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"I don't need your protection."
"Yes, you do."
"No," she said, numb with a heavy kind of dread. "What I need is to get as far away from you as I can."
"Tess, the safest place for you now is here, with me."
When he came toward her, holding out his hands in a gesture that begged trust, she recoiled. "Stay away from me. I mean it, Dante. Get away!">"Hello?" Tess called into the empty space. "Is someone in here?"
The instant the words left her lips, all other sound around her ceased, including the beeps of the monitor. She glanced to the grid just in time to see the lights blink off. Like someone had disconnected them from within the far room.
A feeling of unease crept up her spine. In her arms, Harvard started to squirm and whimper. He wriggled away from her, jumping down and scrambling back up the corridor. Tess couldn't name the dread that was running through her, but she wasn't about to stand around and wonder either.
She turned back for the doors. Started walking briskly toward them, her head turned to watch for movement behind her. She felt a sudden drop in the temperature--a chill breeze on her skin, crawling up the back of her neck.
"Shit," she whispered, more than a little unnerved.
She put her hand out to push open the door and jumped back when her palm connected with something warm and unmoving. Tess stopped short and swung her head around in shock. Her gaze latched on to a hideously scarred face and torso of an immense, muscular man.
No, not a man.
A monster, with the huge fangs and fiercely glowing amber eyes of the ones who had assaulted her in the street.
A vampire.
In a flash of vivid, horrific remembrance, Tess was bombarded with images of the earlier attack: bruising fingers digging into her arms, holding her down; sharp teeth tearing into her, the endless, fevered pulls at her veins; awful, animalistic grunts and moans as the beasts fed on her. She saw the moonlit pavement, the darkened alleyway, the ramshackle shed where she'd thought she was going to die.
And then, just as suddenly but oddly out of place, she saw the small storage room in the back of her clinic. There was a big man with dark hair huddled on the floor, bleeding. He was dying, riddled with bullets and other terrible wounds. She reached out to him--
No, that didn't belong in her memories. It hadn't actually happened... had it?
She didn't have a chance to try putting the pieces in place. The vampire blocking her escape stalked forward, his head cocked as he glared at her in wild fury, those enormous fangs deadly white and sharp enough to tear her to shreds.
Dante stood in Gideon and Savannah's study, waiting for a verdict on the flash drive Tess had been carrying in her coat pocket. "You think you can get around the encryption on that thing, Gid?"
"Please." The blond vampire slanted him an arch look. "You jest," he said, leaning heavily on his faded English accent. He already had the drive plugged into his computer, his fingers flying over the keyboard. " I've hacked into the FBI, the CIA, our own IID, and just about every other hack-proof database in existence. This will be cake."
"Yeah? Let me know what you find. I gotta go now. I left Tess waiting--"
"Not so fast," Gideon said. "I'm almost in. Trust me, this won't take long, maybe five minutes. Let's make it interesting. Give me two minutes, thirty seconds, tops."
Beside him, leaning back against the antique carved mahogany desk in dark jeans and a black sweater, Savannah smiled and rolled her eyes. "He lives to impress, you know that."
"Be a hell of a lot easier to take if the bastard wasn't always right," Dante drawled.
Savannah laughed. "Welcome to my world."
"Too bad you can't read computer files with your touch," he told her. "Then we wouldn't need to put up with this guy."
"Alas," she sighed dramatically. "Psychometry doesn't work that way, at least not for me. I can tell you what Ben Sullivan was wearing when he handled the flash drive, describe the room he was in, his state of mind, but I can't penetrate electronic circuitry. Gideon's our best hope for that."
Dante shrugged. "Just our luck, eh?"
Over at the computer, Gideon hit one last series of keystrokes, then sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. "I'm in. Looks like one minute, forty-nine seconds, to be exact."
Dante walked around to look at the screen. "What have we got?"
"Data files. Spreadsheets. Flow charts. Pharmaceutical tables." Gideon rolled the mouse and clicked one of the files open. "Looks like a chemistry experiment. Anyone need a recipe for Crimson?"
