Deeper Than Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  LARA ADRIAN’S

  MIDNIGHT BREED SERIES

  TAKEN BY MIDNIGHT

  “Keeping a long-running series evolving in an

  intriguing manner is no easy task, but Adrian pulls it

  off with seeming ease. It will be interesting to see

  what’s next!” —Romantic Times

  “A thrilling addition to the extraordinary Midnight

  Breed series!” —Fresh Fiction

  “Taken By Midnight … holds you hostage.… I

  couldn’t put it down and I bet you won’t be able to

  either.” —Joyfully Reviewed

  SHADES OF MIDNIGHT

  “[Lara Adrian] once again serves up a blockbuster

  hit.… With a fast-paced tale of romantic suspense

  and intense and realistic characters … Lara Adrian

  compels readers to get hooked on her storylines, and

  that’s why Shades of Midnight deserves a Perfect 10.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “[A] rapid fire story … Besides delivering wonderful

  paranormal romances, the Midnight Breed series also

  continues to add complexity.… A twist at the end

  could prove quite interesting. This is time well spent!”

  —Romantic Times

  ASHES OF MIDNIGHT

  “Ashes of Midnight will scorch its way into your heart.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Lara Adrian continues to kick butt with her latest

  release.… Ashes of Midnight is an entertaining ride

  and as usual kept me riveted from page one.”

  —The Romance Reader Connection

  VEIL OF MIDNIGHT

  “Adrian’s newest heroine has a backbone of pure steel.

  Rapid-pace adventures deliver equal quantities of

  supernatural thrills and high-impact passion. This is

  one of the best vampire series on the market!”

  —Romantic Times

  “Veil of Midnight will enthrall you and leave you

  breathless for more.”

  —Wild on Books

  MIDNIGHT RISING

  “Fans are in for a treat.… Ms. Adrian has a gift for

  drawing her readers deeper and deeper into the

  amazing world she creates.… I eagerly await the

  next installment of this entertaining series!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Packed with danger and action, this book

  also explores the tumultuous emotions of guilt,

  anger, betrayal and forgiveness. Adrian has

  hit on an unbeatable story mix.”

  —Romantic Times

  MIDNIGHT AWAKENING

  “This is one of the best paranormal series

  around. Compelling characters and good

  world-building make this a must-read series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “One of the Top 10 Best Romance Novels of 2007.”

  —Selected by the Editors at Amazon.com

  “Ms. Adrian’s series just gets better and better.…

  Midnight Awakening was exactly what I hoped it would

  be then so much more.… I’m intrigued and

  without a doubt completely hooked.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Vengeance is the driving force behind this entry in the

  intense Midnight Breed series.… Things look bad for

  the characters, but for the readers it’s nothing but net!”

  —Romantic Times

  KISS OF CRIMSON

  “Vibrant writing heightens the suspense, and hidden

  secrets provide many twists. This dark and steamy

  tale … is a winner and will have readers eager

  for the next Midnight Breed story.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Hot sensuality with emotional drama and high-stakes

  danger … [Adrian] ensures that her latest is terrific

  supernatural entertainment.”

  —Romantic Times

  “[Adrian] pens hot erotic scenes and

  vivid action sequences.”

  —The Romance Reader

  KISS OF MIDNIGHT

  “Evocative, enticing, erotic. Enter Lara Adrian’s

  vampire world and be enchanted!”

  —J. R. Ward, bestselling author

  “Kiss of Midnight is dark, edgy and passionate,

  an irresistible vampire romance.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Lara Adrian delivers a fast-paced, sexy

  romantic suspense that … stands above the

  rest.… A gripping, sensual love story.”

  —The Romance Reader

  “Gritty and dangerous, this terrific launch book

  sets up an alternate reality filled with treachery

  and loss. The Midnight Breed series is poised

  to deliver outstanding supernatural thrills.”

  —Romantic Times

  By Lara Adrian

  KISS OF MIDNIGHT

  KISS OF CRIMSON

  MIDNIGHT AWAKENING

  MIDNIGHT RISING

  VEIL OF MIDNIGHT

  ASHES OF MIDNIGHT

  SHADES OF MIDNIGHT

  TAKEN BY MIDNIGHT

  DEEPER THAN MIDNIGHT

  Deeper Than Midnight is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2011 Dell Mass Market Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by Lara Adrian, LLC

  Excerpt from Darker After Midnight copyright © 2011 by Lara Adrian, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DELL is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Darker After Midnight by Lara Adrian. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33991-5

  Cover design: Jae Song

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  For all the readers who have been asking me for a story

  about Hunter since he first walked onto the page four

  books ago. I hope you enjoy the ride!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you, first and foremost, to my wonderful editor Shauna Summers, for patience and guidance, for championing my books from the very beginning (and I mean day one, thirteen years ago in the slush pile!), and for continuing to shape me into a better writer each time we talk about my work.

