henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (11 page)

Of course, that attitude made life hard for humans who shacked up with vampires. Cooking was revolting to their undead paramours, so they were less likely to do it, and it became that much easier to stick to a diet of string cheese and crackers, with a side of drugs, alcohol, and vampire blood. Yet another reason humans and vampires would never be truly compatible. The only couple I’d ever seen make it work long-term were Lark and Thomas. That thought made the grease in my stomach churn uneasily, and I crumpled my wrapper while trying very hard not to picture the pus-filled boils on Thomas’s dying form.

Lark and Thomas had loved each other for two decades before Thomas was turned, and he’d borne no animosity toward Lark for doing the deed that I’d ever seen. He may not have been keen on murder, but that didn’t mean he regretted being a vampire. I couldn’t picture him wanting the Cure and going back to mundane mortality, and all the problems it had brought Lark and Thomas as couple. No matter what his murderer thought they’d been doing, they hadn’t been trying to do him a favor.

Instead of voicing these thoughts, I continued on the path of small talk.

“Isn’t the Factory big enough to handle some minor cooking for the mortal residents?” I asked.

“Sure, if you want to do it yourself, in the daytime, and deal with the bitching. Trust me, it’s easier to eat out whenever possible.”

I believed it. No one whines like a vampire forced to deal with some minor unpleasantness. You’d think immortality would toughen people up, but oddly the opposite tends to be true.

Ray had lived in an apartment complex in Bellevue, not far from Factoria Mall. The building was brown with orange accents. It was too boxy for my taste. I parked in a visitor’s parking space and then pulled a Mariners baseball cap out of my backseat, handing it to Aidan, who looked at it like it was a poisonous snake.

“Cover your hair. Blue is too memorable.”

“Where are we?” he asked, but he put the hat on.

“Remember the body I had your master incinerate?” Aidan rolled his eyes at the word “master.” “This is where he lived.”

I hit the elevator call button with my elbow and inside, I put on a pair of latex gloves. Then I handed a pair to Aidan. “Put these on.”

He didn’t argue. “And why are we here?”

“His lab was robbed the night he was killed, and the killer took several vials of the Cure, which means his murder is probably connected to Thomas’s.”

Ray’s apartment was a little more horror movie fanboy than I’d expected. His walls were covered in posters for werewolf movies. A life-size cutout of a werewolf was propped up in the nook that contained his bedroom and bathroom doors. He had an entire shelf of DVDs that were all werewolf-related media and an entire bookshelf full of titles like
Full Moon
and
Wolf Walker
. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a werewolf-shaped pillow on his bed.

I probably should have expected the unchecked werewolf fanaticism. After all, what kind of person wants to bring a horror movie monster to life? One who’s completely, utterly obsessed.

I headed for the bedroom. His double bed was unmade, but messier on one side, with an e-reader on the nightstand next to a glass of water. On the wall in front of the bed was a mural of a forest at night, black trees over a purple and blue sky, and a big, bright full moon in the corner. It was pretty, in a way, if you didn’t imagine mindless wolf people racing through the trees.

There were two empty glass terrariums on the dresser. I remembered Neha mentioning he’d had rats, but that was apparently a thing of the past.

I opened the nightstand. It was full of the detritus of emptied pockets: lighters, coins, receipts and business cards. His dresser was surprisingly well organized (socks on the top left, undies on the right). Same with his closet. I had only ever seen him in lab coats and t-shirts, but he’d owned his fair share of nice collared shirts and ties. There were no guns or suspicious secret boxes in the back of his closet. His bedroom was a standard bedroom with clothes and blankets.

“Guy’s a fan of monster movies, huh?” Aidan observed. He was standing in the open kitchen, looking at one of the B movie posters on the wall.

“Something like that,” I said. “See anything weird?”

Aidan shrugged. “I live with a vampire in an old factory. My baseline for weird is a little higher than usual.”

I laughed and then clamped my lips shut. I did not want to like the human pet. I did not want to enjoy his company. People like Aidan go one of two ways: dead or undead. And either way, we were never going to be friends.

“I will say it doesn’t look like a scientist’s place,” he said, leaning on the counter. “I mean, not the way I’d picture.”

Aidan was right. Ray’s apartment was all movie buff, zero pharmacological chemist. No microscopes or telescopes, no big science textbooks or petri dishes. Not even a copy of
Cooking With Chemistry
in his meager cookbook collection. If you had to guess Ray’s line of work from the things in his apartment, pharmaceutical scientist wouldn’t make the list.

I ran my fingers over the DVD cases on the shelf. Dozens of werewolf movies. On a whim, I opened a DVD case at random. Just a DVD. I put it back on the shelf.

I opened the drawers and cabinets in his kitchen but only found cookware and the usual junk drawer full of old mail, a lease, and various bottle caps. His fridge was better stocked than mine, full of steaks and veggies and some raw chicken. It was hard to picture Ray coming from his secret lab and cooking up a meal, but apparently he had done just that. There were dirty dishes in his sink and Tupperware leftovers to prove it.

The hall closet was home to a broom, mop, and vacuum cleaner. The pantry was full of food. The bathroom was a bathroom. His medicine cabinet held a toothbrush, mouthwash, and one bottle of ibuprofen. I checked the contents and it was the usual brown pills you’d expect to find. No prescriptions. No funny-colored pills.

He didn’t even seem to have a computer. There was an empty MacBook box in his closet, but I suspected that MacBook had been the one stolen at the lab.

There was nothing nefarious. No clue as to his experiments and no obvious reason anyone would want to kill him. Which left the most obvious reason of all: whatever the killer had taken from the mini-fridge at the lab.

“Any luck?” Aidan asked. He was standing in the kitchen, examining the bottles of whiskey in a cabinet. There were some seriously high-end whiskeys in the collection. Aidan had one bottle in his hand that I knew from my bartending days retailed for five grand a bottle.

