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"Can't... breathe... " Dante gasped, every panting breath he took dragging more phantom smoke into his lungs. Choking him. "Ah, God... dying... "
Tegan's eyes bored into him, flinty sharp. His gaze was unsympathetic but level with a strength Dante knew would keep him steady.
"You hang on," Tegan demanded. "It's a vision, it's not reality. Not yet, anyway. Now, stay in there, ride it out. Go back as far as you can, and absorb all of the detail."
Dante let the images swamp him once more, knowing Tegan was right. He had to open his mind to the pain and fear so he could look past it to the truth.
Panting, his skin searing from the heat of the inferno surging all around him, Dante forced himself to focus on his surroundings. To place himself deeper into the moment. He stretched his mind backward from the worst of the vision, halting the action, then sending it into reverse.
The flames shrank away. The smoke reduced from massive, roiling clouds of black ash to thin gray tendrils that crept in along the ceiling. Dante could breathe now, but fear still clogged his throat with the realization that these would be his last few minutes of life.
Someone was in the room with him. A male, judging from the scent of him. Dante was lying prone on something icy cold and slick while his captor yanked his hands behind his back, then bound him at the wrists with a length of wire cord. He should have been able to snap it like twine, but it wouldn't budge. His strength was useless. The captor bound Dante's feet next, then hog-tied him on his stomach, a slab of bare metal beneath him.
Loud crashes sounded from somewhere outside the room. He heard bansheelike shrieks, smelled the coppery stench of death nearby.
And then, a low taunt sounded near his ear: "You know, I thought killing you was going to be difficult. You've made it very easy for me."
The voice faded into a self-amused chuckle as Dante's captor came around to where his head hung over the edge of the metal platform that held him. Denim-clad legs bent at the knee, and slowly the torso of his would-be killer came into Dante's line of sight. Rough fingers grasped him by the hair, lifting his head up to face him in the instant before the vision started to fade away, as quickly as it had come...
Holy hell.
"Ben Sullivan." Dante spat the name out like ash on his tongue. Released from the clutches of the premonition, he dragged himself to a sitting position on the floor. Dante wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow as Tegan stared at him in grave acceptance. "Son of a bitch. It's the Crimson dealer, Ben Sullivan. I don't fucking believe it. That human--he's the one who's going to kill me."
Tegan gave a grim shake of his head. "Not if we make him dead first." Dante pushed himself up to his feet, planting one palm against the concrete wall next to the elevator while he tried to catch his breath. Beneath his fatigue, rage simmered, for Ben Sullivan and for former Agent Sterling Chase, who'd evidently taken it upon himself to let the bastard go.
"Let's get the hell out of here," he growled, already stalking across the cavernous garage, flipping one of his malebranche blades between his fingers.
Chapter Twenty-six
Ben's captors had let him sit forever by himself in an unlit, windowless, securely locked room. He kept waiting for the one they'd called Master to appear--the nameless, faceless inpidual who'd been covertly financing the development and distribution of Crimson. Time dragged, maybe a full twenty-four hours since he'd been picked up and taken here. No one had come for him yet, but they would. And in a dark corner of his mind, Ben understood that when they did, he wouldn't get out of the confrontation alive.
He got up off the floor and made his way across the bare concrete to the closed steel door on the other side of the room. His head was screaming from the beating he'd taken before he was dragged off the street to this place. His broken nose and neck wound were crusted over with dried blood, both injuries on fire with raw pain. Ben put his ear to the cold metal door and listened to movement getting louder on the other side. Heavy footsteps clopped nearer and nearer, the purposeful gaits of more than one man, punctuated by the metallic jangle of chains and weaponry.>"You got it."
"Thanks."
As she grabbed the films for her next patient, her cell phone went off in her lab-coat pocket, the vibration beating against her thigh like bird's wings. She dug the device out and checked the ID to see if it might be Ben. The number was blocked.
Oh, God.
She knew who it was, who it had to be. She'd been suspended in an awful state between anticipation and dread all morning, knowing that Dante was going to call. He'd called her apartment as she was leaving early that day, but she'd let the blocked call go straight to voice mail. She hadn't been ready to talk to him then; she wasn't at all sure she was ready now.
Tess walked down the hall to her office and closed the door, her spine sagging against the cool metal. The phone trembled in her hand as it rang for the fifth and probably final time. She shut her eyes and touched the talk button. "Hello?"
"Hey, angel."
The sound of Dante's deep, delicious voice sent a slow current through her. She didn't want to feel the warmth that spread along her limbs and pooled in the center of her being, but it was there, melting the edges of her resolve.
"Everything okay?" he asked when she fell silent, an air of protective concern in his tone. "You still with me, or did I lose you?"
She sighed, unsure how to answer that.
"Tess? What's wrong?"
For a long few seconds, all she could do was breathe in and out. She hardly knew where to begin, and she was terrified of where it was all going to end now. A thousand questions crowded her mind, a thousand doubts that had been raised in the hours since she'd listened to Ben's bizarre message.
Part of her doubted Ben's outrageous claims--the rational part of her that knew better than to believe there could be monsters loose on the streets of Boston. Yet there was another part of her that wasn't as quick to dismiss the unexplainable, the stuff that existed with or without tidy logic or conventional science.
"Tess," Dante said amid the quiet, "you know you can talk to me."
