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Dragos sent them here.
He knew it.
He knew it the same way he knew now that this was an act of retaliation, not merely some bizarre coincidence. This was Dragos taking his revenge for what Chase had done the other night. He brought this on the Order ... on his friends.
With an anguished roar, Chase ripped loose from his restraints and fled the infirmary using every ounce of preternatural speed at his command.
Lucan stood with the rest of the Order, all of them gathered in the tech lab watching the news report incredulously.
Their disbelief had been nothing compared to the sick sense of dread - the first true sense of fear that Lucan had experienced in a long time - when the red pickup truck carrying the suspected bombers rammed the mansion's gate.
A silence filled the tech lab in that terrible instant.
It was full daylight outside. No chance for escape. They were trapped now, with no choice but to watch the skirmish take place above the compound and hope law enforcement left without deciding to nose around the property or question the owners.
And in the pit of his heavy heart, Lucan understood that this was Dragos's intention all along. This was why he'd planted the tracking device in Kellan Archer. This was how he meant for the Order to go down.
Not by his hand, but by the humans.
"Seal all portals to the compound and lock them down," he told Gideon. "If any of those criminal fucks or the cops do something stupid like bring this thing inside the mansion, we don't want them getting curious about what might lie below the house."
If they did, the Order would have no choice but to kill them all on sight. And that would be damned hard to sweep under the rug, especially since the whole bloody chase was being captured on live news coverage.
"Shut it down now," he said, slamming his fist onto the table and sending a big crack running down its center. "This is Dragos's doing. He sent them here. Right to our goddamn doorstep."
"Compound portals are sealed," Gideon reported. Then he hissed a curse, something Lucan did not want to hear at that moment. "Ah, Christ. I don't believe this."
He pivoted his head toward Lucan and gestured to one of the interior surveillance feeds from inside the mansion.
"Holy fuck," Nikolai breathed from his place among the others. "It's Harvard. What the hell is he doing up there?"
"He's saving us," Dante answered, no inflection in the warrior's voice at all. They watched in dumbstruck silence as Chase strode calmly toward the front door of the mansion. He opened it on to the yard full of uniformed cops, SWAT members, and Secret Service agents. As he lifted his hands to his head in a show of surrender, sunlight streamed in all around him, a nimbus that lit him up in silhouette like an avenging angel. The humans rushed up to intercept him, more than one speaking quickly into his radio as they got a good look at Chase, no doubt every man out there recognizing him from the sketch that was circulating in every station and precinct house between Boston and D.C. Lucan watched, humbled and grateful. If not for Chase's sacrifice, those men likely would have torn the estate apart. They might still, but the Order had just been granted a stay from that particular execution. Instead of a potential daylight raid, the Order might have a chance to collect themselves and clear out at nightfall instead.
All thanks to Sterling Chase.
"Man, this is fucked up," Brock murmured from beside Lucan. "We can't just let them take him away like this. We have to do something."
Lucan gave a grim shake of his head, wishing there was a way to help. "Harvard just took that option out of our hands. He is truly on his own now."
Chapter Thirty-five
Darker After Midnight
Coming from Delacorte Press in Spring 2012
The charges are set, Lucan. Detonators are ready whenever you say the word. On your go, it all ends right here."
Lucan Thorne stood silent in the dusk-filled, snow-covered yard of the Boston estate he had acquired more than a hundred years ago as a base of operation for himself and his small cadre of brothers-in-arms. For more than a hundred years, on countless patrols, they rode out from this very spot to guard the night, maintaining a fragile peace between the unwitting humans who owned the daytime hours and the predators who moved among them secretly, sometimes lethally, in the dark.
Lucan and his warriors of the Order dealt in swift, deadly justice, and had never known the taste of defeat.
Tonight it was bitter on his tongue.
"Dragos will pay for this," he growled around the emerging points of his fangs. Lucan's vision burned amber as he stared at the pale limestone facade of the Gothic mansion across the expansive lawn. A chaos of tire tracks scarred the grounds from the police chase that had crashed the compound's tall iron gates that morning and come to a bullet-riddled halt right at the Order's front door. Blood stained the snow where law enforcement gunfire had mowed down three terrorists who'd bombed Boston's United Nations building then fled the scene with a dozen cops and every news station in the area in close pursuit. All of it - from the attack on a human government facility to the media-covered police chase of the suspects onto the compound's secured grounds - had been orchestrated by the Order's chief adversary, a power-mad vampire called Dragos.
He wasn't the first of the Breed to dream of a world where humankind lived to serve and served in fear. But where others before him with less commitment had failed, Dragos had demonstrated astonishing patience and initiative. He'd been carefully sowing the seeds of his rebellion for most of his long life, secretly cultivating followers within the Breed and making Minions of any humans he felt could help carry out his twisted goals. For the past year and a half, since their discovery of Dragos's plans, Lucan and his brethren had kept him on the run. They had succeeded in driving him back, thwarting his every move and disrupting his operation.
Until today.
