Lucas Read online

  Lucas scanned the area, his senses wide open. His gaze fell on the industrial-sized elevator, which appeared to be in relatively good shape. Alex was clearly maintaining it for his own use, despite the ramshackle state of the rest of the building.

  The double doors slid open a moment later, and Alex himself stepped out.

  “Forgive me, my lord. I meant to be waiting here when you arrived.”

  Lucas dipped his head briefly in acknowledgement. “Alex, this is Special Agent Kathryn Hunter, FBI. I don’t believe you’ve met.”

  Alex smiled faintly. “The infamous Agent Hunter. You’ve got Francoise in quite a tizzy.”

  “I don’t know why. Unless one of you has something to hide,” Kathryn responded coolly.

  “I admire Daniel’s work a great deal, Agent Hunter. But regrettably, he is not with me.”

  Kathryn remained silent, but Lucas could feel her tension and distrust like a buzz saw along his nerves.

  “Why are we here, Alex?” he asked, wanting to get this over with.

  “Please, my lord,” he said, gesturing at the elevator. “What I have to say is best said in private. I have a very pleasant apartment of sorts downstairs, a place for when I need to get away. No one knows about it, but me. And now you, of course.”

  Lucas studied the other vampire, looking for deception. If Alex tried to tell an outright lie, Lucas would know, but beyond that, it was difficult to say. Alex didn’t belong to him. Still, he was in Lucas’s territory, and he had to know that Kathryn, at least, didn’t believe a word he was saying. Nonetheless, he seemed perfectly relaxed. Maybe it was only because he was in his private lair, someplace he felt secure. Or maybe he had nothing to hide.

  “All right,” Lucas agreed. “Is there light enough for Kathryn?”

  “Of course, my lord. I frequently work down there.”

  “Kathryn?” Lucas said, glancing at her in question.

  “Sure, why not?” She’d re-holstered her sidearm, but Lucas noticed she hadn’t replaced the safety strap, and her hand rested lightly on the butt of the weapon.

  “Lead the way, Alex,” Lucas said, gesturing toward the open elevator.

  The elevator’s descent was smooth. Despite the disreputable state of the building, the vamp had clearly maintained the elevator in good condition, which made sense if he came here often to sleep in the basement. The lack of security was surprising, but perhaps there was more to it than what Lucas could see. At a minimum, Alex could probably lock down the elevator and make the lower level inaccessible during the daylight hours.

  Lucas glanced up at the floor numbers over the elevator door and frowned abruptly. They had just passed B1 and were descending to B2. “There’s a subbasement?” he asked sharply.

  Alex nodded. “It’s one of the reasons I bought this building. No one seemed to know what the original owners stored down here, but I assume it benefited from the cool conditions. I had the entire site tested for contaminants just to be safe, but there was nothing here.”

  Lucas accepted the explanation, but couldn’t shake a growing bad feeling about this little adventure. Clearly, Kathryn was having the same reservations, because she edged out to one side and a half step behind him as the elevator slowed. Defensive tactics 101. Never give your enemy a concentrated target.

  Before the doors to the elevator opened, Lucas sent his power sweeping outward, searching for enemies. Alex surely felt the brush of it, but he didn’t offer a protest of any kind, not even an assurance that it wasn’t necessary. And it suddenly occurred to Lucas what was bothering him about this setup. It was Alex himself. No vampire liked to have his lair invaded, and especially not by a vampire as powerful as Lucas, who was also the sworn enemy of Alex’s master. But it wasn’t that Alex was too nervous, it was that he was too calm.

  Outwardly, Lucas gave away nothing, but privately he cursed his own arrogance and let his emotions leak to Nicholas, who was waiting upstairs with Mason. If the shit was going to hit the fan, he wanted Nick firing on all twelve cylinders from the get-go. The doors opened, and he stepped out into the subbasement, scanning from wall to wall with every sense he possessed. Nothing. So why—

  “Forgive me, my lord,” Alex said from behind him. “He gave me no choice.”