“No. Ray was neat and organized, and left zero clues behind.” I sighed. Aidan was studying the bottle like it was a puzzle. “You can take that, if you want it. I doubt anyone will know it’s gone.”

“Nah. I don’t drink anymore.” Aidan put the bottle back and gave the cabinet one last lingering glance before he closed it.

“All right, well, I think we’ve seen all there is to see here. Let’s go.”

“Where to?” Aidan asked.

I considered. Ray’s apartment had provided no leads. There was only one other place I could think to troll for clues.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the venue where Thomas was stabbed. Or back to the Factory to talk to people there. See if anyone is harboring a grudge or throwing a celebration now that Thomas is dead.”

I wished I could figure out how someone had gotten into the lab with Ray. I didn’t know Ray well, but I could imagine him trying to capitalize on selling the Cure to fund his own experiments or trying to unload the rest of his Lemondrop stock when Alana refused to touch it. But those were just theories until I had something more solid to go on.

And without any new clues, I was left spinning my wheels, and the Showbox was the only place left to check out.

I gestured to Aidan that we should go and had my hand on the doorknob when someone knocked.

T
HE THUMP
of the knock startled me and I flinched back. I shot a questioning look at Aidan, who was smirking, amused. Asshole.

I collected myself and peered through the keyhole. A buff guy in a sleeveless t-shirt stood there. He was the size of a small truck and clearly a regular at the gym with muscles like that. One of the best things about being a vampire and having preternatural speed and strength was not having to be scared of big, strong people. That was one of the things I missed most of all.

I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Truck Guy frowned. “You’re not Ray,” he said.

“Nope,” I said, folding my arms over my chest and trying to look like he didn’t intimidate me.

The guy shifted, angling to see into the apartment over my head. He was jittery, his eyes darting back and forth too quickly. I thought maybe he was high, but his pupils weren’t dilated. He looked weirdly familiar, and I strained my mind trying to think of where I might know him from. Maybe he’d been a customer at Le Poisson recently or something.

“Is Ray here?” he asked.

“He’s dead,” I said.

His bloodshot eyes jerked back to me. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Very dead,” Aidan confirmed.

“Fuck.” The guy punched the frame of the door lightly and bowed his head. When he looked back up, his eyes were yellow. Not yellow like they were jaundiced but as if the color of the iris had changed. And the pupil was now a horizontal slit, like a lizard’s. Or a wolf’s. My heart hammered at double speed and my stomach sank as I took a guess at what I was seeing. Ray hadn’t just been working on his werewolf drug in theory. He’d been testing it on people. If Neha knew he’d gotten this far, she sure as heck hadn’t mentioned it.

As if he could read my thoughts, the man growled. It rattled my bones but I stood steady, refusing to show fear. Aidan, however, carefully eased a few steps deeper into the apartment.

“Hey, cut it out.” I snapped my fingers in front of the man’s face. His eyes cleared up and his snarl morphed into a look of surprise. “Let me guess, Ray was running some kind of drug trial with you, yeah?”

He stared, trying (and failing) to look blank at this suggestion.

I sighed. “I can help you. But only if you help me, got it? I have access to his lab and I might be able to get you what you need.” It was a tenuous promise. Ray’s computer had been taken. Even if Neha could find his notes on their shared server and manage to locate samples of this drug that the killer hadn’t run off with, it was hard to say if she’d help this man. She had never been a fan of creating monsters: her goal was always to “Cure” us. But still, it was the only leverage I had.

After a second’s consideration, he said, “You a cop?”

Aidan snorted behind me. I felt much the same, and amused that it was the second time I’d been asked that in a week. “I’m not a cop,” I said. “Just a friend of Ray’s.”

The man considered me before saying, “Ray was trying to help me. He was testing something, yeah. And I need … ” He trailed off, and suddenly his face crumpled. He looked ready to burst into tears. “He’s really dead?”

“Afraid so,” I said. “Trust me, I wish that wasn’t the case.” That, at least, was very true. Ray’s death had caused me nothing but headaches and it might inadvertently lead to my own death by angry vampire.

“Shit. Without the booster … ” He shook his head. “Can I—” He started to step inside. I blocked his way, knowing that he could easily pick me up and displace me if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He may have been built like a bulldozer but he didn’t act like it. “Please. I need the booster.”

“There’s nothing like that here. Trust me, we’ve looked,” I said. I saw Aidan nodding in agreement out of the corner of my eye. I really didn’t want Cazimir knowing that the same lab that had brought the world the Immortality Cure might also have invented werewolves, so I had to end this conversation now, before Aidan got any juicy details to report back to his master. I held up my cell phone. “Give me your info. I’ll search the lab and I’ll contact you when we find what you need. Okay?”

The man opened his mouth again, maybe to protest, but he glanced from me to Aidan and seemed to figure it out. Or maybe he just realized he wasn’t getting anything else without a fight, and even though he’d clearly win in any kind of fisticuffs, he probably didn’t want the mess. He took my phone in his meaty fingers and put in his contact info before handing it back. His name was Jake. He sort of looked like a Jake. Why did that sound so familiar? When had I met a Jake? This guy looked like he lived for gyms and morning marathons, which was definitely not my scene. But if he recognized me, he wasn’t showing it, and I couldn’t figure out where I might have seen him before.

“Thanks,” he said, and walked away. I shut the door and pretended like we hadn’t been on our way out in order to give him time to get away. I didn’t want him to see us leave and decide to come back and break down the door. The longer we could keep mortal police from looking into Ray’s disappearance, the better, and nothing says foul play like a break-in.

“What the hell was that about?” Aidan asked, frowning. “Did he used to be a vampire, too? Do
you
need booster shots?”