The Midnight Breed Series Companion (29 page)

The blast threw him into the wall, smoke and debris flying all around him. He hit hard, felt the burn of random shrapnel peppering his back. But he was alive. He was still in one piece. Relief washed over him...until his nostrils filled with the alarming scent of his own blood.

A lot of it.

He shifted from where he had fallen on the stairs and looked down to assess the damage. Hundreds of lacerations and singed skin where the hot shrapnel had hit him. Nothing his Breed genetics couldn’t heal on their own in a few hours’ time.

But it was the other wound that gave him pause.

The catastrophic rip in his left thigh, which had nearly severed the limb and was currently gushing like a geyser with each heavy pound of his heartbeat.

Blood seeped out of him fast and hard.

His body could mend itself from injury. It had, more times than he’d ever bothered to remember.

But this was bad.

This was deadly bad, even for one of his kind.

CHAPTER 14

A heavy thump hit the front door, drawing Savannah up from the chair with a start.

Gideon?

It seemed like she’d been waiting forever, concern for him and distress over being left alone in the sorrowful old house making time drag endlessly.

Another loud thump sounded from outside the door.

She crossed the room, feeling a surge of relief. “Gideon, is that you?”

She wanted it to be him.

Prayed it was...until she heard the metallic snick of the lock, then the door opened and a large, blood-and-sweat-soaked body slumped in onto the floor.

“Oh, my God. Gideon!”

Savannah raced to him. She dropped down beside him, horrified at his condition. His hair and face, his hands--every exposed inch of him was covered in black ash, sweat and blood. So much blood.

He tried to speak, but all that passed his lips was a rasp of sound. “Keaton,” he wheezed. “Minion...he’s dead...can’t hurt you now.”

She blew out a curse that sounded more like a sob. “I don’t care about him, damn it. All I care about is you.”

He tried to sit up, only to slump back down onto the floor in a heap. Blood was pooling under him, pulsing out from scores of shrapnel wounds and a very severe injury in his thigh.

She glanced down at his leather weapons belt, cinched as a makeshift tourniquet around the upper portion of his leg. She could see muscle in the open gash on his thigh. Holy shit. She could see bone in there too.

“Gideon,” she cried. “You need help. You need a hospital--”

“No.” He snarled the word, his voice sounding unearthly, lethal.

His eyes were on fire, swamped completely in bright, glowing amber light. His pupils had thinned so much they almost weren’t there. His fangs filled his mouth, stretched sharp as daggers between his parted lips as he struggled to drag air into his lungs.

“Get away,” he gasped when she reached out to smooth away the soaked hank of hair plastered to his brow. His skin was pale white and waxy. His face contorted in pure agony. “Stay away.”

“You have to let me help you.” She leaned over him to try to lift him up.

Gideon’s eyes rolled hungrily to her throat. “Stay back!”

The hissed command made her flinch, recoil. She stared at him, unsure what to do for him and half-afraid he was already too far gone.

“Gideon, please. I don’t know what to do.”

“Order,” he said thickly. He recited a string of numbers. “Go now...call them.”

She tried desperately to remember the sequence, repeated them back to him to be sure. He gave a vague nod, his eyelids drooping, skin growing ever more dangerously pale. “Hurry, Savannah.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, Gideon. I’ll call them. Stay with me. I’m gonna get you help.”

She flew into the bedroom to retrieve her wallet from her purse and a pen to frantically scribble the digits onto the palm of her hand. Then she raced out of the house and down the street, praying the battered pay phone on the corner wasn’t out of service.

Fumbling change into the slot, she then dialed the number Gideon had given her. It rang once, then silence as someone picked up on the other end.

“Um, hello? Hello!”

“Yeah.” A deep voice. Dark, arresting. Menacing.

“Gideon told me to call,” she blurted in one panicked rush of breath. “Something’s happened to him and I--”

Click.

“Hello?”

The dial tone buzzed in her ear.

~ ~ ~

It wasn’t even ten minutes later that Savannah found herself standing beside an unresponsive Gideon, staring up into the hard face and unreadable eyes of a massive Breed male dressed in black leather and pulsing with lethal power.

He hadn’t knocked, simply strode right in without a word of greeting or explanation. And he’d arrived on foot apparently, from where, Savannah could only guess.

Since she’d met Gideon and learned about his kind, she was coming to simply accept some things as simply part of the new reality.

Still, she could hardly curb the impulse to scrabble out of the disturbing male’s way when he came farther inside the house.

The place was his, there could be no doubt about that.

He was the one who put the box of ashes in the hidden room below the kitchen.

It was his wrenching sorrow Savannah had glimpsed when she touched the reliquary.

He stared at her now without any emotion whatsoever. His green eyes didn’t so much look at her as through her.

