Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series)

CHAPTER ONE



Present day



Aaron Davenant scaled the outer wall of the two-story building with only a sliver of moon and a solitary security light to guide his way. He was dressed all in black; his snugly fitted jacket had a hood he wore low on his brow, hiding his face in a veil of shadows. He wore shoes and gloves utilized by mountain climbers to maximize their gripping and foot-hold capacities. The fragrance of pine sap was strong and heady in the air, the scent of the rustic cedar siding tangy as he hooked his fingertips into miniscule nooks and crannies, climbing nimbly.

Balancing two stories off the ground against a scrap of window ledge, he slipped a folding knife from a sheath on his belt, then slid the razor-keen edge of its four-inch long blade through the thin mesh of an exterior screen. The knife had been used in the past to punch through flesh and underlying fat and muscle, its serrated edge able to cleave through bone. The screen proved little obstacle, nor did the simple locking mechanism on the window just beyond. In less than ten seconds, he cut the screen, opened the window, and stole inside—as silent as a shadow.

As he stood by the window, Aaron scanned the room slowly, but did not lower his hood. The pupils of his eyes expanded reflexively, opening so that to any outside observer, the dusky blue of his irises would seem swallowed by their ever-expanding circumferences. As they widened, his visual acuity and sensitivity to light likewise increased, and the shadow-draped room became more visible.

Although the exterior of the building was deceptively residential, the inside looked more like the hospital he’d been told it would be. The smell of antiseptic cleansers hung in the air, sterile and cold. The floors were smooth, nondescript tile, the walls painted a pale shade of grey to match. The overhead fluorescents had been darkened and the only illumination came from a small nightlight in the far corner of the room.

He had performed a perfunctory telepathic scan of both the building and surrounding grounds before he’d started his climb, and opened his mind, scanning again, confirming these preliminary results.

One woman in a nearby antechamber. Her name, Aaron could clearly sense, was Karen Pierce. He found himself nearly disappointed to realize she was human, because although he’d never admit, Aaron had been excited by the prospect of coming to the Morin family compound on the shores of Lake Tahoe, if only for the slim chance of even catching a glimpse of others like himself—and especially a woman. He could count on one hand the number of female Brethren he’d seen in his more than 200 years of life—and that was if he held up his fist.

Ahead of him, a young Brethren man lay in bed, surrounded by a bevy of machines that beeped, clicked and whirred softly. His name was Tristan Morin. And although he did not know it yet, these were to be the last moments of his life.

Make him answer for it, his father had instructed. Little more than a withered husk, brittle, parchment-like skin covering a skeletal frame of clearly discernible bony prominences and depressions, Lamar Davenant was more than five hundred years old—the oldest living member of any Brethren clan. His power and authority among his people had been deferred to his son, Allistair, some two hundred years earlier, but even in this semblance of retirement, Lamar had remained a stalwart patriarch to his clan; the final say and ultimate command among his kin.

Aaron couldn’t tell by looking if Tristan was asleep or comatose, but when he opened his mind, extending a cautious wave of telepathy in the boy’s direction, he could sense that his mind was clouded, his consciousness subdued.

Pain killers, he thought, because he could see now that the young man was injured. His arm lay outstretched in the bed beside him, a lattice-work of pins and metal framing apparently holding broken bones together. The blankets were swathed low on his torso, and his chest had been wrapped in bandages from which Aaron could see a pair of tubes, one from each side of his rib cage, drooping down in loose coils toward canisters resting on the floor. More bandages, so stark to Aaron’s hypersensitive field of vision now they seemed aglow, marked places along his arms and upper chest where peripheral intravenous and central access ports had been inserted.

Looks like Jean Luc gave as good as he received, he mused, surprised and impressed. Had he been the betting sort, his money wouldn’t have been on his brother even in a scrap against Shirley Temple.

