Ashes of Midnight

"What. The. Fuck." Reichen and the others followed him inside. A shocked and prolonged silence fell over each of the Breed males, from the youngest of the group to the centuries-old Gen One whom Reichen had never once seen rattled beyond words. For within the space on the other side of that door was a broad platform raised slightly off the floor. And on that platform was a large, pivotable chair rigged with heavy restraints built for an inpidual of immense size and strength. Ankle braces as thick as a woman's thigh. Shackles for powerful wrists that must have supported hands big enough to crack an average human's skull like a walnut.

"This is where he's been keeping the Ancient," Tegan said, the first of them able to form words. "Holy shit. He's had the Ancient under his control all this time." "How?" Nikolai asked, then glanced down near their feet and exhaled a sober curse. "Ultraviolet light bars. Check the floor. The ceiling, too. The entire perimeter of this platform is circled by an array of UV light fixtures. When they're activated, the UV bars would contain the Ancient inside better than the strongest, thickest kind of metal." The words were barely out of Niko's mouth before a sudden, odd hum rent the air around them. Intense light exploded from all directions, so bright and hot, Reichen and the others had no choice but to cover their eyes with updrawn arms. He smelled the acrid taint of singed skin. At first, he worried that his pyro had awakened from out of nowhere. Then he realized this was something even worse. Reichen squinted beyond the piercing blast of light, upward, toward a glassed-in viewing area he hadn't noticed above the Ancient's holding cell until that very moment.

Inside that viewing area stood Wilhelm Roth, grinning with smug satisfaction as Reichen, Tegan, and the rest of the warriors who'd come with them were hemmed in tight by the lethal vertical beams of ultraviolet light that surrounded them on all sides. Roth motioned to a pair of big males--black-clad, hard-eyed, and bristling with automatic weapons. Both males bore thick black polymer collars around their necks, their shaved heads and bare throats covered in Gen One glyphs, every massive, muscled inch of them seething deadly purpose. The two assassins exited both sides of the viewing area to twin landings at the top of a double flight of stairs. They took aim on Reichen and the others trapped inside the UV light cage, then opened fire.

Chapter Thirty

Claire's heart slammed against her sternum at the sudden cacophony of gunfire that erupted over the comm device on the Rover's dashboard. She'd been tensely monitoring the team's progress inside Dragos's lair along with Dylan and Rio, fear twisting like a serpent in her stomach with each step Andreas and the others took deeper into the horrible place. Now her fear shot up her throat, exploding out of her in a scream as the sounds of ripping bullets, shouts, and chaos filled the vehicle.

"Oh, my God!" she cried, her blood freezing in her veins. "Oh, my God! No!" She made a frantic lunge for the door handle beside her in the backseat, but Rio pivoted around from in front of her and clamped his hand down on her shoulder, keeping her in place. "Stay, Claire. You can't do anything to help them," he said, his Spanish accent rolling, dark-fringed eyes grave. He hissed a curse as more gunfire cracked over the receiver. Then, another disaster, this time from the ground level post near the barn's entrance, where Renata and the male called Hunter were stationed. Renata's voice came into the vehicle in a breathless rush.

"Ah, shit. We've got company. Four guards coming into view right now outside the old barn... Fuck, I think they're Gen Ones--" Blam! Blam! Blam! More bullets began to fly the racket cutting Renata off and echoing from out of the forest like thunderclaps. "Oh, Jesus," Dylan whispered from her seat beside her mate in the front of the SUV as the Order came under attack both inside Dragos's lair and outside on ground level. "Rio... what should we do?" "Stay here, both of you," he ordered them grimly, pulling a nasty-looking pistol out of its holster on his belt and loading the chamber. He threw open the driver-side door and leapt out.

"Stay in the Rover and keep it running in case things go any further south and you need to haul ass out of here. I'm going in."

The Gen One assassins rained down a hail of bullets on Reichen and the warriors caught within the UV prison below. Returning their fire wasn't easy. The light bars were blinding and searingly hot, offering little room to dodge the incoming rounds while the warriors volleyed back shots with their own weapons.