He knew.
He knew she’d been down in his private cell filled with death.

Savannah could see the awareness of her breach all over his grim face, although he said nothing to her. Did nothing, except grimly go to Gideon’s side. He bent his big body and went down in a crouch on his haunches beside Gideon. A low curse hissed out of big male.

“He won’t wake up,” Savannah murmured. “After I came back from making the call, I found him like this, unconscious.”

“He’s lost too much blood.” The voice was the same deep, threatening growl that she’d heard on the other end of the line. “He needs proper care.”

“Can you save him?”

The tawny head swiveled to face her, bleak green eyes raking her. “He needs blood.”

Savannah glanced down at Gideon, recalling his sharp reprimand that she not come near him. He’d been furious, desperately so, even though it had been obvious that he wanted to drink from her--needed to. “He didn’t want me. He told me to stay away from him.”

That unsettling stare stayed locked on her for a long moment before the vampire returned his attention to his fallen comrade. He inspected Gideon’s leg wound, snarling as he assessed the damage. “So, you’re the girl.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Breedmate my man here hasn’t been able to stay away from since he saw you on the TV news earlier this week, talking about the sword used to kill his brothers.”

Savannah felt a twinge of confusion. An odd niggle of dread. “Gideon saw me on the news? He knew I’d seen the sword?” She shook her head. “No, that’s not right. We met at the library where I work. He didn’t know anything about me before then.”

The other warrior glanced over at her once more, a flat look that made her discomfort deepen even more.

“Gideon was looking at some of the library’s artwork. It was just before closing, and...”

Her words drifted off as an unwanted realization began to settle on her.

Right. He just happened to be at the library, not looking for books, but browsing artwork outside her office. Flirting with her. Quoting Plutarch and practically charming her pants off under the Abbey Room murals.

Pretending he knew nothing about the fact that her roommate had been murdered the night before by a goddamn vampire--one of his own kind.

Savannah felt oddly exposed. Like a fool who had arrived two minutes after a punch line.

“Are you saying he sought me out that night?”

The warrior swore, low under his breath, but he didn’t answer her question. There was no need. She knew the truth now. Finally, she supposed.

Gideon had seen her interview on the news and pursued her to get information on someone he was determined to find. Someone he believed was his enemy, perhaps connected to the murders of his brothers.

He’d used her.

That’s why he knew where she lived, why he was always in the right place at the right time with her.

He was tracking her the way he would any other prey...or pawn.

God, was everything between them just part of some plan? Some private vendetta he meant to pursue?

Savannah staggered backward a pace, feeling as if she’d just been slapped.

He was still using her today, encouraging her to touch Rachel’s bracelet so he could learn more about Keaton and the vampire who’d attacked him.

Now Gideon was lying there at her feet, wounded and weak, unconscious and bleeding--maybe dying--because of his damned quest.

And she was standing over him like an idiot, feeling helpless and afraid...terrified that she had let herself fall in love with him, when all she’d apparently been to him was a means to an end.

It was easier to accept that he was Breed--something far other than human--than it was to realize she’d been played this whole time. The hurt she felt was like cold steel in the center of her being.

One other person had used her to get something he wanted more, but Danny Meeks had only taken her virginity. Gideon had taken her heart.

Savannah took a step back. Then another, watching as Gideon’s comrade from the Order adjusted the tourniquet around his savaged thigh and prepared to carry him back to where he belonged.

She felt cool air at her back as she edged out the open door and into the night.

Then she pivoted and bolted, before the first hot tears began to flood her cheeks.

CHAPTER 15

“Savannah.”

Gideon jolted back to wakefulness on a shout, his sole concern, his every cell, honed in on a single thought...
her.

He sat up and felt the sharp stab of pain answer from all over his body, the worst of it coming from the deep gash in his thigh. He was in a bed. Lying in the Order’s infirmary. He breathed in, and didn’t smell any of the ash or sweat or blood that had crusted every square inch of him following his ordeal at the Minion’s house. Someone had gone to the trouble of cleaning him up after patching him back together.

“What time is it?” he murmured out loud. How long had he been unconscious? “Ah, shit. What day is it?”

“It’s okay, Gideon. Relax.” A gentle female hand settled on his bare shoulder. “You’re okay. Tegan brought you back to the compound last night.”

Last night.

“Danika,” he rasped, peeling his eyes open to look up at Conlan’s Breedmate, who stood beside him, a roll of white gauze bandages in her hand. “Where is she? Where’s Savannah?”

The tall blonde gave a sympathetic shake of her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

Damn it.
Gideon threw off the sheet and swung his legs around to the side of the bed, ignoring the hot, spearing complaint of his wounds. “I need to see her. I need to find her. Keaton’s Master is still out there somewhere. She’s not safe--”