Pack Dynamics (22 page)

“Yes, ma’am.” Doc Allen nodded and left, trailing smoke behind him.

Alex’s gun sat beside his computer, and she was going to have to use it because they still hadn’t figured out a better way of killing the rabbits. Ugh. Maybe she should sedate the creature first; getting a clean head shot on something whirling around that fast would be iffy at best.

She found the pole syringe—which Alex had told her he’d ordered in when they’d found the rabbits—and injected the bunny with a massive dose of sedative. However, the anesthetic had little effect, and she had to poke it three more times before it dropped and she could kill it with the gun. And she took two shots to do that because she wasn’t experienced with firearms and flinched hard the first time she fired it.

She made a mental note to hide the pole syringe when Lockwood was in the room. She had the feeling he’d react violently to it.

By that time, Doc Allen had brought her four lycan-vamp bunnies. “Want me to necropsy this one?” he asked.

“If you don’t mind.”

“Nope, not at all,” he said cheerfully, opening the cage and grabbing the rabbit, which had resumed bunny form as soon as it had died. “Should be informative.”

McFoucher sedated the new rabbits and injected them with the nanotech from the other test tubes. Hopefully she’d get better results than the first one.

O O O

Ostheim had been in his study for about an hour when Idna joined him. They’d run on the beach the previous night, which had invigorated him, and he had energy to spare. “How are you feeling, my dear?” he asked.

“A little … odd.”

Every muscle in his body went tense, and the smile froze on his face. “How do you mean?”

“My head hurts, quite a bit. And I’m dizzy and out of breath. Why am I out of breath? I don’t breathe.”

He felt cold, and he stopped himself from saying “It didn’t work,” because it hadn’t, clearly, but he didn’t want to say it to Idna. And he was short on resources now, without McFoucher or Reed on his team. He hated to admit it, but he’d hit a dead end. He might have to go crawling to Jarrett after all. The thought made his claws extend and the hair sprout on his back.

“Hans?”

“It’s fine,” he managed. “It’ll be fine, Idna. Have some breakfast. I’ll see what the doctors say.”

She left, supporting herself on the wall. He swore under his breath. He would find a way to fix this.

No matter what it took.

O O O

Alex wandered downstairs into the living room, scrubbing his hand through his shower-dampened hair and feeling rested after a few hours of sleep. He stopped short when he saw Ben sprawled on the couch, his arm over his face. “Are you all right, Ben? You look like shit.”

Ben didn’t move his arm. Every line of his body radiated exhaustion. “Yeah, thanks, that … makes me feel better.”

“Let me see you, man,” Alex insisted.

Ben’s arm fell down alongside the sofa, his hand thunking on the floor, and Alex’s mouth dropped open as his heart sank.

“Whoa. Downstairs, now!” Alex said. Ben’s face was pale, even for a vampire, and the skin around his eyes was smudged with such dark circles he looked as though he’d gone ten rounds in a boxing ring. Alex helped him up and got a shoulder under his armpit. “Where’s Janni?”

“She got … called in to work,” Ben mumbled.

“And you let her go?” Alex hit the button for the elevator, because the stairs were out of the question.

“I didn’t feel this bad … two hours ago.”

“No? How did you feel two hours ago?” The doors opened, and they stepped in.

“Little dizzy, headachy, winded. Like I’d run a long way.”

“You tell anyone?” Alex asked.

The elevator finished its descent, and they exited into the basement. Alex half-carried Ben to an office chair, where he collapsed, while Megan stared in horror at his condition. Michelle made a precipitous escape, muttering something about rabbits.

“And be subjected … to more needles? No.”

Dammit, this almost looked like what Idna had, from what Ostheim had told him. “Hell, Ben, you should have said something.”

Ben’s head had sunk to his chest, and he looked up at Alex without moving anything but his eyes. “Hey, Alex, I don’t feel so hot.”

“Yes, very useful,” Doc Allen said, coming over with a stethoscope. He listened for a moment. “Huh.”

“What does that mean?” Ben asked.

“Your heart rate is elevated. Also, you’re breathing, and your lungs sound terrible, not to put too fine a point on it.” Allen spun on his heel. “You’re not going to like this, but I need another blood sample.”

Ben’s eyes slid shut. “Fuck me.”

