He and Johnson crashed through the brush on the bluff, waded the shallow river, and ran down the road to the dude ranch, where everybody staying at the ranch, Katy, her siblings, and her parents, were all standing on the edge of the golf course, looking at the fire in the sky.
Jim Waller called to them as they passed, “Is that the Drake place? What’s going on up there?”
They didn’t bother to answer, but piled into Johnson’s Cadillac and headed out to the highway.
“Gotta be a right turn,” Johnson said.
A mile up the road, they found Pescoli sitting next to the right front wheel of her Jeep. She was holding a tissue next to her eye, showing a little blood. Up the road, they could see Drake, spread-eagled in the headlights of his Jeep.
He and Johnson jumped out of the Cadillac and they hurried up to her. She was white faced, her eyes a little glassy, but she answered.
“I’m not bad. I shot him twice, maybe three times. He thought we had him. He had nothing to lose by trying to take me out.”
Her hand was shaking a little.
“He was right about that,” Virgil said and saw the smashed-up Jeep and the body lying in the grass near the shoulder. “You check him?”
“Enough to know we don’t need an ambulance,” she said, chalk white, her voice distant, almost disembodied. She cleared her throat and focused on Virgil, as if seeing him for the first time. “I wish we could have taken him alive. I wish we could have gotten him in court.”
“Probably better this way,” Johnson said, avoiding looking at the corpse. “What if he’d gotten off? If what everybody says is true, the cocksucker deserves to be dead.”
He and Regan both gave Johnson a look, and he muttered, “Okay. Sorry about that ‘cocksucker.’?”
Virgil stood up from checking the body and looked at Regan and Johnson.
“But you’re right. He deserves to be dead. And now he is.”
LARA ADRIAN AND CHRISTOPHER RICE
THRILLERS COME IN ALL FORMS. The number of subgenres is staggering, and this story is representative of one of the most popular.
Paranormal.
Lara Adrian has made a name for herself in this world where her books are huge bestsellers. True to his namesake (as the son of Anne Rice), Christopher Rice cut his teeth on dark suspense, before shifting to romance. Teaming these two together seemed like an exciting idea, but it also posed a few challenges. The timeline of Lara’s long-running Midnight Breed series spans twenty-five years in the future. Chris sets his stories and characters in the present. So, right away, the clock had to be turned back to a time when Lara’s vampires were unknown inside her imagined world.
But that played right into their hands.
Chris’s initial idea was to have his Desire Exchange series character, Lilliane, attacked by someone on her home turf of New Orleans where Lara’s character, Lucan Thorne, could witness both the altercation and Lilliane’s extraordinary powers.
From there, everything fell right into place.
Lara wrote the first draft, then Chris rewrote and edited. The title is a bit of an inside thing. Midnight from Lara’s long-running series. Flame from the candles that symbolically form a huge part of Chris’s fictional world.
The result is a gem.
Midnight Flame.
MIDNIGHT FLAME
THUNDER SHOOK THE TINY FRENCH quarter bookshop as Lucan Thorne handed his cash to the young woman behind the register. Rain had been hammering New Orleans since he arrived from Boston a couple of days ago. As the evening crept toward midnight, the deluge showed no signs of letting up anytime soon either. He didn’t mind getting wet. Besides, this last-minute stop for a special gift before returning home would be worth the trouble and then some.
The perky blond clerk made change for him and handed it over along with his purchase. “You sure picked a bad night to be out shopping. The city’s a lot more fun when the weather’s nice and everyone’s out having a good time.” When he reached for the paper gift bag, she brushed her fingers over his. “You gonna be in town for a while? I’d love to show you what I mean.”
Under the fall of his damp black hair, Lucan smiled, baring just the tips of his fangs. “I’m not really a people person.”
The human sucked in a sharp breath.
She let go of the bag as if it burned her fingers, blinking fast, her mortal brain no doubt struggling to process what she imagined she’d just seen.
“Thanks for your help, Krystal,” he said, his fangs now retracted as he slipped the bag into a large inside pocket under his black trench coat.
“Uh, sure.”
She gave him a befuddled wave as he left the store.
As he stepped out to the wet street, he heard the locks on the shop door tumble closed behind him. Revealing himself, or his kind’s, existence to the humans living alongside the Breed wasn’t something Lucan chanced often. As one of the eldest members of his kind, he knew better than anyone how critical it was for the vampire nation to maintain its secret from mankind.
As commander of the Order, a cadre of Breed warriors who’d pledged their arms and their lives to protecting the fragile peace with their mortal neighbors, there was nothing Lucan wouldn’t do to ensure the security of both man and Breed alike. And if he thought for one second that the clerk inside the bookstore was any kind of threat to those goals, he’d have mind-scrubbed her on the spot.
Right now, all he wanted to do was get back to the Order’s headquarters in Boston, where the rest of his team, and his new Breedmate, Gabrielle, awaited his return. After two days in New Orleans, smoothing the ruffled feathers of Breed civilian leaders worried that recent problems in Boston might spill over into other major cities unless the Order got them under control, he was eager to be done with his diplomatic duties. He itched to be back in combat with his warriors. More than that, he couldn’t wait to be back in bed with his sweet Gabrielle.
The book he’d bought was a present for her. A signed first-edition novel by one of her favorite authors whose bestselling books had proclaimed New Orleans the vampire capital of the world and ignited a global obsession. Hell, decades later, women were still swooning over that certain French bloodsucker who was as sinister as he was sophisticated and seductive.
Personally, Lucan didn’t understand the appeal.
And, yeah, maybe he didn’t particularly appreciate competing with that fictional fantasy where Gabrielle was concerned either. But if the book made his mate happy, who was he to disagree?
Still, his ego needed some reassurance that his fangs were the only ones his Breedmate wanted at her neck.
Not to mention elsewhere.