  Thanks also to my fantastic literary agent Karen Solem, for counsel and encouragement, for deft management of all the details that would otherwise make me crazy, and for believing in me and my career at a time when I had needed it the most.

  To the rest of my publishing colleagues, both in the United States and abroad, thank you so much for the care, attention, and support you give my books. It’s a privilege to have you all in my corner.

  To my assistant and friend, Heather Rogers, a growing debt of thanks for undertaking the challenge of keeping me organized while also ensuring that there is always something fun and creative going on at my Website or Facebook community.

  And to my husband, John, for more than I could ever adequately express in words or on the page.
Everything, always, because of you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Excerpt from Darker After Midnight

  The club was private, very much off the beaten path, and for damned good reason. Located at the far end of a narrow, ice-encrusted back alley of Boston’s Chinatown district, the place catered to an exclusive, if discriminating, crowd. The only humans permitted inside the old brick building were the stable of attractive young women—and a few pretty men—kept on hand to satisfy the late-night clientele’s every craving.

  Concealed within the shadows of an arched vestibule at street level, the unmarked metal door gave no indication of what lay behind it, not that any local or tourist in their right mind would pause to wonder. The thick slab of steel was shielded by a tall iron grate. Outside the entrance, a big guard loomed like a gargoyle in a knit skullcap and black leather.

  The male was Breed, as was the pair of warriors who emerged from the gloom of the alleyway. At the sound of their combat boots crunching in the snow and frozen filth of the pavement, the guard on watch lifted his head. Under a thick, bulbous nose, thin lips curled away from crooked teeth and the sharp tips of the vampire’s fangs. Eyes narrowed at the uninvited newcomers, he exhaled a low snarl, his warm breath steaming from his nostrils to plume into the brittle December night air.

  Hunter registered a current of tension in his patrol partner’s movements as the two approached the vampire on guard. Sterling Chase had been twitchy ever since they’d left the Order’s compound for tonight’s mission. Now he walked at an aggressive pace, taking the lead, his fingers flexing and contracting where they rested none too subtly on the large-caliber semiautomatic pistol holstered on his weapons belt.

  The guard took a step forward too, putting himself directly in their path. Large thighs spread, boots planted wide in warning on the pitted pavement as the vampire’s big head lowered. The eyes that had been narrowed on them before in question now went tighter with recognition as they hit and settled on Chase. “You gotta be kidding me. What the hell do you want out here on Enforcement Agency turf, warrior?”

  “Taggart,” Chase said, more growl than greeting. “I see your career has been in no danger of improving since I quit the Agency. Reduced to playing doorman for the local sip-and-strip, eh? What’s next for you—security detail at the shopping mall?”

  The agent pursed his lips around a ripe curse. “Takes some kind of balls to show your face, especially around here.”

  Chase’s answering chuckle was neither threatened nor amused. “Try looking in a mirror sometime, then let’s talk about who’s got balls showing his face in public.”

  “This place is off-limits to all but the Enforcement Agency,” the guard said, crossing beefy arms over a barrel chest. A barrel chest sporting the broad leather strap of a weapons holster, with still more hardware bristling around his waist. “The Order’s got no business here.”

  “Yeah?” Chase grunted. “Tell that to Lucan Thorne. He’s the one who will have your ass if you don’t move it out of our way. Assuming the two of us standing here cooling our heels for no good reason don’t decide to remove you ourselves.”

  Agent Taggart’s mouth had clamped shut at the mention of Lucan, the Order’s leader and one of the longest-lived, most formidable elders of the Breed nation. Now the wary gaze strayed from Chase to Hunter, who lingered behind his fellow warrior in measuring silence. Hunter had no quarrel with Taggart, but he had already calculated no less than five different ways to disable him—to kill him swiftly and surely, right where he stood—should the need arise.

  It was what Hunter had been trained to do. Born and bred to be a weapon wielded by the merciless hand of the Order’s chief adversary, he was long accustomed to viewing the world in logical, unemotional terms.

  He no longer served the villain called Dragos, but his deadly skills remained at the core of who, and what, he was. Hunter was lethal—unfailingly so—and in that instantaneous connection of his gaze and Taggart’s, he saw that grim understanding reflected in the other male’s eyes.

