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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.

He’d been tailed by someone on foot when he fled the club—one of the two big dudes who’d been somewhere inside the place and evidently had seen him dealing. They might have been undercover cops, maybe even DEA, but both the dark-haired one in sunglasses and his equally intimidating companion who came at Ben like a freight train looked to be the shoot-first, ask-questions-later types.

Ben wasn’t about to wait around and find out. He’d run out of the club and made a frantic, helter-skelter dash in and out of the surrounding streets and alleyways, finally ditching his pursuer long enough to circle back, reach his van, and get the hell out of Dodge.

The situation at the club was still playing through his head in a haze of confusion. Everything had happened so fast. The kid taking the jumbo hit of Crimson. The first sign of trouble, when his body began to spasm as the drug entered his system. The freakish roar that came out of his mouth an instant later. The answering screams of the people around him.

The sheer chaos that ensued.

Most of those intense several minutes were still spinning through Ben’s mind in strobe-light flashes of memory, some images clear, others lost to the dark fog of his panic. But there was one thing he was absolutely sure of….

The kid had sprouted fucking fangs.

Sharp-ass canines that would have been damn hard to hide, not that the kid had been trying to conceal anything when he’d let out that bloodcurdling howl and made a grab for one of the club girls standing next to him.

Like he meant to rip her throat out with his teeth.

And his eyes. For crissake, they had been glowing bright amber, like they were on fire in his skull. Like they belonged on some kind of alien creature.

Ben knew what he saw, but it made zero sense. Not in this world, not by any brand of science he knew, and not in this reality, which cast things like that firmly into the realm of fiction.

Frankly, by everything he knew to be logical and true, what he had witnessed just wasn’t possible.

But logic had little to do with the fear pounding through him right now or the chilling sense that his harmless little “pharming” endeavor had suddenly veered way off the track. An overdose was bad enough, even worse that it had happened in a very public place, with him still on the premises to be identified. But the incredible effect the Crimson seemed to have on that kid—the monstrous transformation—was something off-the-charts unreal.

Ben turned the key in the ignition, sitting numbly as the van’s engine rattled to a rest. He had to check his formula for the drug. Maybe the current batch was bad; he might have accidentally altered it somehow. Maybe the kid simply had an allergic reaction.

Yeah. An allergic reaction that just so happened to turn an otherwise normal-looking twentysomething into a bloodthirsting vampire.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben hissed as he climbed out of the van and hit the gravel below at an anxious jog.

He reached the old building and fumbled for the key to the big padlock on the door. With a metallic snick and a creak of the door’s hinges, he entered his private lab. The place looked like shit outside, but inside, once you got past all the dilapidation and ghostly manufacturing remnants of the paper mill’s previous occupation, the setup was actually pretty sweet—all of it provided by a wealthy, anonymous patron who’d commissioned Ben to focus his pharming efforts solely on the red powder known as Crimson.

Ben’s office was located behind a spacious cell of ten-foot-high steel-link fencing. Inside, there was a gleaming stainless table weighted down by a collection of beakers, burners, a mortar and pestle, and a state-of-the-art digital scale. A wall of combination-locked cabinets housed canisters of assorted pharmaceutical drugs—serotonin accelerators, muscle relaxants, and other ingredients—none of it too hard to come by for an ex-chemist with business contacts