Tess backed up, inching closer to the far wall of the chamber and the arched hollow carved into the stone.
“Damn it, Tess. Hear me out. I love you.”
“Don’t say that. Haven’t you told me enough lies already?”
“It’s no lie. I wish it was, but—”
Dante took another step, and his knee suddenly gave out beneath him. He hissed as he caught himself on one of the low benches, his fingers digging into the wood so hard, Tess thought it a wonder he didn’t crush it.
Something strange was happening to his features. Even with his head dropped down, she could see that his face was growing sharper, his cheeks seeming leaner, more angular, his golden skin stretched tight over the bones. He spat a curse, something she didn’t recognize any more than she did the gravelly roughness of his voice.
“Tess... you have to trust me.”
She moved closer to the archway, leading with her hand as she sidled along the wall. And then she was standing in front of the opening, nothing but pitch blackness behind her and a thin, chill breeze at her back. She turned her head to glance into the dark—
“Tess.”
Dante must have sensed her movement, because when she looked back at him, he lifted his head and met her gaze. The warm color of his eyes had changed to a fierce glow, his pupils narrowing down to bare slits as she watched his transformation in stunned horror.
“Don’t go,” he rasped thickly, his words tangling on the lengthening sharpness of a spectacular set of fangs. “I won’t hurt you.”
“It’s too late, Dante. You already have,” she whispered, moving farther away from him, stepping back into the arched doorway. In the darkness, she saw that a flight of stone steps climbed steeply upward, toward the source of the cool air that drifted down around her. Wherever they led, she had to go. She put her foot on the first step—
“Tess!”
She didn’t look back at him. She knew she couldn’t or she might not find the courage to leave him. She climbed the first few steps tentatively, then began running, taking the flight as quickly as she could.
Down below, Dante’s anguished roar echoed off the stone walls of the cathedral and the darkened stairwell, straight into the marrow of her bones. Tess didn’t stop. She ran faster up what seemed like hundreds of steps, until she reached a solid steel door at the top. She slapped her palms against it and pushed it open.
Blinding daylight poured over her. A cool November breeze sent dried leaves spiraling up from the grass outside. Tess let the door close behind her with a bang. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and took off, running into the crisp, bright morning.
Dante thrashed on the floor, caught in the grip of his persistent, debilitating nightmare. The death vision had come on suddenly, intensifying as he and Tess argued.
It only worsened now that she was gone. Dante heard the topside door slam closed above and knew from the brief flash of daylight that shot down the long stairwell that even if he was able to break away from the invisible chains that held him, the sun’s brutal rays would prohibit him from going after her.
He sank deeper into the abyss of his premonition, where vines of thick black smoke curled around his limbs and throat, choking off precious air. The shattered remains of a smoke alarm hung from the ceiling by its mangled wire guts, silent as the smoke collected around it.
From elsewhere came the angry crash of objects falling, as if fixtures and furniture were being overturned and thrown to the floor by a marauding army. All around him in the small white cell that held him, Dante saw upended cabinet drawers and files, their contents spilled everywhere, rifled through in haste.
In the vision, he was moving now, stepping through the debris and making his way to the closed door on the other side of the room. Oh, Jesus. He knew this place, he realized now.
He was in Tess’s clinic.
But where was she?
Dante registered that he ached everywhere, his body feeling battered and tired, each step sluggish.
Before he could reach the door and try to get out, it opened from the other side. A familiar face leered at him through the smoke.
“Look who’s up and about,” Ben Sullivan said, coming inside and holding a length of telephone cord in his hands. “Death by fire is such a nasty way to go. Of course, if you breathe in enough smoke, the flames will be just an afterthought.”
Dante knew he shouldn’t be afraid, but terror clawed at him as his would-be executioner entered the room and took hold of him in a surprisingly strong grasp. Dante tried to fight, but his limbs didn’t seem his own to command. His struggles only slowed Sullivan down. Then the human cocked his arm back and nailed Dante with a blow to the jaw.
His vision swam crazily. When he next opened his eyes, he was on his stomach, lying on a raised slab of cold polished steel while Ben Sullivan pulled his hands behind his back, then bound him at the wrists with the cable he was holding. Dante should have been able to snap his bonds loose, but they held tight. The human moved down to his feet, hog-tying him.
“You know, I thought killing you was going to be difficult,” the Crimson dealer whispered near his ear, the same words Dante had heard the last time he’d endured this glimpse of death. “You’ve made it very easy for me.”
As he’d done before, Ben Sullivan went around to the front of the platform and bent down in front of Dante. He grabbed Dante by the hair and lifted his face up off the cold metal. Past Sullivan’s head, Dante saw a clock on the wall above the door, the time reading 11:39. He struggled to collect more detail, knowing he would need all he could gather in order to confront this eventuality and maybe turn it around in his favor. He didn’t even know if it might be possible to cheat fate, but he was damn well going to give it a shot.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” Sullivan was saying now. The human leaned in close—close enough that Dante saw the vacant gaze of a Minion staring back at him. “Just know that you brought this on yourself. Be grateful I didn’t turn you over to my Master instead.”