From his periphery, Reichen saw Tegan take a bullet to the shoulder. Another grazed Nikolai in the thigh, knocking him on his ass for a second before he locked and loaded a second pistol and squeezed off several semiautomatic rounds. And up above, secure behind the bulletproof Plexiglas that shielded him from the fray, Wilhelm Roth was still watching, still gloating. Smiling, as though it were all merely entertainment and he'd already won this war. Reichen's fury churned on a swift, hard boil. Already the pyro was rising up inside him; he felt the living heat ripple over his skin, watched with nonchalant acceptance as the bullets that should have punctured his body instead fell away the instant they met the field of psychic energy that enveloped him.

"Get behind me!" he shouted to Tegan and the others, spreading his arms wide to create an even wider field of protection. "Not too close," he warned. "The heat will deflect the bullets, but it also kills." The warriors moved in as tight as was prudent, using Reichen's body like a shield as they continued to strike back at their attackers, who had the advantage of unrestricted movement and seemingly endless firepower.

Reichen's vision began to warp before his eyes. His pyro was building faster now, burning hotter than ever as he glared up at Roth. He let his rage expand, coaxed the flames to swell even bigger from within him. He summoned every ounce of fire at his command, letting it tumble and roil in his gut, willing it to strengthen as he held it down well past the point of pain. Past even the point of sanity. Some threadbare shred of instinct told him that he was courting disaster, but he shoved reason aside and stoked the flames brighter. Tasting the need for vengeance--for a final, bloody justice--like potent liquor on his tongue. "Wilhelm Roth," he bellowed darkly, centering all of his hatred, all of his white-hot energy, on the male who had taken so much from him, even before he'd called for the slaughter of Reichen's Darkhaven kin. "Tonight you die, Roth!" Focusing his talent, Reichen fisted his hand and punched it through the ultraviolet light bars of the cell. He felt no burn, other than the heat coursing through him already.

He glanced up and took great satisfaction in the sudden, slack-jawed astonishment written across Roth's face. Grinning himself now in a smile full of hatred and laser-sighted purpose, Reichen stepped out of the Ancient's cage with a roar of mingled triumph and murderous rage. The two Gen One assassins blasted at him with their useless weapons. Reichen glanced up at them, heat rippling outward from his body with nuclear intensity. He summoned power to his raised and fisted hands, then turned it loose on the pair. Twin fireballs rocketed out of his palms. The spinning white-hot orbs struck their targets in an instant, incinerating the vampires on impact, bodies and weapons reduced to a flurry of drifting ash and molten bits of metal showering down from the top of the double staircases. "Holy shit!" one of the warriors crowed from behind him, but Reichen had no time to relish the small victory. Not when Roth was staring wide-eyed in panic, backing away from the window as if he was preparing to bolt. Reichen crouched low, then sprang into the air.

In one fluid motion, fire engulfing him, he leapt off the floor and sailed up to the broad sheet of Plexiglas that separated him from his quarry. He locked eyes with Roth, curling his lip off his teeth and fangs as he smashed into the window and watched the barrier shatter inward in a million melting pebbles. Wilhelm Roth gaped at the towering pillar of hellish fire that had transformed Andreas Reichen into something too incredible for words. He'd understood the male's unique Breed-born talent was pyrokinesis, but this ... this was beyond reckoning. It was awesome in its power, and Roth could not keep himself from staring, struck dumb with wonder and fear, as Reichen stalked toward him. The concrete floor scorched black beneath Reichen's boots. The fluorescent lights overhead popped and smoked as he passed under them, moving inch by inch across the viewing room. Roth retreated, feeling his hair and skin singe from the intensity of the heat rolling off Reichen. "You think you can accomplish anything by killing me?" he asked the glowing form that stalked him with obvious deadly intent. "You've seen this place, Reichen. You can figure out what it's been used for all these years. Dragos has bred his own army down here. He's done much more than that, and he cannot be stopped now. Do you actually think my death will make a difference in the grand scheme of things?" "It will make a difference to Claire," came the deep, heat-warped reply. "It will make a difference to me." Roth kept moving backward, until the gauges and switches of the UV cage's control panel behind him bit into his spine. "Let me go, and maybe your friends down there in that cell will live."

