henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (13 page)

“Well, crap.” Since I had no idea how many people had been part of Project Werewolf, I didn’t know how many suspects I had for Ray’s murder. The sooner we knew how far he’d gotten and how many subjects he was experimenting on, the better.

“I’m working on decrypting the files,” Neha said.

I flicked my fingers while I thought. “Why would a lycanthropy shot destroy a vampire?”

Neha shook her head. “I’d have to know more about the serum, but I assume whatever it attempts to do to the human body doesn’t work on a vampire one.”

I thought of Thomas, covered in pustules, and shuddered. “That’s an understatement.”

It was getting dark outside. The lab had no windows, but I could almost feel the sunset releasing a pull on my veins, the shadow of vampirism lingering inside me. The Cure had worked, but I was still highly attuned to the sun. I could still taste memories in blood. I wondered what that meant. I wanted to ask Neha, but I didn’t dare open up to her anymore. She’d betrayed my trust when she injected me with something against my will. That was the day she took away my autonomy. The day she’d turned me from a willing aide and made me an enemy. She took away my power. She didn’t deserve to know the little things her Cure hadn’t burned out of me.

The truly frustrating thing was that there were plenty of vampires who’d probably happily have volunteered for her trial. Weepers who wanted a way out. Vampires who had lived for centuries or millennia who might have been ready to give up forever for a mortal life, where they could live out their days under the sun. They’d have supplied her data and blood in exchange for being human again.

But Neha had jabbed me instead, and now whatever trust we’d built was shattered. I’d help solve Ray’s murder because it would help me solve Thomas’s, but then I was done with her until she found an antidote.
If
she found me an antidote. I didn’t get the impression she was trying very hard, but I didn’t want to get into it now.

“I have to go,” I said, setting the empty vial on the metal counter. “Keep me updated.”

“I will,” Neha agreed.

“And watch your back. Ray’s test subject or subjects might be staking out the lab.”

Neha swallowed uneasily and nodded. She opened her mouth and then closed it, deciding against whatever she was going to say. That was fine with me. I had vampires to interview.

I
PARKED
two blocks from the Factory in a ten-dollar all-night lot and took my time adjusting my lipstick and not getting out. When I finally did, I double-checked that the car was locked, hoping to god I’d be coming back to retrieve it. My stomach churned uneasily. In order to get to the bottom of Thomas’s murder, I needed to talk to anyone who might have an idea of how or why he’d been stuck with that needle and poisoned. But I couldn’t help but feel like I was heading toward the gallows.

If I were smart, I’d have booked a trip to Vietnam or New Zealand or anywhere halfway across the globe where I stood a chance of escaping Lark’s vengeance. But if I ran, Lark could find me, and when she did, she’d have every right to kill me. Running makes you look guilty, and no one would question it if she executed me then.

Besides, if I was in perpetual hiding from vampires, I could never convince one of them to turn me back. And without a dose of the Cure, I had nothing to bribe any Weepers with.

I held my head up and walked on, every step hitting the pavement at a ominous volume.

“I did warn you to stay away from here,” Sean said. He was leaning against one of the streetlamps a block from the Factory. He must have watched me park and known what direction I’d come from, but his appearance in my path still left me a little unsettled. Love and loathing warred with each other at the sight of him, as they always did, but now the bitterness hung heavy over all of it.

“And I told you I had a murder to solve,” I said stiffly, pushing past him. He didn’t move, but his eyes followed me like guided lasers and I could feel them on my back.

“I spoke to Cazimir. I cannot keep them from executing justice.” The word “executing” made the hair on my arms stand at attention. Knowing Sean, he found the choice of words amusing. “But I have insisted they give you a fair chance to prove your innocence, or I shall take great offense.”

Offense? I wondered if it was an understatement or if now that I was merely a mortal, that was all my death was worth to him. I turned around. Sean straightened and smiled crookedly, a bit of fang showing. The streetlight looked like a spotlight shining down on the Devil himself. Sean’s hair had been dyed black, and he wore jeans and a wool peacoat and scarf. They hugged his narrow frame like they were made for him. His skin was white and luminous. His smile was as dangerous as ever.

“You bought me time?” is what I said out loud.

“Two nights. That was as much as I could bargain. Lark is quite upset.” Another massive understatement. “But I have convinced them that since you remain under my protection, they must adhere to basic decency.”

Sean had turned Lark. He’d never loved her in a romantic sense, but he’d admired the hell out of her. He’d found her on the cotton fields sometime in the 1820s. Her little brother had been murdered by her enslaver’s son, a vile man who had done unspeakable things to the boy for months before his death. Lark had wanted freedom and revenge. Sean granted it to her in the form of vampirism. With that gift, she murdered the plantation master, his son, and the entire household. Then she burned the entire plantation to the ground. Sean kept in touch with her the way he kept in touch with all of his vampire fledglings: sporadically, but enough to know the approximate part of the world she existed in.

They never had the bond Sean and I share—shared?—but he was still her sire. She was under no magical obligation to obey him or respect him, as the stories of vampires sometimes suggest, but it’s hard to share that kind of kinship and not have some familial feelings. She would at least listen when he spoke, and even grant him some patience where I was concerned.

Besides, god knew Cazimir didn’t want to start anything with Sean. Sean was ruthless and powerful. He had no qualms about raining destruction down on Cazimir’s head if he deemed it necessary, and he was older than Cazimir, which meant he was stronger to boot.

“Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t sufficient, but nothing was. Sean had saved my ass, or at least done as much as he could in order to help me save it myself.