“How much of what have you had to eat today?” Allen asked, stripping the packaging off a syringe.

“Pint of blood at breakfast. That’s it. Wasn’t very hungry.”

“Little poke.”

Ben’s claws extended, and he bared and clenched his teeth, which had grown bigger. But not as big as Alex had expected, and he had no idea if this meant that their pet hacker was getting jaded to his needle phobia or if he just didn’t have the energy to react anymore.

Allen swore. “You should have eaten more this morning. There’s not enough blood in your veins to keep a friggin’ cocker spaniel alive.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll make do, but you need to have at least another pint, if not two. Three if you can handle it.”

Alex took the hint and called Chambliss, who appeared a few minutes later with a huge mug of warmed blood and handed it to Ben. Ben cupped his hands around it and sipped slowly, and his color came back after a few minutes.

“Better?” Alex asked.

“Little bit, yeah.” He took a longer swallow. “Maybe I was just hungry. And tired. Haven’t gotten much sleep this week.”

Alex didn’t believe that for a second. He didn’t know from vampires, but Ben looked far from healthy, although he was better now that he’d had more nourishment. “You should rest.”

“Mmm. Would rather have something to do.”

“Haven’t got anything right now, unless you want to be poked and prodded some more.”

“Will it help?”

Alex glanced over at Doc Allen, who was frowning over a microscope with a cigarette dangling, forgotten, from his mouth. “Doc?”

“Bone marrow sample would be handy,” Allen said.

Ben’s renewed color drained from his face. “I know what that entails, and I’d rather not.”

“Just not sure what we’re dealing with here, and the more information I have the better. Wouldn’t mind doing a lumbar puncture either.”

“I’d mind.” Ben emptied the mug and set it on the desk.

“I know. Get some rest; I’ll work with what I’ve got for now,” the Doc said.

The hospital bed had been pushed over to one side of the room, and someone had changed the bloody linens since Ben had wrecked it. He got up carefully from the chair and made it over without assistance, although Alex stood ready to help if he needed to.

Ben sank onto the mattress with a sigh that sounded like relief. “Someone should call Janni …”

“She’s not answering her phone,” Megan said. Of course she was on top of this. She always was. “I’ll keep trying.”

“Yeah, she turns it off when she’s working …” And Ben was out.

“You’re gonna want to see this,” Doc Allen said to Alex, gesturing at the computer screen, where Ben’s DNA sequence was up.

“Gaps. Shit. Dr. McFoucher!” Alex hollered.

Michelle poked her head into the room, noted where Ben was, and walked over to the work station. “That’s not good.”

“Tell me it’s not the same thing Idna had.”

“If I said that, I’d be lying and you’d fire me.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It must have been transmitted to him when we—” She stopped awkwardly, not wanting to finish the sentence.

“You think? I thought that procedure was supposed to cure it,” Alex said, with some heat.

“It did, in the rabbits, but you know as well as I do that results aren’t necessarily the same across species.” She rocked back and forth on the heels of her sensible shoes. “And Ostheim didn’t let us wait to see the long-term effect. For all I know, those rabbits we thought we cured are dead now. I wonder how Idna’s doing.”

Alex didn’t care how Idna was doing. “But whatever this is doesn’t affect werewolves or humans, right? Strictly a vampire thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Then if we get rid of the vampirism, werewolf healing and nanotech will take care of it, logically.” Alex cracked his knuckles. “Let’s get to work. Quickly, people.”

O O O

“Ugh, not that,” McFoucher said to the room at large a couple of hours after a working lunch. “Cross cryonics off the list. Might have cured it, but I couldn’t save the eyes, and the toes and ears fell off. None of these nanoretroviruses worked either.”

Two of them had killed the rabbits outright, just boom, dead—which might come in handy sometime, she thought. The other two had induced the same rage state that the first one had, although at differing levels of intensity. One, in fact, had caused the wolfy rabbit’s heart to literally erupt out of its chest in a messy and spectacular explosion.

“Any luck with starfish regeneration?” she asked Jarrett.

“Not so much.” He sipped from his fifth cup of coffee, which he’d dolloped a generous measure of scotch into, and she wondered where he was putting it all. “Still don’t know what the mechanism is.”

Janni burst into the room. “Where is he? Damn traffic.” She caught sight of Lockwood sleeping across the room, and was over there so fast McFoucher wondered if she’d levitated. “Ben?”

