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He was trapped.

He felt his skin blistering. Heard the sickening crackle of his clothing--his hair too--catching fire while he registered it all in stark, debilitating horror.

There was no way out.

Death was coming.

He felt the dark hand descend on him, pushing him down, toward a vortex of seething, endless nothing --

"No!"

Dante came awake with a jolt, every muscle tensed to fight. He tried to move, but something held him down. A slight weight draped across his thighs. Another lying limply across his chest. Both females stirred on the bed, one of them making a purring noise as she nestled against him and stroked his clammy skin.

"What'sa matter, baby?"

"Get off me," he muttered, his voice raw and thready in his parched throat.

Dante extricated himself from the tangle of naked limbs and put his bare feet on the floor of the unfamiliar apartment. He could hardly catch his breath yet, his heart still hammering hard. He felt fingers running up the small of his back. Irritated by the unwanted touch, he got up off the sagging mattress and began searching for his clothes in the dark.

"Don't go," one of them complained. "Mia and I aren't finished with you yet."

He didn't answer. All he wanted right now was to be moving. He'd been still for too long. Long enough for death to come looking for him.

"You okay?" asked the other girl. "You have a bad dream or something?"

Bad dream, he thought wryly. Far from it.

He'd been seeing the same vision--living it in vivid detail--for as long as he could remember.

It was a glimpse of the future.

His own death.

He knew every agonizing second of his final few moments of life; all that remained unanswered was the why, the where, and the when of it. He even knew who to credit for the curse of his vision.

The human woman who bore him in Italy some 229 years ago had seen not only her own death but that of her beloved mate, the Darkhaven vampire who had been Dante's scholarly, aristocratic father. Just as she'd envisioned it, that gentle female met a tragic demise, drowning in an ocean riptide after she' d swum out to pull a child from the same disaster. Dante's father, she had predicted, would be slain by a jealous political rival. Some eighty years after her death, outside a crowded meeting hall in the Rome Darkhaven, Dante had lost his father just as his mother had described.

His mother's unique Breedmate gift had passed down to her sole offspring, as was often the case among the Breed, and now Dante was the one damned with death visions.

"Come back to bed," one of the young women pleaded from behind him. "Come on, don't be such a drag."

Yanking on his clothes and boots, Dante strolled back over to the bed. The females pawed at him as he came near, their movements drowsy and fumbling, their minds still sluggish from the thrall of his earlier bite. He had sealed their wounds right after he'd fed, but there remained one thing to do before he could make his escape. Dante reached out and put his palm against the brow of one girl, then the other, scrubbing all recollection of this night from their thoughts.

If only he could do the same for himself, he thought, his throat still dry with the taste of smoke and ash and death.

Chapter Nine

"Relax, Tess." Ben's hand came to rest at the small of her back, his head bent low near her ear. "In case you hadn't noticed, this is a cocktail reception, not a funeral."

Which was a good thing, Tess thought, glancing down at her garnet-colored dress. Although the simple, resale-shop halter was a favorite, she was the only one wearing color amid the general sea of black. She felt out of place, conspicuous. Not that she was used to fitting in among other people. She never had, not from the time she was a little girl. She was always... different. Always apart from the rest of the world in ways she didn't fully understand and had learned it better not to explore. Instead, she tried to fit in--pretended she did--like now, standing in a crowded room of strangers. The urge to bolt from the crush of it all was strong.

Actually, more and more, Tess was feeling like she was standing at the front of a rising storm. As if unseen forces were gathering all around her, shoving her out onto a bare ledge. She thought if she looked down at her feet, she might find nothing but chasm beneath her. A steep fall with no end in sight.

She rubbed her neck, feeling a dull sort of ache in the tendons below her ear.

"You okay?" Ben asked. "You've been quiet all night."

"Have I? I'm sorry. I don't mean to be."

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