Sean shrugged and then he was right in front of me again, as if he’d teleported. I started, disoriented by the vampiric movement, and had to steady myself. Naturally, that amused him. “Dear Henri, how odd to see you like this. It’s why I didn’t come, you know. I knew it would be surreal to see my work undone.” He touched my check with his cold hand. I leaned against it, though anger twisted at his words. His
excuses
. He smiled sadly. “You are elegant, even in your mortality.” And then his cheek replaced his hand, his lips quivering over my throat.

A smart mortal fights back at this point. A smart mortal aims for the balls with her knee. She struggles or screams. She fights, pushes, and tries to run. She pulls out her trusty Taser.

I was not smart, not when it came to Sean. Not when his nose nuzzled my neck and his lips caressed my skin. Pain flared to life in my throat, sharp and sudden. I didn’t pull away. I leaned into him, arms moving around him like they had a mind of their own. His lips moved over my neck and I could feel the way my heart strained against him as he drank my blood. It was only a second. Only a taste. And then his tongue moved over the wound and he pulled back. He grinned and I could see crimson on his white fangs.

He bent forward, as if to kiss me, and then stopped short of my mouth. “Your blood doesn’t taste tainted,” he said.

The spell broke. Something shattered in me. It hadn’t been a gesture of affection. It had been an experiment to test my blood. And I was very fucking tired of being everyone’s lab rat. I pulled away from him. Once again, I was acutely aware of how much I hated him for avoiding me since the incident. But this was how it always went: I loved him and hated him at the same time, never able to decide which feeling was stronger at any given moment.

“Don’t look so stricken,” he said. “You’re still mine, you know.”

“I’ve never been yours, asshole,” I said sharply. “I need to go. I have work to do.”

“Of course. Do survive, will you? I’d hate to lose you over something as stupid as that librarian’s death. He was never going to make much of a vampire.”

I rolled my eyes, but I hadn’t known Thomas enough to know what his heart held. It was possible he deeply regretted being turned. Looking into the Devil’s eyes is a lot different than taking his place in Hell. But still, Sean didn’t have to be so flippant about everything. “I’m doing my damnedest. But it wouldn’t hurt to be immortal again.”

Sean licked his lips. “I suspect it’s possible, but I cannot be sure until I see what effect your blood has on me. Besides, I’m not going to offer my blood to someone who will only be pushed into the sun in forty-eight hours.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, turning and walking away.

“If I didn’t have confidence in you, you would have died a mortal death years ago, and I certainly wouldn’t be here now.”

“This is why you shouldn’t stay away, Sean. I forget what a charmer you are.” I gave him my most sarcastic smile, and then I headed toward the outline of the Factory looming in the distance.

Having two days was a huge deal. It meant that I wasn’t going to be grabbed and killed upon arrival tonight. It meant I had time.

But it wasn’t much time. And I still had no clue who had murdered Ray or Thomas.

CHAPTER 14

A
mortal woman in a suit, one of Caz’s security guards, opened the door and eyed me for a long moment. I felt my heart beat in my throat, sure she was going to slap handcuffs on my wrists and drag me into whatever excuse for a dungeon the Factory had. But after asking my name and checking something on a computer tablet, she waved me inside. I guessed I was on Cazimir’s guest list. Better than being on his most wanted list.

The Factory was in chaos, which seemed to be its normal state of operation, but there was an electricity in the air that made my hair stand on end. The few people I saw were running from one place to another, frantic with terror in their eyes. I didn’t see Lark or Cazimir, and there was no flash of bright blue hair to signal Aidan’s presence.

I stopped one of the women moving past by grabbing her sleeve. She was a vampire who looked like she hadn’t been a vampire long. A couple of weeks at most. Her skin was pale but her eyes were bloodshot, a common occurrence in new vampires, usually a result of their own mortal death. It would fade. And there was a clumsiness to her movements, a jerkiness, like she wasn’t totally in control of her limbs yet. Newer vampires take time to adjust to having a vampire’s heightened perceptions and abilities. She looked confused when I stopped her, and when she realized I wasn’t a vampire, she started to pull away.

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

She eyed my hand on her sleeve as if trying to decide whether or not she should tear off my arm. I let go. New vampire or not, she was stronger than my mortal self. Old habits died hard, but I wasn’t an idiot.

“Some of the blood bags are sick.” She spat the words, as if she was disgusted, though I couldn’t tell if her disgust was at the fact that humans lived at the Factory or at the illness itself.

Uneasiness wormed through me. “Sick? How? Like Thomas—”

“Fuck if I know, lady. I was just told to get ice.” She shook her head derisively. “As if that’s why I’m here, to play nursemaid to walking juice boxes.”

“For someone’s who barely a vampire, you sure have a dim view of humanity,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “Fuck off.” She stomped away unsteadily on her heels.

I sighed and headed for the parlor. It was closed and there was no sound within, so I went to the stairs. On the third-floor landing, I spotted a cluster of people hovering outside one of the doors, as they had last night. My stomach churned until it pushed bile up my throat as I remembered the grotesque boils covering Thomas’s body. The urge to run was almost overwhelming. I didn’t want to see anything that horrible ever again. As it was, I’d never be able to fully scrub the image from my mind.

And then there was the practical reason to run: if it was the same thing affecting these mortals, I would probably be dragged into a dark room and tortured until they realized I really didn’t know how to cure whatever it was or prevent it from spreading.

But if I left now and didn’t find answers, they’d hunt me and down kill me. Better to be visibly working the problem than hiding in fear like a guilty person. I forced myself forward.

A bubble of relief burst when I saw a blue head of hair storm out of the room. Aidan. He pushed through the crowd of mostly mortals and seemed to be looking for someone. His eyes landed on me for a second, but he turned to people in the crowd.

“Have you seen the doctor?” he was asking.

I remembered the man in the lab coat last night. I hadn’t seen him among the people downstairs and neither had anyone within earshot, because no one answered and the doctor did not materialize in front of the crowd.