Aaron crept forward, the soles of his shoes settling silently against the glossy linoleum. He listened to the soft, ragged sounds of Tristan’s breathing. The young man’s skin was flushed, glossed lightly with sweat, and Aaron understood now—it wasn’t just morphine flowing into him through the IVs, but antibiotics as well. He’d obviously come down with some sort of infection; Aaron could feel the heat radiating off him in febrile waves.

Make him bleed, Lamar had rasped, his telepathic voice little more than rats’ feet scraping in a dry cellar inside of Aaron’s mind. Lamar’s vocal cords had long since withered away, his teeth working loose of their moorings with the inexorable and relentless passage of time. He could no longer speak aloud, could no longer feed himself—his vampiric bloodlust was slaked by tube feedings, a line that ran directly through a permanent, narrow incision above his naval through which human blood was flushed on a regular basis. His body was weak and frail, but his mind remained as sharp as any Brethren a quarter of his age.

As did his rage.

Two of his brothers were dead—Allistair, who had succeeded Lamar to the head of the clan, and Jean Luc, who had gone to seek revenge for Allistair’s murder. Allistair’s death had been a spectacle, occurring in front of the breadth of the Brethren Council—every male among their kind. He’d been killed by their family’s long-time rival, Augustus Noble; his humiliation had been shared—his shame branded—with every member of the Davenant clan.

Jean Luc’s death had been something more private, the details of it more speculation than known. But Lamar had been able to discover that another long-standing rival—one believed dead for centuries—had been to blame: Michel Morin and his clan. Make him answer for it, Lamar had hissed.

And Aaron had every intention of doing precisely this.

He’d put his knife back in the clip at his belt and reached for it now, curling his fingers lightly about the grip, using the pad of his thumb to unfold the gleaming length of its curved blade. Had it been his choice, he might have opted to use his handgun instead, a .45-caliber Heckler and Kock he carried in a shoulder holster beneath his jacket or—preferably—the 98-Bravo sniper rifle he kept in the trunk of his rented Infiniti G35 sport coupe so he wouldn’t have had to set foot the room at all.

Could have shimmied up one of the trees outside, propped myself on a good-sized branch and taken my time, lined it up perfectly. One shot, straight through the frontal cortex. Dead on arrival.

But it wasn’t his choice. It was Lamar’s, and Aaron’s father wanted to send a message to the Morins that was loud, clear, and bloody.

Tear open his throat, leave the mark of our vengeance in blood on the floor around him, he’d ordered. Take your blade and carve out his heart—I want to hold it in my hand, crush it with whatever strength I have yet to call my own.

With his free hand, Aaron reached down, touching Tristan’s forehead, easing his head back ever so slightly, leaving the slope of his neck vulnerably exposed. Leaning down, he tucked the knife against this soft curve of flesh. When the edge of sharpened steel pressed with enough force to draw a thin line of blood—the fragrance of it pungent, sharp and instantly discernible to Aaron’s heightened senses—Tristan groaned softly, his brows knitting upward, his heartbeat shuddering even faster.

You will have to get through me first to hurt him.

Aaron had sensed the presence of another Brethren in his mind a split second before hearing the voice—low, husky and menacing—and had already started to pivot upon the words: You will…

He caught a glimpse of a shadow-draped figure crouched cat-like on the sill, poised to leap down into the room. The knife, which had just settled into Tristan’s flesh, now winked in midflight, reflected glow from the nightlight as Aaron threw it, blade still extended. He could hit a target dead center from thirty meters in nearly pitch blackness; had anticipated the wet, meaty thunk as the knife hit home before the figure at the window could move out of its path, and blinked in surprise as instead, the blade’s course abruptly shifted, as if it had been hooked by an invisible line. It cut a nearly perfect one hundred and eighty-degree turn in midair, spinning around so that when it flew again, it now came straight for him with the same lethal accuracy with which he’d hurled it.

Aaron’s surprise was short-lived. They can move things with their minds, Lamar had warned him of the Morins.