  Lucas spun around to find Alex still standing in the open elevator door, his left hand punching a series of buttons on the control panel. Locking it down? Or . . .

  In a flash of insight, Lucas understood everything Alex had done. He grabbed Kathryn and threw her toward the back wall of the elevator two seconds before the world exploded, and the entire building collapsed on top of them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The first thing Kathryn registered was dirt. Everywhere. It filled her eyes, her mouth, her nose. It covered every bare inch of skin and crawled down her blouse. She coughed, a horrible hacking sound that she wouldn’t have believed could come from her own throat. She went to lift her hand, to brush the filthy hair from her face and bit back a scream of pain. Her arm. Something had happened to . . .

  “Lucas!” She’d meant to scream his name, but what came out was little more than a raspy whisper of sound. God, she hurt. With every sense that returned, every nerve ending that came to life, she hurt more.

  “Lucas?” She tried again, a raw croak this time. Still no answer.

  She struggled to make sense of what had happened, her thoughts thick and slow as tree sap on a cold day. She tried to blink, to open her eyes and realized they were already open. That there was simply no light. Total blackness.

  Closing her eyes again, she went back to first principles and took inventory of her body, wiggling toes, flexing muscles, bending knees. So far, so good. She moved her right hand cautiously. Her wrist was sore, strained most likely, her upper arm bruised and aching, but her hand worked, her fingers flexed. That was good news. She was right-handed.

  Her left arm hadn’t fared so well. The earlier pain had grown to a steady throb that beat in time with her heart. She reached over carefully and felt the warm wetness of fresh blood. That was bad, but probably not fatal.

  Kathryn tried to roll over, so she could sit up, but there was a weight on her legs. Reaching down, she felt around with her good right hand and found some sort of metal sheeting. Grabbing an edge, she lifted it enough to bend her knees and shift her legs out from under it before letting it fall back into place with a clang and a fresh cloud of dust. She pulled her knees up to her chest and held on for a moment, shivering. Was she going into shock? She dismissed that possibility. Her arm wasn’t bleeding enough for that. Internal bleeding was possible, but her quick inventory didn’t seem to indicate any internal injuries.

  She needed to remember. She needed to know where Lucas was. She needed light.

  Her hand slapped down her hip and met the reassuring bulk of her Glock. Hoping against hope, she felt her way back along her belt and nearly laughed in relief at the touch of her small FBI-issue Maglite. She pulled the metal cylinder out of its holster carefully, not wanting to risk dropping it in the dark. Gripping it firmly, she clicked it on and froze.

  Alex Carmichael’s subbasement. She knew they shouldn’t have trusted him. Treacherous, fucking vampire. She shined the flashlight upward and recognized the elevator, or what was left of it. Lucas had grabbed her at the last minute, throwing her back into the elevator with Carmichael who’d been saying something, fiddling with the elevator buttons and then . . . A sudden panicked thought had her flicking her light across the elevator to the corner where Alex had been standing, half expecting to find him staring back at her. But the only things left of Alex Carmichael were the clothes he’d been wearing, and those were literally punctuated by the big honking piece of steel that had ended his life. So the son of a bitch had ended up going suicide bomber on them, blowing up the whole fucking building and himself with it.

  And Lucas . . . She struggled to picture those last moments. He’d thrown her into the elevator and then . . .

  “Lucas!” She did s
cream his name this time. Her flashlight showed a tangled mound of wood, metal and concrete where the basement room had been. Could a vampire survive something like that? What if one of those pieces stabbed him in the heart, just like Alex? Was there a pile of dust and clothes under there somewhere that used to be Lucas? No, he was too much alive to die so uselessly. She wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t. The pain she felt at the possibility of Lucas being dead was startling. When had he come to mean so much to her?

  She shook herself mentally and put aside such thoughts for later. Lucas was under there somewhere, still alive but hurt, and she had to find him. She remembered Nicholas and Mason waiting outside. They’d know something had happened—it would be hard to miss an explosion of this size, after all—and they’d be bringing help, but would they be able to dig through the rubble and get down here?