  Agent Taggart blinked, then took a step back, removing himself from Hunter’s stare and clearing the path to the door of the club.

  “I thought you might be willing to reconsider,” Chase said, as he and Hunter strode to the iron grate and entered the Enforcement Agency hangout.

  The door must have been soundproof. Inside the dark club, loud music thumped in time with multicolored, spinning lights that lit a central stage made of mirrored glass. The only dancers were the trio of half-naked humans gyrating together in front of an audience of leering, hot-eyed vampires seated in booths and at tables on the floor below the stage.

  Hunter watched the long-haired blonde in the center wind herself around a Lucite pole that climbed up from the floor of the stage to the ceiling. Swiveling her hips, she lifted one of her enormous, unnaturally round breasts up to meet her snakelike tongue. As she toyed with the pierced nipple, the other dancers, a tattooed woman with spiked purple hair and a dark-eyed young man who barely fit inside the shiny red vinyl pouch slung around his hips, moved to opposite sides of the mirrored stage and began their own solo routines.

  The club reeked of stale perfume and sweat, but the musty tang couldn’t mask the trace scent of fresh human blood. Hunter followed the olfactory trail with his gaze. It led to a far corner booth, where a vampire in the standard-issue Enforcement Agency dark suit and white shirt fed judiciously from the pale throat of a naked, moaning woman sprawled across his lap. Still more Breed males drank from other human blood Hosts, while some in the vampire-run establishment seemed intent on satisfying more carnal needs.

  Beside him near the door, Chase had gone as still as stone. A low, rumbling growl leaked from the back of his throat. Hunter spared the feeding and onstage spectacle little more than an assessing glance, but Chase’s gaze was fixed and hungry, as openly riveted as any of the other Breed males gathered there. Perhaps more so.

  Hunter was far more interested in the handful of heads that were now turning their way within the crowd of Enforcement Agents. Their arrival had been noticed, and the simmering looks from every pair of eyes that landed on them now said the situation could get ugly very quickly.

  No sooner had Hunter registered the possibility, one of the glaring vampires reclined on a nearby sofa got up to confront them. The male was large, as were his two companions who rose to join him as he cut a clean path through the crowd. All three were visibly armed beneath their finely cut, dark suits.

  “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in,” drawled the agent in the lead, a trace of the South in his slowly measured words and in his refined, almost delicate, features. “How many decades of service with the Agency, yet you never would have deigned to join any of us in a place
like this.”

  Chase’s mouth curved, barely concealing his elongated fangs. “You sound disappointed, Murdock. This shit was never my speed.”

  “No, you always held yourself above temptation,” the vampire replied, his gaze as shrewd as his answering smile. “So careful. So rigidly disciplined, even in your appetites. But things change. People change, don’t they, Chase? If you see something you like in here, you need only say so. For old times’ sake, if nothing else, hmm?”

  “We’ve come for information about an Agent named Freyne,” Hunter interjected when Chase’s reply seemed to take longer than necessary. “As soon as we have what we need, we’ll leave.”

  “Is that so?” Murdock considered him with a curious tilt of his head. Hunter saw the vampire’s gaze drift subtly away from his face to note the dermaglyphs that tracked up the sides of his neck and around his nape. It took only a moment for the male to discern that Hunter’s elaborate pattern of skin markings indicated he was Gen One, a rarity among the Breed.

  Hunter was nothing close to the ages of his fellow Gen One warriors, Lucan or Tegan. However, sired by one of the race’s Ancients, his blood was every bit as pure. Like his Gen One brethren, his strength and power was roughly that of ten later-generation vampires. It was his rearing as one of Dragos’s personal army of assassins—a secret upbringing known by the Order alone—that made him far more lethal than Murdock and these couple dozen Agents in the club combined.

  Chase seemed to snap out of his distraction at last. “What can you tell us about Freyne?”

  Murdock shrugged. “He’s dead. But then, I expect you already know that. Freyne and his unit were all killed last week while on a mission to retrieve a kidnapped Darkhaven youth.” He gave a slow shake of his head. “Quite the pity. Not only did the Agency lose several good men, but their mission objective proved less than satisfactory as well.”

  “Less than satisfactory,” Chase scoffed. “Yeah, you could say that. From what the Order understands, the mission to rescue Kellan Archer was fucked six ways from Sunday. The boy, his father, and grandfather—hell, the entire Archer family—all of them wiped out in a single night.”

  Hunter said nothing, letting Chase bait the hook as he saw fit. Most of what he charged was true. The night of the rescue attempt had been a blood-soaked one that had ended with too much death, the worst of it being dealt to the members of Kellan Archer’s family.