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 f**king 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 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.