  Kathryn shot the Maglite’s beam straight up over her head. The elevator wasn’t going anywhere, that was for sure. Even if the shaft and its pulley mechanism had survived intact, the elevator itself was bent like an empty juice box. A fresh jolt of fear speared her gut. She was more than a touch claustrophobic. It was a control thing, but knowing that didn’t make it any easier to breathe. Not when she thought about the tons of stone over her head, about whether anyone would dig them out before the air ran out—or the wreckage crashed down on her head.

  She scanned what was left of the basement one more time. Was it still a basement if there was no longer a building above it? It was more like a tomb. Piles of rock and rubble on top of them with no way out. She banished that thought quickly. There would be plenty of time to give up later. What she had to do now was venture out into that mess and find Lucas. She couldn’t wait for Nicholas and the troops to arrive. Lucas couldn’t wait. He’d risked his life for hers, and she wasn’t going to leave him out there alone.

  There was no room to stand, so she duck-walked when she could and crawled when she had to. What was left of the floor was littered with jagged metal and glass, and she had to check every step she took, every place she put her hand down. It was slow and exhausting, but more than anything she was terrified of what she’d find.

  “Lucas.” Kathryn kept saying his name, sometimes calling it out, sometimes whispering it desperately. She couldn’t remember exactly where he’d been when the explosion hit, so she started at the elevator and worked outward as much as possible. There was an awful lot of tangled metal, big heavy bars torn like paper, all twisted up with each other, the spaces filled in with huge chunks of concrete and dirt. She wasn’t an engineer, but some of those beams seemed to be holding up the worst of the rubble from above, leaving small pockets at ground level. From far overhead, she thought she could hear shouting, and every once in a while, the air would fill with the sound of groaning metal. She imagined those thick beams straining under the weight of the demolished building. The first time she’d heard the noise, she’d been afraid something had cracked, and everything up there was about to end up down here. But increasingly, the crashing noises began to sound like an organized effort, almost like a construction site, and it gave her hope of a rescue. But that could take hours, and she had to find Lucas.

  “Lucas?” she said again, nearly sobbing. Her chest hurt from trying to breathe the dusty air, her back ached from bending over in the cramped spaces. Her fingers were cut and bleeding from shoving aside jagged pieces of metal and concrete, and . . . she’d begun to fear Lucas might actually be dead.

  “Kathryn.”

  She froze, not sure she’d really heard it. “Lucas?”

  “More or less,” he said weakly, and coughed.

  Her flashlight searched the rubble and found nothing. “Where are you?”

  “To the left. The other left,” he clarified when her light went the wrong way.

  She forced herself to search slowly, moving the Maglite’s narrow beam back and forth until she at last caught a flash of pale skin, nearly invisible in the twisted mass of steel.

  “Lucas!” At first, she was unable to reach him. Kathryn was strong for a woman, but even she couldn’t move all of that debris aside, even if it had been wise to do so. Frustrated, she duck-walked around to the left, toward where she was certain the outside wall had to be. Alternating her light between where she knew Lucas was and her current path, she found a tunnel of sorts through the wreckage and snaked into him on her belly, her skin crawling with the knowledge of everything that was hanging over them.

  “Lucas,” she murmured in dismay, running her flashlight over what little she could see of him. He was all but buried beneath a pile of concrete and rebar, only his head, shoulders, and one arm visible. She shimmied as close to him as she could get, ignoring the pain as sharp bits of rubble tore her clothes and dug into the skin of her knees and elbows.

  His eyes opened, gleaming with a golden light that put her Maglite to shame.

  “Kathryn.” The words scraped dryly, and she wished she had some water to offer him. “You’re bleeding,” he said. “Are you injured?”

  She shook her head, not trusting her voice and feeling foolish. Tears overflowed her eyes, mingling relief with despair. Vampire or not, he was seriously injured. Broken bones, those internal injuries she’d been worried about . . . that was just the beginning of what could be happening to Lucas.

