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Dante roared, what little patience he had for the situation evaporating as he gripped his attacker's skull and launched the kid off him. The Darkhaven youth crashed against the side of the steel Dumpster, then slid to the pavement in a heap of gangly arms and legs.
Dante stalked over to him, his own eyes sharp with anger, throwing off the amber glow of fury. He could feel his fangs extruding, a physical reaction to the heat of battle. "Get up," he told the younger male.
"Get up, before I lift you up by your balls, asshole."
The kid was growling low under his breath, muscles bunching as he collected himself. He stood up and pulled a knife out of the back pocket of his jeans. As weapons went it was pitiful, just a stubby blade with a fake horn handle. The utilitarian knife looked like something the kid had pilfered out of his father's toolbox.
"Now, what the fuck do you think you're gonna do with that?" Dante asked, coolly sliding his malebranche blade out of its sheath. The arc of polished steel with its sleek titanium edge gleamed like molten silver, even in the dark.
The Darkhaven youth eyed the custom-made dagger, then snarled and took a careless swipe at Dante.
"Don't be stupid, kid. That hard-on you're feeling is just the Crimson talking. Drop your blade, and let 's take this shit down a notch, get you the help you need to come off your high." If the youth even heard Dante talking, it might as well have been coming at him in a foreign language. Nothing seemed to register. The vampire's glowing yellow eyes remained fixed and unresponsive, his breath sawing in and out of him from between his bared teeth. Thick pink spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. He looked rabid, completely out of his mind.
He snarled. Took another swipe at Dante with the knife. As the edge of the blade came toward him, Dante moved his own weapon into the path to deflect it. The titanium-edged steel made contact, slicing across the back of the other male's hand.
The Darkhaven youth hissed in pain, but the sound stretched long, like a slow, wet sizzle.
"Ah, fuck," Dante muttered, having come to know that sound well enough in his many years of hunting Rogues.
The Crimson eater was beyond saving. The drug had induced Bloodlust, strong enough in this young vampire that he had turned Rogue. The truth of that irreversible transformation was in the acid burn of his flesh where the titanium of Dante's blade had cut him.
The metal alloy worked fast; already the skin of the vampire's hand was corroding, dissolving, falling away. Red trails running up the Rogue's arm showed the poison racing through his bloodstream. Another few minutes and there would be nothing left of him but a percolating mass of melting flesh and bone. Hell of a way to go.
"Sorry, kid," Dante told the wild-eyed Rogue before him.
In an act of mercy, he flipped the arced blade around in his hand and sliced it cleanly across the other vampire's neck.
"Jesus Christ--no!" Chase's shout preceded the hard pound of his footsteps on the asphalt of the alleyway. "No! What the fuck are you doing?"
He drew up short next to Dante, just as the Rogue's body dropped lifelessly to the ground, its severed head rolling to rest nearby. Decomposition was swift but grisly. Chase recoiled, watching the process in abject horror.
"That was a--" Dante heard a thick catch in the agent's voice, like he was choking back bile. "Son of a bitch! That was a Darkheaven civilian you just killed! He was a goddamn kid--"
"No," Dante answered calmly as he cleaned his blade and resheathed it on his hip. "What I killed was a Rogue, no longer a civilian or an innocent kid. The Crimson turned him, Chase. See for yourself."
On the street in front of them, all that was left of the Rogue was a scattered pile of ash. The fine dust caught in the slight breeze, tracing across the pavement. Chase bent down to recover the crude knife from the scattering remains of its owner.
"Where's the dealer?" Dante asked, hoping like hell to get his hands on him next.
Chase shook his head. "He got away from me. I lost track of him a few blocks from here. I thought I had him, but then he ran into a restaurant and I just... I lost him."
"Forget it." Dante wasn't worried about finding the guy; he only had to look for Tess, and sooner or later her boyfriend was bound to make an appearance. And he had to admit that taking the human out personally was something he looked forward to. The Darkhaven agent swore under his breath as he stared down at the knife in his hands. "That kid you killed--that Rogue," he corrected, "was from my community. He was a good kid from a good family, goddamn it. How am I going to tell them what happened to their son?"
Dante didn't know what to say. He couldn't apologize for the killing. This was war, no matter what the Darkhavens' official position might be on the situation. Once a Breed vampire turned Rogue--whether he turned from Crimson or the weakness present in all of the Breed--there was no coming back, no hope of rehabilitation. No second chances. If Harvard was going to run with the Order for any length of time, he'd better get a grip on that fact ASAP.
"Come on," Dante said, clapping the grim-faced agent on the shoulder. "We're finished here. You won't be able to save them all."
Ben Sullivan didn't ease up on the gas until Boston's city lights were a distant glow in the rearview mirror. He turned off Route 1 just inside Revere, flooring the vehicle onto one of the industrial drives down near the river. His hands were shaking on the wheel, palms slick with sweat. His heart was beating like a jackhammer behind his rib cage. He couldn't catch his breath.
Holy shit.
What the fuck just happened back there at that club?
Some kind of overdose--it had to be. The guy who'd taken the hit of Crimson and lapsed into convulsions was a regular customer. Ben had sold to him at least half a dozen times in the past couple of weeks alone. He'd been manufacturing and dealing the mild stimulant on the club and rave circuit for months now--since the summer--and to his knowledge, nothing like this had ever happened before.
A goddamn overdose.
Ben pulled the van into a gravel yard outside an old warehouse, cut the lights, and sat there with the engine running.
