchment-like skin covering a skeletal frame of clearly discernible bony prominences and depressions, Lamar Davenant was more than five hundred years old—the oldest living member of any Brethren clan. His power and authority among his people had been deferred to his son, Allistair, some two hundred years earlier, but even in this semblance of retirement, Lamar had remained a stalwart patriarch to his clan; the final say and ultimate command among his kin.

Aaron
couldn’t tell by looking if Tristan was asleep or comatose, but when he opened his mind, extending a cautious wave of telepathy in the boy’s direction, he could sense that his mind was clouded, his consciousness subdued.

Pain killers,
he thought, because he could see now that the young man was injured. His arm lay outstretched in the bed beside him, a lattice-work of pins and metal framing apparently holding broken bones together. The blankets were swathed low on his torso, and his chest had been wrapped in bandages from which Aaron could see a pair of tubes, one from each side of his rib cage, drooping down in loose coils toward canisters resting on the floor. More bandages, so stark to Aaron’s hypersensitive field of vision now they seemed aglow, marked places along his arms and upper chest where peripheral intravenous and central access ports had been inserted.

Looks like Jean Luc gave as good as he received
,
he mused, surprised and impressed. Had he been the betting sort, his money wouldn’t have been on his brother even in a scrap against Shirley Temple.

Aaron
crept forward, the soles of his shoes settling silently against the glossy linoleum. He listened to the soft, ragged sounds of Tristan’s breathing. The young man’s skin was flushed, glossed lightly with sweat, and Aaron understood now—it wasn’t just morphine flowing into him through the IVs, but antibiotics as well. He’d obviously come down with some sort of infection; Aaron could feel the heat radiating off him in febrile waves.

Make him bleed,
Lamar had rasped, his telepathic voice little more than rats’ feet scraping in a dry cellar inside of Aaron’s mind. Lamar’s vocal cords had long since withered away, his teeth working loose of their moorings with the inexorable and relentless passage of time. He could no longer speak aloud, could no longer feed himself—his vampiric bloodlust was slaked by tube feedings, a line that ran directly through a permanent, narrow incision above his naval through which human blood was flushed on a regular basis. His body was weak and frail, but his mind remained as sharp as any Brethren a quarter of his age.

As did his rage.

Two of his brothers were dead—Allistair, who had succeeded Lamar to the head of the clan, and Jean Luc, who had gone to seek revenge for Allistair’s murder. Allistair’s death had been a spectacle, occurring in front of the breadth of the Brethren Council—every male among their kind. He’d been killed by their family’s long-time rival, Augustus Noble; his humiliation had been shared—his shame branded—with every member of the Davenant clan.

Jean Luc’s death had been something more private, the details of it more speculation than known. But
Lamar had been able to discover that another long-standing rival—one believed dead for centuries—had been to blame: Michel Morin and his clan.
Make him answer for it,
Lamar had hissed.

And
Aaron had every intention of doing precisely this.

He’d
put his knife back in the clip at his belt and reached for it now, curling his fingers lightly about the grip, using the pad of his thumb to unfold the gleaming length of its curved blade. Had it been his choice, he might have opted to use his handgun instead, a .45-caliber Heckler and Kock he carried in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket or—preferably—the 98-Bravo sniper rifle he kept in the trunk of his rented Infiniti G35 sport coupe so he wouldn’t have had to set foot the room at all.

Could have shimmied up one of the trees outside, propped myself on a good-sized branch and taken my time, lined it up perfectly. One shot, straight through the frontal cortex. Dead on arrival.

But it wasn’t his choice. It was Lamar’s, and Aaron’s father wanted to send a message to the Morins that was loud, clear, and bloody.

Tear open his throat, leave the mark of our vengeance in blood on the floor around him,
he’d ordered.
Take your blade and carve out his heart—I want to hold it in my hand, crush it with whatever strength I have yet to call my own.

With his free hand,
Aaron reached down, touching Tristan’s forehead, easing his head back ever so slightly, leaving the slope of his neck vulnerably exposed. Leaning down, he tucked the knife against this soft curve of flesh. When the edge of sharpened steel pressed with enough force to draw a thin line of blood—the fragrance of it pungent, sharp and instantly discernible to Aaron’s heightened senses—Tristan groaned softly, his brows knitting upward, his heartbeat shuddering even faster.