  “Sssh, don’t cry.” He reached for her with his one good hand. “I’m hard to kill, a cuisle. You’re not rid of me just yet.” A grimace of pain twisted his handsome face. He closed his eyes against it, but didn’t groan, didn’t cry out. It was everything Kathryn could do not to cry out for him.

  She nodded, not really believing him, but understanding the importance of him believing what he said.

  “Are you injured?” he repeated, squeezing her fingers.

  She swallowed past the knot of grief in her throat. He could have saved himself, but he’d saved her instead. And now he was lying there broken and possibly dying, no matter how much he denied it.

  She shook her head. “I’m not hurt. A few cuts. It’s nothing.” She twisted her fingers in his, then leaned forward and touched her lips to his mouth carefully. “What can I do?”

  “The kiss was a start.”

  She laughed. At least she meant to laugh. It was more of a broken sob, but that was okay. If he could tease, maybe there was hope. Maybe vampires really were tougher than she thought.

  “Do you need my blood?” she asked urgently.

  He grinned, his teeth flashing white despite the desperate circumstances. “I shall remember this moment forever, Katie mine.” He coughed harshly, then said, “A bit of blood would be most welcome.”

  “How do we . . . I mean—”

  “Your wrist will do quite well.”

  “Oh. Right. Of course.” Kathryn propped her flashlight in the dirt, angling it to provide light without blinding either one of them. She was wearing both a jacket and long-sleeved blouse. Both were torn and dirty, but remarkably the cuffs were intact. She pushed the left sleeve of her jacket up to her forearm and unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse, folding it up over the jacket to bare her wrist.

  “Do I—”

  Lucas took her arm with his free hand and brought it to his lips, kissing the soft skin of her wrist gently. “So soft, a cuisle. So fragile.”

  “Fragile,” she repeated. “There’s a word not too many people would use to describe me.”

  “That’s because they don’t know you like I do.”

  Her words of protest died unsaid as his warm tongue swiped once, twice over the pulse point of her wrist. Her heart started hammering when he kissed her wrist. She knew the pleasure of his bite, and so did her body. Her breasts seemed suddenly too tight in the confining bra she’d put on beneath her sensible cotton blouse this evening.

  “This will hurt, Kathryn,” he whispered, his breath blowing gently over her damp wrist. “I’d rather be between your legs, my cock buried in your oh so wet pussy—”

  “Lucas,” she warned him, her face heating. “This isn�
��t—”

  He struck without warning, his fangs sinking into the veins buried deep in her forearm. And he was right. It hurt much worse than when he bit her neck, but only for the few seconds it took for the euphoric in his bite to make it up to her brain. After that . . .

  She let her head fall forward, fighting the wave of sexual ecstasy careening through her system. If her breasts had seemed sensitive before, they were sheer torment now, her bra scraping her engorged nipples as if it were the roughest lace instead of fine cotton. Heat built between her thighs, waves of sensation storming up into her womb, her abdomen.

  A cry escaped her lips, her body shuddering as the climax hit her. Kathryn buried her face against her upper arm, thankful for the darkness. They were trapped in a basement, three stories of dirt, rock and metal on top of them, and she was having a damn orgasm.

  Lucas lifted his mouth from her wrist, his fangs sliding painlessly from her vein. He licked the wounds and deposited another kiss on her wrist, but he didn’t let go of her hand.

  “Thank you, Kathryn,” he said solemnly.

  She nodded. But couldn’t look at him. She was too embarrassed.

  “Katie mine.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  She lifted just her eyes in a glance, then back down.

  “That wasn’t a look. Stop it, Kathryn. This is biology. It’s how we survived the centuries before humans moved beyond superstition and into discos.”

  She smiled despite herself. “Discos?”

  “A boon for the vampire community, a ghrá. But the true revolution was birth control. All of those beautiful women suddenly free and eager to indulge the sexuality men had enjoyed so liberally for centuries.”