She walked out of the living room to a tiled foyer. Curious, she opened the door and peered out onto a corridor of glossy white marble. Tess looked up the long hallway, then down the other side. It was empty, just a curving tunnel of polished stone. On the floor, inlaid into the snowy marble, was a series of symbols--interlocking geometric arcs and swirls rendered in obsidian. They were unusual and intriguing, some of them forming similar patterns to the beautiful multihued tattoos Dante sported on his torso and arms.
Tess bent down to get a closer look. She was so involved in studying the symbols that she didn't realize Harvard was near until the terrier slipped past her and started trotting off down the corridor.
"Harvard, get back here!" she called after him, but the dog kept running, disappearing around a bend in the curved hallway.
Damn it.
Tess stood up, shot a glance up and down the vacant corridor, then went after him. The pursuit led her down one long stretch of corridor, then another. Every time she got close to catching the errant terrier, he dodged capture, trotting through the endless maze of hallway as if they were playing a game.
"Harvard, you little shit, stop right now!" she whispered sharply and to no avail.
She was impatient now and uncertain if she should be traipsing around the place alone. Even though she couldn't see them, she was sure security cameras were clocking her every move from within the opaque glass orbs that were installed every few feet in the corridor ceiling.
There were no signs anywhere to indicate her location or to note where any of the labyrinthine corridors led. Wherever it was that Dante called home, it was rigged up like some high-tech government agency. Which only gave more credibility to his outrageous claims of an underworld war and the existence of dangerous creatures of the night. Tess followed the dog around a sharp right turn that opened onto another wing of the compound. Finally, Harvard's run was thwarted. A pair of swinging doors blocked his path at the end of the hall, the small square windows at eye level cloudy with frosted glass.
Tess approached cautiously, not wanting to frighten the dog out of her reach but also unsure what might be on the other side of those doors. It was quiet here, nothing but endless white marble everywhere she looked. There was a vaguely antiseptic smell in the air. From somewhere not far, her ears picked up the faint electronic beep of medical equipment and some other rhythmic, metallic clank that she could not place.
Was this some kind of medical wing? It felt sterile enough, but there were no outward indications of patients inside, no staff rushing about. No one at all, from what she could tell.
"Come here, you little beast," she muttered, bending down to retrieve Harvard from where he'd stalled out near the doors.
Holding him close to her chest in one arm, Tess slowly pushed open one of the doors a crack and peeked inside. Only dim light shone beyond the doors, a soothing semidarkness. There was a row of closed doors on both sides of the interior hallway. She slipped through the swinging doors and walked a few paces inside.
Right away she found the source of the beeping: A digital panel was mounted to a wall on her left, its array of monitoring lights dark except for a handful in a grid on the lower portion of the board. It appeared to be some kind of EKG monitor, although it was nothing like any she'd seen before. And coming from the farthest room in the hallway was the repetitive clank and thunk of something heavy.
"Hello?" Tess called into the empty space. "Is someone in here?"
The instant the words left her lips, all other sound around her ceased, including the beeps of the monitor. She glanced to the grid just in time to see the lights blink off. Like someone had disconnected them from within the far room.
A feeling of unease crept up her spine. In her arms, Harvard started to squirm and whimper. He wriggled away from her, jumping down and scrambling back up the corridor. Tess couldn't name the dread that was running through her, but she wasn't about to stand around and wonder either.
She turned back for the doors. Started walking briskly toward them, her head turned to watch for movement behind her. She felt a sudden drop in the temperature--a chill breeze on her skin, crawling up the back of her neck.
"Shit," she whispered, more than a little unnerved.
She put her hand out to push open the door and jumped back when her palm connected with something warm and unmoving. Tess stopped short and swung her head around in shock. Her gaze latched on to a hideously scarred face and torso of an immense, muscular man.
No, not a man.
A monster, with the huge fangs and fiercely glowing amber eyes of the ones who had assaulted her in the street.
A vampire.
In a flash of vivid, horrific remembrance, Tess was bombarded with images of the earlier attack: bruising fingers digging into her arms, holding her down; sharp teeth tearing into her, the endless, fevered pulls at her veins; awful, animalistic grunts and moans as the beasts fed on her. She saw the moonlit pavement, the darkened alleyway, the ramshackle shed where she'd thought she was going to die.
And then, just as suddenly but oddly out of place, she saw the small storage room in the back of her clinic. There was a big man with dark hair huddled on the floor, bleeding. He was dying, riddled with bullets and other terrible wounds. She reached out to him--
No, that didn't belong in her memories. It hadn't actually happened... had it?
She didn't have a chance to try putting the pieces in place. The vampire blocking her escape stalked forward, his head cocked as he glared at her in wild fury, those enormous fangs deadly white and sharp enough to tear her to shreds.
Dante stood in Gideon and Savannah's study, waiting for a verdict on the flash drive Tess had been carrying in her coat pocket. "You think you can get around the encryption on that thing, Gid?"