As mad as she was at his deception, as frightened as she was of everything she didn't understand about him, she needed him to be all right.
If anything were to happen to him -
The thought was cut short as a round of gunfire cracked behind her in the dark.
She froze, all the breath sucked out of her lungs.
She heard a strange, animal roar.
Another two shots rang out, rapid sequence, then... nothing.
Only a heavy, wrenching silence.
Oh, God.
"Lucan?" she screamed. Panic lodged in her throat. "Lucan!"
She was running once more, back where she'd come from. Back to where she feared her heart was going to shatter into a million pieces if Lucan wasn't standing there unharmed when she reached him.
She felt a vague sense of worry that the kid from the police precinct - Minion, that was the odd word Lucan had called him - might be waiting for her, or already coming after her to finish her off as well. But concern for her own personal safety was shoved aside as she neared the little corner of the moonlit playground.
She just needed to know that Lucan was okay.
Above everything else in that moment, she needed to be with him.
She saw the silhouette of a dark figure on the grassy yard - Lucan, standing with legs braced apart, arms held down at his sides in a menacing angle. He stood over his assailant who was evidently ass-planted on the ground in front of him and attempting to scrabble out of Lucan's reach.
"Thank God," Gabrielle whispered under her breath, instantly relieved.
Lucan was all right, and now the authorities could deal with the deranged psychotic who might have killed them both.
She hurried a little closer.
"Lucan," she called, but he didn't seem to hear her.
Towering over the man at his feet, he bent at the waist and reached down to grab him. Gabrielle's ears registered a queer strangling sound, and she realized with not a little shock that Lucan was holding the man by the throat.
Hauling him up off the ground with one hand.
Her steps slowed, but she couldn't halt them altogether as her mind struggled to make sense of what she was seeing.
Lucan was strong, there was no doubting that, and the kid from the police station probably weighed only about fifty pounds more than she did, but to lift him with the power of one arm alone... she could hardly imagine it.
She watched in peculiar detachment as Lucan raised his arm higher, letting the man squirm and fight the clawing grip that was slowly cutting off his air. A terrifying roar began to fill her ears, building slowly, until everything else faded away.
In the moonlight, she saw Lucan's mouth. It was open, teeth bared. His mouth, making that terrible, otherworldly noise.
"Stop," she murmured, her eyes rooted on him now, suddenly sick with dread. "Please... Lucan, stop."
And then the keening howl went silent, replaced by a new horror as Lucan brought the spasming body down before him and calmly sank his teeth into the flesh below the man's jaw. A jet of blood spurted from the deep puncture, crimson rendered black against the darkness of night that surrounded the terrible scene. Lucan remained fixed, holding the gushing wound to his mouth.
Feeding from it.
"Oh, my God," she moaned, her hands trembling as she brought them up to hold back a scream. "No, no, no, no... Oh, Lucan... no."
His head came up abruptly, as if he'd heard her quiet misery. Or maybe he'd suddenly sensed her presence not a hundred yards from where he stood, savage and terrifying, looking like nothing she'd ever seen before.
Not true, her stricken mind contradicted.
She had seen this brutality once before, and if reason had forbade her from giving a name to the horror then, it rose up within her now like a cold, bleak wind.
"Vampire," she whispered, staring at Lucan's bloodstained face and feral, glowing eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
The smell of blood wreathed him, pungent and metallic, his nose swamped with the sweet, coppery tanginess. Some of it was his own, he realized with a dull sense of curiosity, grunting as he looked down and noted the gunshot wound to his left shoulder.
He felt no pain, only the swelling energy that always filled him after he fed.
But he wanted more.
Needed more, came the answering cry of the beast within him.
That voice was rising. Demanding. Urging him toward the edge.
But then, hadn't he been heading there for a long time, anyway?
Lucan clamped his jaws together so hard his teeth should have shattered. He had to get a grip, had to get the hell out of there and back to the compound, where he might be able to pull his shit together.
He had been walking the darkened streets for two hours, and still his blood was drumming hard in his temples, rage and hunger still ruling all but a sliver of his mind. He was a danger to all in this condition, but his restless body would not be still.
He stalked the city like a wraith, moving without conscious thought even though his feet - his every sense - led him on a purposeful path toward Gabrielle.
She hadn't gone home. Lucan wasn't sure where she had run, until the unseen thread that connected him to her by scent and senses brought him in front of an apartment building in the city's North End. A friend of hers, no doubt.
A light was on in an upstairs window, that bit of glass and brick was all that separated him from her.
But he wasn't going to try to see her, and not merely because of the red Mustang parked outside with the police light propped on the dash. Lucan didn't have to see his reflection in the windshield to know that his pupils were still narrow in the center of his huge irises, his fangs still protruding behind the rigid set of his mouth.
He looked every bit the monster he was.
The monster Gabrielle had seen firsthand tonight.