"Sure, but there's not much to tell. He died back in Chicago when I was fourteen."
"Car accident," Dylan said from beside Jenna.
Tess nodded. "That's right. Why do you want to know?"
"Are you sure it was a car accident?" Jenna pressed.
"Positive. He was in a convertible, speeding. My father always loved driving too fast." She smiled sadly. "He was larger than life. Utterly fearless."
Jenna felt sorry for the young girl who lost a parent she obviously adored. "How did the accident happen?"
"Witnesses said he dodged to avoid hitting a dog that ran in front of him. He swerved into oncoming traffic. There was a semi coming the opposite way."
Jenna had seen enough head-on collisions in her work as a Statie in Alaska. She could imagine what had happened. But she still needed to hear the answer from the Breedmate herself. "How did he die, Tess?"
"He was decapitated. He died instantly."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
"I SURE HATE TO SEE a pretty woman drinking alone." Tavia didn't bother to glance up when the middle-age suit down the bar from her at the hotel lounge finally worked up the nerve to saunter over and attempt to strike up a conversation. Her drink was long gone and her burger-and-fries lunch sat barely touched in front of her. "I'm not looking for company."
"I hear ya. Had my fill of people the past couple of days too. Holidays are a bitch like that." His domestic light beer sloshed in the longneck bottle as he gestured to the empty seat beside her. "Care if I sit down?"
She practically snarled. "Would it matter if I said yes?"
He chuckled as if that was invitation enough and plopped down next to her. Without looking at him, she sized him up by scent alone. Cheap hotel soap and designer cologne on his skin, neither of which masked the trace musk of recent sex that clung to him. Fabric softener and spray starch on the white button-down he wore under his discount outlet suit that still carried the tang of jet fuel exhaust from being packed in his luggage on the flight. He wasn't wearing a ring when he came over, but she didn't have to check to know that she'd find a faint outline of one against the tan he probably picked up at Disney World with the family not too long ago.
"You in Boston on business?" she asked.
He set his empty on the bar and pivoted in his seat to face her. "Sales convention here in the hotel the next couple of days. Just got in this afternoon."
Tavia gave him a tight smile, barely resisting the urge to flash a little fang. "You sure don't waste any time. Your wife know you f**k around on her when you're out of town?"
He got quiet all of a sudden. "My ... what the hell do you know about my wife?"
She smirked into her plate as he slid off the stool in a huff and shuffled away to rejoin some of the other men in his pack.
Alone once more, Tavia couldn't suppress her soft bark of laughter. Heightened senses could prove quite amusing in this new life she was going to be living as one of the Breed.
She motioned for the bill and began digging in the pocket of her jeans for her money. Before she'd left the house that day, she'd taken the two hundred dollars emergency cash from the kitchen drawer. Not like anyone was going to miss it, after all. Unfortunately, it wouldn't last long, and then she'd have to figure something else out.
She already felt guilty enough, having appropriated a room on her own when the hotel refused to give her one without a credit card and proper ID. It had taken her only a few tries to mentally unlock a vacant room near a stairwell exit. Easy escape, in case someone opened it legitimately with a key and she had to get out of there fast.
"Need anything else here?" the bartender asked as he came over with the check.
Tavia shook her head. "I'm all set." She eyed the total and left him a healthy tip, more than ready to be gone from the place now that the bar was filling up with a dozen more businessmen who reeked of cheap beer, cigarettes, and bad cologne.
She swung off the stool and could hardly get through the crowd that was thickening inside the cramped lounge. They moved en masse toward a flat-screen monitor mounted in the corner of the place at the other end of the bar. She thought maybe there was a big game under way, until several of the gathered men crossed themselves, eyes wide, transfixed by the television. "Holy shit," someone muttered darkly. "Turn that up, will ya?"
The volume bar inched up to full blast and Tavia stared, horrified, as a live newscast played from a satellite link overseas. The reporter was speaking in German, but there was no need to understand the language in order to comprehend what was being said.
The scene taking place on several simultaneous video feeds behind him was utter chaos.
People racing through the darkened city streets, screaming, wailing. Running for their lives. Wild gunfire popping in the distance. Smoke rising from storefronts and high-rises. Cars abandoned in the middle of intersections, doors flung open, metal twisted and crushed by a brute force unlike anything mankind had ever witnessed before.
And the bodies. Dozens of them, strewn about like broken, bloodied dolls.
The reporter went on, his voice cracking with emotion as he attempted to choke back tears while his city was being sacked in front of the world at large. In the end, he lost it. A sob ripped out of him, and in the moment before he dissolved into an unintelligible howl of anguish and terror, one word echoed like a scream in Tavia's heart.
"Vampires."
LUCAN COULDN'T FEEL HIS LEGS.
For the first time in his life, he felt utterly powerless. He stood in the great room of the makeshift, inadequately equipped compound and listened on speaker phone with the rest of the Order's household as Andreas Reichen reported in from Berlin.