His vision swam crazily. When he next opened his eyes, he was on his stomach, lying on a raised slab of cold polished steel while Ben Sullivan pulled his hands behind his back, then bound him at the wrists with the cable he was holding. Dante should have been able to snap his bonds loose, but they held tight. The human moved down to his feet, hog-tying him.
"You know, I thought killing you was going to be difficult," the Crimson dealer whispered near his ear, the same words Dante had heard the last time he'd endured this glimpse of death. "You've made it very easy for me."
As he'd done before, Ben Sullivan went around to the front of the platform and bent down in front of Dante. He grabbed Dante by the hair and lifted his face up off the cold metal. Past Sullivan's head, Dante saw a clock on the wall above the door, the time reading 11:39. He struggled to collect more detail, knowing he would need all he could gather in order to confront this eventuality and maybe turn it around in his favor. He didn't even know if it might be possible to cheat fate, but he was damn well going to give it a shot.
"It didn't have to be like this," Sullivan was saying now. The human leaned in close--close enough that Dante saw the vacant gaze of a Minion staring back at him. "Just know that you brought this on yourself. Be grateful I didn't turn you over to my Master instead."
With that, Ben Sullivan released him, letting Dante's head fall back down. As the Minion strode out of the room and locked the door, Dante opened his eyes and saw his reflection in the polished steel surface of the table on which he lay.
No, not his reflection.
Tess's.
Not his body bound on the examination table while the clinic was being consumed in smoke and flames, but hers.
Oh, mother of Christ.
It wasn't his horrific death he'd been experiencing in his nightmares all these years. It was the death of his Breedmate, the woman he loved.
Chapter Thirty-four
Tess made her way into the city from the compound's property in a state of emotional numbness. Without her purse, coat, or cell phone, she had few options--not even a key to get into her apartment. Breathless, confused, utterly exhausted from everything that was happening to her, she headed for a corner pay phone, praying it wasn't out of order. She got a dial tone, hit 0, and waited for the operator to come on.
"Collect call, please," she panted into the receiver, then gave the operator the number of the animal clinic. The phone rang and rang. No answer.
As it went into voice mail, the operator disconnected, saying, "I'm sorry. There's no one there to accept charges."
"Wait," Tess said, worry niggling at her. "Will you try it again?" "One moment."
Tess waited anxiously as the phone began ringing again at the clinic. No answer.
"I'm sorry," the operator said again, disconnecting the call.
"I don't understand," Tess murmured, more to herself. "Can you tell me what time it is?"
"It's ten-thirteen A.M."
Nora wouldn't break for lunch until noon, and she never called in sick, so why wasn't she picking up the call? Something must be wrong.
"Would you like to try another number?"
"Yes, I would."
Tess gave the operator Nora's land line, then, when that call came up empty, she gave her Nora's cell. As each call rang unanswered, Tess's heart sank deeper in her chest. Everything felt wrong to her. Very wrong.
With dread pounding through her, Tess hung up the pay phone and began walking for the nearest subway station. She didn't have the dollar-twenty-five fare it would cost to ride to the North End, but a grandmotherly woman on the street took pity on her and gave her a handful of loose change.
The trip home seemed to take forever, each stranger's face on the train seeming to stare at her as if they knew she didn't belong there among them. As if they could sense that she had been changed somehow, no longer a part of the normal world. No longer a part of their human world.
And maybe she wasn't, Tess thought, reflecting on all that Dante had told her--everything she had seen and been a part of in the past several hours. The past several days, she corrected herself, thinking back on Halloween night, when she'd truly first seen Dante.
When he'd sunk his fangs into her neck and turned her normal world upside down.
But maybe she wasn't being totally fair. Tess couldn't remember a time when she'd really felt a part of anything normal. She had always been... different. Her unusual ability, even more than her troubled past, had always kept her separate from other people. She'd always felt like a misfit, an outsider, unable to trust anyone with her secrets.
Until Dante.
He had opened her eyes to so much. He'd made her feel, made her desire in ways she never had before. He'd made her hope for things she'd only dreamed of. He'd made her feel safe and understood. Worse than that, he had made her feel loved.