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 in debt to him for numerous and varied favors.
He hadn‘t set out to be a drug dealer. In the beginning, after he was released from the cosmetics company where he‘d been working as a chemical engineer and research–development manager, Ben would never have considered operating on the other side of the law. But his staunch opposition to animal abuse—the very thing that got him fired in the first place, after witnessing years of torture in the makeup company‘s testing labs—put a fire in Ben‘s belly to take a stand.
He started rescuing abandoned and neglected animals. Then he started stealing them when regular, legal channels proved too sluggish to be effective. From there, it was a short fall into other questionable activities, club drugs being an easy, relatively low-risk venture. After all, what was the crime in dealing fairly harmless recreational drugs to consenting adults? The way Ben saw it, his rescue operation needed funding and he had something of value to offer to the clubbers and candykids of the rave crowds—something they were going to get anyway from someone, somewhere, so why not him?
Unfortunately, Tess hadn‘t seen things from his perspective at all. Once she learned what he was doing, she broke it off with him. Ben had sworn up and down he would quit dealing—just for her—and he truly had, until his current patron came knocking last summer with a fat wad of cash in hand. At the time, Ben hadn‘t understood the focused interest in Crimson. If he‘d been paid to step up production and distribution of Ecstasy or GHB, maybe it would have made more sense, but Crimson—Ben‘s own private recipe—had been one of the milder products he had produced. In Ben‘s trials, conducted primarily on himself, he found that the drug generated a slightly more intense buzz than a caffeinated energy drink, with an increase in appetite and a lessening of inhibitions.
Crimson was a fast-hitting high, but fast-fading too. Its effects vanished after about an hour. In fact, the narcotic had seemed so innocuous, Ben could hardly justify the generous payment he‘d been collecting for its manufacture and sale.
After what had happened tonight, he imagined those generous payments were about to come to an abrupt—and understandable—end.
He had to get in contact with his benefactor and report the terrible incident he‘d witnessed at the nightclub. His patron needed to know about the apparent problems with the drug. Certainly he would have to agree that Crimson had to be taken out of circulation immediately.
CHAPTER Twelve
Dante followed the soft rumble of conversation coming from the formal dining room of the compound‘s mansion at street level. He and Chase had arrived at the Order‘s headquarters a few minutes before, after securing the scene at the nightclub and doing a further comb of the area for signs of trouble. Now Chase was in the tech lab below, logged on to the Darkhaven computers, making his report of the night‘s events.
Dante had his own report to make as well, one that definitely wasn‘t going to win him any attaboys with the formidable leader of the warriors. He found Lucan seated at the head of the long, elegantly set table in the candlelit dining room. The warrior was dressed for combat, as though he had only recently returned from patrol himself. From beneath his black leather jacket, an array of weapons glinted, giving the impressive Gen One male an even greater aura of danger and command than what normally shrouded him.