Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [234]
She backed away from the counter as the message played on, Ben’s voice chilling her as much as the things he was telling her.
“Asshole bit me—smashed my head into a car window, beat me nearly unconscious, and then…he fucking bit me! Ah, Christ, my neck is still bleeding. I gotta get to a hospital or something….”
Tess retreated into her living room, as if the distance from Ben’s voice would somehow insulate her from what she was hearing. She didn’t know how to make sense of any of it.
How could Dante be involved—even peripherally—in an attack on Ben like the one he described? True, after he’d arrived at her place last night loaded down with weapons and bleeding from an obvious altercation, he had said he’d been pursuing a drug dealer. It certainly could have been Ben he was talking about. Tess had to admit, albeit sadly, that it wasn’t that big of a stretch to imagine Ben falling back into his old ways.
But he was talking absolute nonsense now. Men who could turn into fanged monsters? Savagery that belonged in a horror movie? Those things had no place in real life, not even in the harshest realm of reality. It just wasn’t possible.
Was it?
Tess found herself standing in front of the shrouded sculpture she’d been working on last night, the one of Dante’s likeness. The one she’d botched and would probably end up throwing away. She’d gotten his mouth all wrong, hadn’t she? Given him some strange sort of sneer that didn’t look like him at all?
Now her fingers tingled as she reached for the scrap of cloth that covered the piece. Confusion and an odd, niggling dread sat in her stomach like a stone as she grasped the edge of the fabric and drew it clear of the bust. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw what she had done—the mistake she’d made had given Dante a wild, almost animal-like appearance…right down to the sharp canines that turned his smile into a feral-looking sneer.
Inexplicably, she had given him fangs.
“I’m really afraid, Tess. For both of us,” Ben’s voice said over the speaker of her answering machine. “Just…whatever you do, stay the hell away from these guys.”
Dante flipped his malebranche blades, one in each hand, the steel flashing in the fluorescent lights of the compound’s training facility. He spun at blinding speed and struck hard at the polymer target dummy, ripping twin razor-sharp lacerations several inches into the thick plastic hide. With a roar, he pivoted around and went at it again with a further assault.
He needed to feel at least the semblance of combat, because if he sat still for more than a second, he was going to kill someone. Top on his list at the moment was Darkhaven Agent Sterling Chase. Ben Sullivan was a damn close runner-up. Hell, if he could take both of them out at once, so much the better.
He’d been fuming ever since he returned to the compound and learned that the agent had been a no-show with their Crimson dealer. Lucan and the others were giving Chase the benefit of the doubt for now, but Dante had a feeling in his gut that Chase, for whatever his reasons, had willfully defied his order to take Ben Sullivan into custody at the compound.
Dante meant to find out what had happened, but phone calls, e-mails, and pages to the agent’s Darkhaven residence had gone unanswered. Unfortunately, an in-person interrogation was going to have to wait until sundown.
Which is roughly ten frigging hours away, Dante thought, delivering another savage attack on the target dummy.
The wait was made even worse by the fact that he’d been unable to reach Tess either.