With that, Ben Sullivan released him, letting Dante’s head fall back down. As the Minion strode out of the room and locked the door, Dante opened his eyes and saw his reflection in the polished steel surface of the table on which he lay.
No, not his reflection.
Tess’s.
Not his body bound on the examination table while the clinic was being consumed in smoke and flames, but hers.
Oh, mother of Christ.
It wasn’t his horrific death he’d been experiencing in his nightmares all these years. It was the death of his Breedmate, the woman he loved.
CHAPTER Thirty-four
Tess made her way into the city from the compound’s property in a state of emotional numbness.
Without her purse, coat, or cell phone, she had few options—not even a key to get into her apartment.
Breathless, confused, utterly exhausted from everything that was happening to her, she headed for a corner pay phone, praying it wasn’t out of order. She got a dial tone, hit 0, and waited for the operator to come on.
“Collect call, please,” she panted into the receiver, then gave the operator the number of the animal clinic. The phone rang and rang. No answer.
As it went into voice mail, the operator disconnected, saying, “I’m sorry. There’s no one there to accept charges.”
“Wait,” Tess said, worry niggling at her. “Will you try it again?”
“One moment.”
Tess waited anxiously as the phone began ringing again at the clinic. No answer.
“I’m sorry,” the operator said again, disconnecting the call.
“I don’t understand,” Tess murmured, more to herself. “Can you tell me what time it is?”
“It’s ten-thirteen A.M.”
Nora wouldn’t break for lunch until noon, and she never called in sick, so why wasn’t she picking up the call? Something must be wrong.
“Would you like to try another number?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, I would.”
Tess gave the operator Nora’s land line, then, when that call came up empty, she gave her Nora’s cell.
As each call rang unanswered, Tess’s heart sank deeper in her chest. Everything felt wrong to her. Very wrong.
With dread pounding through her, Tess hung up the pay phone and began walking for the nearest subway station. She didn’t have the dollar-twenty-five fare it would cost to ride to the North End, but a grandmotherly woman on the street took pity on her and gave her a handful of loose change.
The trip home seemed to take forever, each stranger’s face on the train seeming to stare at her as if they knew she didn’t belong there among them. As if they could sense that she had been changed somehow, no longer a part of the normal world. No longer a part of their human world.
And maybe she wasn’t, Tess thought, reflecting on all that Dante had told her—everything she had seen and been a part of in the past several hours. The past several days, she corrected herself, thinking back on Halloween night, when she’d truly first seen Dante.
When he’d sunk his fangs into her neck and turned her normal world upside down.
But maybe she wasn’t being totally fair. Tess couldn’t remember a time when she’d really felt a part of anything normal. She had always been... different. Her unusual ability, even more than her troubled past, had always kept her separate from other people. She’d always felt like a misfit, an outsider, unable to trust anyone with her secrets.
Until Dante.
He had opened her eyes to so much. He’d made her feel, made her desire in ways she never had before.
He’d made her hope for things she’d only dreamed of. He’d made her feel safe and understood. Worse than that, he had made her feel loved.
But that had all been based on lies. Now she had the truth—incredible as it was—and she would give just about anything to pretend it wasn’t real.
Vampires and blood bonds. A mounting war between creatures who shouldn’t exist outside the realm of the imagination, of nightmares.
It was all true, though.
It was real.
As real as her feelings for Dante, which only made his deception cut deeper. She loved him, and she’d never been more terrified of anything in her life. She had fallen in love with a dangerous vigilante. A vampire.
The admission weighed her down as she stepped off the subway car and made her way up to street level in her North End neighborhood. The local shops were bustling with morning patrons, the outdoor market enjoying a steady flow of regular customers. Tess passed a knot of tourists who’d stopped to browse autumn melons and squash, weathering a chill that had little to do with the crisp fall air.
The closer she got to home, the deeper her sense of dread grew. One of the tenants came out as she reached the front stoop. Although she didn’t know the old man by name, he smiled at her and held open the door for her to enter. Tess went inside and climbed the flight of stairs to her unit. Before she got within ten feet of the door, she realized that it had been broken into. The jamb was chewed up near the doorknob, as if it had been jimmied open and then closed to make it appear that nothing was out of place.
Tess froze, panic dousing her. She took a backward step, ready to turn around and bolt. Her spine connected with a solid mass, someone standing right behind her. A strong arm snaked around her waist,
yanking her off balance, and a length of cold, sharp steel pressed meaningfully below her jaw.
“Morning, Doc. About fucking time you showed up.”
“You can’t be serious, Dante.”
Although all of the warriors, including Chase, were gathered in the training facility watching him gear up for battle, Gideon was the first to challenge him.
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” Dante took a pistol out of one of the gun cabinets and grabbed a handful of rounds. “I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
“Jesus Christ, D. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s just after ten o’clock in the morning. That means full-on daylight.”
“I know what it means.”
Gideon exhaled a low curse. “You’re going to fry, my man.”
“Not if I can help it.”