He shifted his weight, cut sideways and ducked his head, feeling a whip of wind against his cheek as the knife sailed past. It clattered against the floor, spinning in broad, looping sweeps before coming to a stop somewhere beneath Tristan’s bed.

Aaron whirled back to the window, readying his telepathic defenses, and for the first time, got a good, clear look at his opponent.

Holy shit, he thought, eyes widening. It’s a woman.

Not the human he’d sensed earlier inside the clinic—this woman was like him—a Brethren. Not only that, but he could see now that she was stunning, with elegant features, chocolate-colored skin and dark hair worn closely cropped to her scalp. For some reason, she appeared to be barefooted but wearing a cocktail dress, the gold, shimmery kind that showed off generous amounts of both cleavage and legs. As he looked her in the eyes, he was struck with the most peculiar notion that he knew her, though for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how or from where.

All at once, like the knife, Aaron found himself flying backwards, as if unseen hands had grasped him fast and flung him hard, sending him crashing into the far wall. He hit with enough force to feel the drywall beneath him crunch at the impact. For a long, impossible moment, that invisible grasp held him, the air around him seemingly collapsed, pressed tautly against him.

Brows furrowed, he locked his gaze—and his mind—on the woman, converging all of his psionic energy the way a magnifying lens will focus a broad shaft of sunlight into a narrow, potent beam. Like this spear of light could then have devastating effect, at least if you were an ant in its path, so, too, could Aaron use this single, concentrated telepathic force. Like an epileptic seizure, it caused a sudden firestorm of neural-electrical energy to surge through the woman’s brain. She cried out sharply, her entire body jerking in violent, spastic reaction, and the crushing sensation that held him pinned to the wall was abruptly gone.

Freed from its grip, Aaron dropped to his feet. The woman had crumpled to the ground and lay in a shadow-draped, shuddering heap, the last convulsions shaking her slim form.

“Sorry about that,” he said, his voice shaky and hoarse. “You didn’t leave me much choice.”

He went to her side, leaning over long enough to press his fingertips against the slope of her neck and feel her pulse. Her skin was soft and warm, her heart beat fluttering, but palpable. Again, he couldn’t shake the idea that he’d seen her before—knew her somehow—but even now, seeing her close up, he couldn’t place her face.

Did I know her from before the accident? he wondered.

In the year 1815, he’d been thrown from his horse, shattering his skull. He remembered the date quite well—October 12, his mother’s birthday. According to his older brother Julien, the accident had occurred shortly after a party Lamar had hosted at their clan’s great house to celebrate.

“I think you must have imbibed a bit too much brandy,” Julien had once remarked with a laugh. “You were always a fairly adept horseman, Az, but have never been able to hold your booze.”

After the accident, Aaron had languished in a coma for more than a year. When he’d come to, he’d forgotten how to speak. He’d forgotten everything, in fact, his entire body and mind reduced to the level of a newborn infant. It had taken him years to recover, decades in fact, but even now, there were large parts of his past that Aaron simply could not recall. He hadn’t lived in Kentucky after that, but instead, in the city of Boston, surrounded night and day by a staff of physicians, nurses, nannies and tutors—all of them human. To that day, with the exception of his brother, Julien, and father, Lamar, had seen no other Brethren like himself. Least of all a woman.

“Who are you?” he whispered, caressing her cheek, fascinated and bewildered.

From behind him, he heard the soft, nearly imperceptible whisper of feet against the tile floor and realized what he’d forgotten—or rather, who; the human, Karen Pierce. The Brethren woman had distracted him—so beautiful, fierce and somehow familiar. He’d lost his focus and had about a millisecond to chide himself for the careless oversight.

Stupid, he thought. Stupid, stu—

Then, with a whistle of wind, and a soft grunt as she put all of her weight into the blow, Karen struck him with the broad base of a fire extinguisher, connecting solidly with his head, and knocking him immediately out cold.