His eyes blinked open. “Job done with, honey? How’d it go?”

“It was just a luncheon. What’s wrong with you?” Janni sat on the bed and gathered him into her arms.

“Tired. Weak. Dizzy.” He relaxed into her. “Aches, but better now you’re here. Cold. I hate being cold.”

“Cold? But you’re—” She stopped, alarmed. “He’s burning up.”

Doc Allen stood with a determined expression. “Okay, that’s it. Bone marrow and spinal tap, now.”

McFoucher decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Considering their history, being in the same room with Lockwood when people were stabbing him with needles seemed ill-advised. “I need more rabbits.”

O O O

Janni’s heart pounded against her ribs while Doc Allen worked. Ben barely reacted to the needles—his arm tightened around her waist and he sucked in a deep breath, but otherwise he was nonresponsive. “Oh, sweetie,” Janni murmured. She’d almost rather see a panic attack, because at least that would be normal.

“’S all right …”

No, it wasn’t, she could tell from the way everyone else was acting. “I feel so useless right now,” she said into his hair.

“Not useless. Keep me grounded. Gotta reason—” He didn’t finish, and after a second she realized he’d fallen asleep in the middle of Doc Allen sucking bone marrow out of his hip with the biggest damn syringe she’d ever seen.

Allen looked at her through a wreath of cigarette smoke. “You are not useless, young lady.” He pulled the needle out and put a bandage on. “I’m fairly certain he’s fighting as hard as he is because of you.”

“This is fighting? It doesn’t look like fighting.”

“Trust me.” He gestured at a mug full of blood, with a straw of all things, on the table beside the bed. “And if you could get him to eat, that’d be great. It’ll help him keep his strength up.” He left to go do whatever it was he was going to do with the spinal fluid and bone marrow.

“Ben. Time for dinner.”

He barely stirred. “Just a few more minutes.…”

“Now, sweetie. Come on, for me.” Using whatever hold she had on him was shameless, but if it kept him alive, she didn’t care.

“Fine.…” His eyes cracked open, and she held the straw to his lips. He raised his head, but only swallowed a few times before falling back asleep, and surely that wasn’t enough to make a difference?

Janni slipped beneath the covers, wrapping arms and legs around Ben’s shoulders and thighs and stroking his hair. “Don’t you dare die on me. Not now.”

The tracery of veins in her wrist caught her attention, and she wondered for a brief second if …

She squashed the idea as idiotic. It circled back around and came at her again.

Blood straight from the vein was different from bagged blood.

Janni remembered that Renee had catered a charity blood drive, and that the bags had an anticoagulant in them. She wondered what sort of effect that would have on a vampire, especially a sick one, and decided it probably wouldn’t be good.

The place where Ben had broken the railing off had left a jagged edge. His back was to the rest of the room, since Doc Allen had needed to do the lumbar puncture from that side, so the others wouldn’t see her or stop her. Before she could think much about it—because she knew that if she engaged her brain instead of her heart she wouldn’t do it—she sliced her wrist open on the metal and put the gushing cut over Ben’s mouth.

For a second, nothing happened, and she thought this might have been a terrible mistake she’d have a hard time explaining to the others. Then he swallowed, once, twice, and settled into steady drinking.

O O O

Ben was in the midst of a dream where rivers of ambrosia flowed down his throat, and Janni’s scent filled his nostrils, her arms wrapping him in a warm cocoon. Then he realized it wasn’t a dream, and his eyes snapped open and he spat her wrist out and shoved her arm away. “Gyah!” His head was pillowed on her stomach and he stared up at her in consternation, hyperventilating. “Janni!”

“I’m not losing you now,” she said, examining the quadruple holes his fangs had left in her wrist, top and bottom. “So whatever I can do—”

“I could have killed you,” he whispered fiercely.

She scoffed as she grabbed Kleenex off the bedside stand and held them against the blood trickling from her wrist. “Like I would have let that happen. I’m not even woozy.” Her fingers roamed through his hair. “I had a theory about the bagged blood, and I was around all these scientist types, so I thought I’d test it. Turns out I was right.”

“Son of a bitch.” He closed his eyes. “Please don’t do it again. Please. I know you said once that you’d willingly open your veins for me, but I never took it
literally
.”