"You can't harm anyone. Not anymore." Reichen's glance bounced from point to point on the control panel. Circuits crackled, shooting off sparks and bitter, electronic smoke. Roth had to duck out of the way of the small explosions, the fallout of Reichen's searing gaze driving him deep into the corner of the room in a cower. Roth snarled, infuriated to have been sent to his knees, particularly by this male, whose death he had craved and sought for far too long. As Reichen stepped closer, murder blazing from every pore of his body, Roth made an abrupt lunge for one of the gauges on the control panel. He understood the fact that he wasn't going to walk away from this fight now, but damn if he would accept defeat alone. With a grunt of determination, Roth smashed his fist onto the panic switch that would activate the lab's emergency detonation sequence. Sirens immediately began to wail overhead. The alarms sounded from every direction, signaling the start of an irreversible countdown. Roth chuckled. "My God. It's almost worth it--knowing that I am about to die down here alongside you and the bulk of the Order. Seeing that look on your face right now... your defeat is palpable, Reichen. So is the horror and outrage--the raw, emotional pain--it's all there, in your eyes." He sighed, knowingly dramatic. "I only wish I could take Claire along with us when this whole goddamned place blows to kingdom come in the next five--ah, make that four minutes and forty-nine seconds."

Chapter Thirty-One

Claire wanted it to all be a dream. A terrible nightmare that she could simply wake from and the world would go back to normal. She wanted to go back to three nights ago, when she and Andreas had been alone at the house in Newport, making love, walking along the wharfs, embracing under the moonlight. But the sound of Wilhelm Roth's cruelly animated voice--the realization of what he had just done to Andreas, to the warriors inside the abandoned lair with him... to the women who would be mourning their mates in mere minutes--sank into Claire's soul like a poison. "I can't stay in here another second," she murmured, meeting Dylan's ashen look. "We can't leave, Claire. Can't you hear the gunfire out there by the entrance?" Claire heard it. Rio had been gone for only a few minutes. He and Renata and Hunter were still engaged with the Gen One assassins who'd come up to ground level. It was dangerous outside the vehicle; Claire knew that. But as she stared anxiously out the tinted windshield at the forest that surrounded her, she knew a deeper sense of dread.

"Oh, my God... no. This cannot be Mira's vision." She opened the door and slid out of the Rover, realizing just now that the premonition she'd seen in the little girl's eyes was about to come true. Right here, within the next five awful minutes. Dylan came out of the vehicle and circled around to grab her by the arms. "Claire, please, get back inside. You can't--" "This is the same woods I saw in Mira's eyes," she cried, sick with certainty. The same location where she'd felt the anguish of losing Andreas in that pile of smoking rubble and ash. "The explosion, Dylan. This is exactly what Mira showed me. It's really going to happen. Oh, my God... no!" Tearing loose of the other Breedmate's hold, Claire raced into the darkened woods, her heart breaking, about to burst from her chest, and Andreas's name a desperate prayer on her lips.

Every cell in Reichen's body screamed for him to unleash the full power of his fury on Wilhelm Roth. It would be the matter of an instant to render the bastard nothing but ashes to be trampled under his boots. But incinerating Roth with a single blast of rage was far too merciful. Evil like him deserved to suffer, especially after the cowardice he'd just shown in activating explosives that none of the warriors trapped in the UV cage below had any hope of escaping. His friends should not have to die as part of this bad blood between Roth and himself. It was that thought, more than any other, that gave Reichen the ability to ignore his hatred of Roth and loose his rage on the control panel that encompassed the entire back wall of the viewing room. He threw one bolt of flame after another at the gauges and monitoring devices, until finally there was a loud pop and the entire space went dark. He didn't see Roth moving until the son of a bitch had managed to scramble through a side door. Reichen pivoted to the blown- out window and glanced down at the warriors leaping off the cell's deactivated platform. "Reichen!" It was Tegan's deep voice calling up to him, although Reichen's vision was swamped with amber and rippling with the heat that was escalating ever hotter inside him.

"Reichen, come on! Leave the son of a bitch. He's dead if he stays in here." True enough, Reichen thought. But the way his body felt now, the way his veins were seething lava and his mind fixed on one thing--destruction--he realized that the moment he'd dreaded for so long had finally arrived. He was too far gone. The fires were intensifying within him, no longer his to control. "Reichen, goddamn it!" Tegan shouted, hesitating when the rest of the warriors were wisely rushing to evacuate. "Forget Roth and let's haul ass out of this place before it fucking blows!" "Take care of her for me," he somehow managed to say, his throat feeling as dry as kindling, scraping with each syllable. "Get her somewhere safe... do that for me, Tegan." He didn't wait to hear the dark curse that shot up from the room below. Reichen took off after Wilhelm Roth, trusting the warrior--his friend--to carry out his request.