Having been around since the eighteenth century, Dante was beyond old by human standards, but as a Breed vampire, he was fairly average, his lineage being several generations distant from the Ancients and their hypersensitive alien skin. He couldn’t stay topside for very long in the daytime, but he could take a small hit of UV rays and live to tell about it.
For Tess, he would be willing to walk into the core of the sun itself if he thought it might save her from the death he knew was waiting for her.
“Listen to me,” Gideon said, putting his hand on Dante’s arm to get his attention. “You may not be as vulnerable to the light as a Gen One, but you’re still Breed. You spend more than thirty minutes in direct sunlight and you’re toast.”
“It’s not like I’m gonna be sightseeing up there,” he said, refusing to be swayed. He shrugged off his brethren’s well-meaning caution and grabbed another weapon from the cabinet. “I know what I’m doing. I have to do this.”
He had told the others about what he’d seen, the vision that was still tearing his heart in pieces. It killed him to think that he’d let Tess leave the compound without his protection, that he hadn’t been able to stop her. That she might be in danger this very moment, while his vulnerable vampire genes forced him to hide belowground.
“What if the time you saw in your vision—eleven thirty-nine—is actually twenty-one minutes to midnight?” Gideon asked. “You can’t be sure the event you saw was taking place during the morning hours. You might be putting yourself at risk for nothing—”
“And if I wait and it turns out I’m wrong? I can’t take that chance.” Dante shook his head. He’d tried to
reach her by phone but got no answer at her apartment or the clinic. And the searing ache in his chest told him that she wasn’t ignoring him purely by choice. Even without the benefit of his hellish precognition, he knew his Breedmate was in danger. “No goddamn way am I taking a chance on
waiting around here ’til dark. Would you, Gideon? If Savannah needed you—I’m talking life-and-death needed you—would you even consider taking that kind of gamble? Would you, Lucan, if it were
Gabrielle out there alone?”
Neither warrior denied it. There wasn’t a blood-bonded male alive who wouldn’t walk through a sea of fire for the woman he loved.
Lucan came toward him and held out his hand. “You honor her well.”
Dante clasped his leader’s strong Gen One hand—his friend’s hand—and shook it firmly. “Thank you.
But to be honest, I’m doing this as much for myself as I am for Tess. I need her in my life. She has become... everything to me.”
Lucan nodded soberly. “Then go get her, my brother. We can celebrate your pairing when you and Tess return safely to the compound.”
Dante held Lucan’s regal gaze and slowly shook his head. “That is something I need to discuss with you. With all of you,” he said, looking to the other warriors as well. “Assuming I survive at all, if I am able to save Tess, and if she will have me as her mate—I intend to relocate to the Darkhavens with her.”
A long silence answered, his brethren staring at him in measured quiet.
Dante cleared his throat, knowing his decision must come as a shock to the warriors he’d fought alongside for more than a century. “She’s been through enough already—even before I met her and dragged her into our world against her will. She deserves happiness. She deserves a hell of a lot more than I can ever hope to give her. I just want her to be safe now, far away from any danger.”
“You would quit the Order for her?” Niko asked, the youngest only behind Dante, and a warrior who relished his duty perhaps even more than Dante had himself.
“I would quit breathing for her, if she asked it of me,” he replied, surprising even himself with the depth
of his devotion. He looked to Chase, who still owed him that second favor from last night. “What do you think? You got any pull left in the Boston Darkhaven to help me get a spot with the Agency?”
Chase smirked, lifting his shoulder in a casual shrug. “I might.” He strode toward the weapons cabinet and took out a SIG Sauer. “But first things first, eh? We have to get your female back here in one piece so she can decide if she wants your sorry ass for a mate.”
“We?” Dante said, watching the former Darkhaven agent suit up with the SIG and another semiauto.
“Yeah, we. I’m going with you.”
“What the—”
“Me too,” Niko said, sauntering over and pulling out his own cache of weapons. The Russian grinned
as he nodded toward Lucan, Gideon, and Tegan. “You’re not going to leave me down here with these Gen One geezers, are you?”
“No one’s coming with me. I wouldn’t ask it—”
“You never have to,” Niko said. “Like it or not, D, Chase and I are all you’ve got on this mission.
You’re not doing this alone.”
Dante swore, humbled and grateful for the show of support. “All right, then. Let’s get moving.”
CHAPTER Thirty-five
With the knife biting into her neck to keep her silent, Ben forced Tess out of her building and into a waiting car on the street. He smelled bad, like soured blood and sweat and a hint of decay. His clothes were filthy and wrinkled, his normally golden hair unkempt, hanging lank and unwashed into his brow.
As he shoved her into the backseat of the car, Tess caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were dull and flat, staring at her with a cold detachment that made her skin crawl.
And Ben wasn’t alone.
Two other men waited in the car, both seated in the front, both sharing the same vacant glint in their eyes.
“Where is it, Tess?” Ben asked as he closed the door and shut them inside the dark vehicle. “I left a little something at the clinic the other day, but now it’s not there. What did you do with it?”
Midnight Breed - Book - 02 Page 28