Shades of Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the back while Homeboy’s busy making an entrance.”
    They moved in behind the building and located a ground-level window half obscured by snow and street rubbish. Squatting on his haunches, Kade brushed away the ice and crusted-over filth, then lifted the hinged panel of glass and peered into the darkened space on the other side. It was a brick cellar, littered with a couple of rotted mattresses, spent condoms, used syringes, and a combined stench of piss, vomit, and various other expelled bodily fluids that assaulted Kade’s acute senses like a sledgehammer blow to his skull.
    “Jesus Christ,” he hissed, lips curling back off his teeth and fangs. “Homeboy’s housekeeper is so fired.”
    He slipped inside, landing soundlessly on the rough concrete floor. Brock followed, 280-plus pounds of heavily armed vampire lighting as quietly as a cat beside him. Kade motioned past the revolting mess on the floor to a pitch-black corner of the room, where a short length of chain and a pair of shackles lay. A strip of silver duct tape had been cast off nearby, with several strands of long, light blond hair stuck to it.
    Brock met Kade’s hard stare in the dark. His deep voice was more growl than words. “Skin trader.”
    Kade nodded grimly, sickened by the evidence of all that had taken place in this dank, dark basement prison. He was about to head for the stairs and crash the party above when Brock’s low curse made him pause.
    “We’re not alone down here, my man.” Brock indicated a barred door all but obscured by shadows and the rusted skeleton of an old box spring that leaned too neatly against it. “Humans,” he said. “Females, just on the other side of that door.”
    Hearing the quiet, broken breathing now, and feeling the current of pain and suffering that rode on the fetid air, Kade moved with Brock toward the lightless corner of the cellar. They pushed aside the old box spring, then Kade lifted the thick metal bar that locked the door from the outside.
    “Holy hell,” Brock whispered into the darkness. He stepped inside the small room where three young women sat huddled together in the corner, shivering and terrified. When one of them started to scream, Brock moved faster than any of the drugged humans could track him. Reaching down, he brushed his hand over the female’s brow, trancing her into silence with his touch. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
    “Have any of them been bled?” Kade asked, watching as Brock willed the other two captives into similar states of quiet.
    “They’ve been beaten recently, so there’s bruising. But I don’t see any bite wounds. Don’t see any Breedmate marks, either,” he added, doing a quick check of the women’s exposed skin and extremities, looking for the teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark that differentiated mortal females from their more genetically extraordinary sisters. Brock gently released the pale arm he held, then stood up. “At least none of these three is a Breedmate.”
    A small mercy, and one that hardly exonerated the vampire scum who’d been making a business out of trafficking women to the highest bidder.
    “Give me a minute to scrub their memories of what they’ve been through and get them safely out of here,” Brock said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
    Kade gave him a tight nod and a flash of fang. “Meanwhile, I’m going to head upstairs and have a little private chat with Homeboy.”
    With aggression burning like acid in his veins, Kade crept up the steps to the noise-filled main floor of the building, bypassing the orgy taking place under a cloud of narcotic smoke, trippy industrial music, and flashing strobe lights.
    In a back office down the hall, he heard the thin rasp of the scumbag he was looking for.
    “Fetch me the female who just came in with those Ivy League losers—no, not the blonde, the other one. If she’s a true redhead, she’s worth twice as much to me.”
    Kade