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The Crimson dealer was her boyfriend.
Chapter Eleven
"Go after him!" Dante called to Chase.
Although his gut impulse was to leap on the fleeing human and shred the bastard before his feet got their first taste of pavement, Dante had a bigger problem to deal with right here in the club. He catapulted onto the back of the raving Darkhaven youth and peeled him off his shrieking human prey. Dante threw the vampire into the nearest wall and crouched low to spring on him again.
"Get out of here!" he ordered the stricken female when she lay there at his feet, immobile in her shock. Everything would be happening too fast for her human mind to sort out, Dante's voice no doubt coming to her ears as a growled, disembodied command. "Move, damn it. Now!"
Dante didn't wait to see if she obeyed.
The Crimson eater came up off the floor, snarling and hissing, his fingers curled into claws. His gaping mouth dripped pink foam, globs of it stretching from the ends of his huge fangs. His pupils were narrowed to thin vertical slits, nothing but a blast of yellow fire surrounding them. The vampire's Bloodlusting focus was twitchy, head cocking from side to side as if he couldn't decide what he wanted more: an open human carotid or a piece of the one who'd interrupted his meal.
The vampire grunted, then made a lunge for the nearest human.
Dante flew at him like a hurricane.
Hurtling bodily down the back corridor of the club, the both of them smashed through the exit and rolled out onto the alley behind the place. There was no one out there--no sign of Chase or Tess's dealer boyfriend. There was only darkness and damp pavement and a Dumpster that reeked of week-old garbage.
With the Crimson eater snapping and clawing at him in a feral chaos of movement, Dante flicked a sharp mental command on the club's back door, slamming the thing shut and jamming the lock to keep the curious from wandering out into the fray.
The young Darkhaven vampire fought like he was crazed, bucking and kicking, thrashing and fighting like he was amped up on a shot of pure adrenaline. Dante felt something hot clamp down on his forearm and realized with not a little fury that the kid had sunk his fangs into his arm.
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."
