henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (16 page)

“Me, too, apparently,” he said as he swept the contaminated lemon wedges into the trash bin. “So what’s got you so preoccupied? New guy?” I shook my head. “Girl? I don’t judge, doll.”

“I’d take either, but lately, I haven’t had time for romance,” I said. My heart was pounding. I had the ridiculous urge to call Neha, which wasn’t going to happen. She’d lost all rights to any data about side effects. Sean, though. I could tell Sean. Test it on Sean, see if it worked with vampire blood.

I popped an Altoid in my mouth and let the sharp bite of the mint overpower the salty taste of blood.

“There’s always time for romance.”

“Hey, how was your date with Javier?” I asked, mostly to change the subject. It worked. Max babbled on, and I tried to figure out how this newfound ability might help me get my immortality back.

CHAPTER 17

F
ive hours later, I pulled my car into a spot on the street a block from the lab. I saw Neha’s SUV parked not far away. That meant she was here, which was a relief since she hadn’t answered her phone for the past two hours as I surreptitiously texted between tables, asking her if she’d learned anything new from the backups of Ray’s computer files.

I turned down the alley. The security door to the lab was open. Blood curdled in my veins. That door never got left open: Neha wasn’t that careless. Fear buzzed through me. I wished I had a gun. I wished I was a fucking immortal and not a weak, fleshy human who could easily be killed by something lurking in the lab.

I steeled myself and took another tentative step toward the lab.

Something slammed into me from behind. I hit the pavement hard. Pain exploded all over my body. Air evacuated my lungs and I struggled to breathe. Oxygen came back to me in fits and spurts. I’d slammed my palms down first, attempting to catch myself, and gravel tore into the tender flesh of my hands. My knees burned. My purse had flown out of my hand.

I started to get up but my body protested. A growl, low and dangerous, filled the air. My throat tightened and my heart slammed into my ribs. The thrum of blood buzzed in my ears. I saw a wolf the size of a small car yards away from me, razor-sharp teeth bared in my direction. It had knocked me over and then leapt in front of me. It snapped its jaws with ferocity.

I weighed my options. The fact that it wasn’t tearing my face off meant that staying down was probably wise. And then a crash came from inside the lab, followed by a high-pitched scream, and lying in the dirt hoping this would all blow over stopped being an option.

The wolf’s yellow eyes bored into me. I swallowed my panic.

I pressed my palms to the ground and winced in pain as I got to my knees. The wolf growled in warning and stepped closer.

“Who are you?” I asked it. It froze, clearly confused by my reaction. Good. Confusion meant it still had some humanity in there. It could be reasoned with. Then it snapped its jaws again and stepped closer, growling louder. Okay, so maybe reasoning wasn’t the way to go.

I glanced at my black purse, wallet and lipstick spilling out onto the ground. My Taser was in there, but it wouldn’t do me a damn bit of good from this distance. That was exactly why I preferred jeans to my work slacks: women’s slacks rarely had adequate pockets.

I pretended to pat myself down for damage and surreptitiously slid the wine key out of the shallow pocket these pants did have, flicking it open in a practiced move with my thumb and doing my best to keep it concealed. My hands throbbed and the wine key felt slick in my hand. Whether it was slick with sweat or blood, I couldn’t tell.

The wolf stalked closer until its breath was hot against my face. It smelled like rotten meat. I tried not to think about the implications of that.

“Hey, doggie,” I said, my voice shaky. “Down, doggie.”

It snapped its jaws in my face. Every cell in my body wanted to flee. I clenched my hand around the cool metal and drove the pointy end of the wine screw into its muzzle. The wolf screamed, a mix of human and animal sounds that shook my bones. I jumped backward. It shook the wine key loose, recovering too fast. I’d barely made it three feet when it pounced.

I froze. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, which was just as well given that a reel of memories ninety years long would take a while. A wave of regret crashed into me. I’d made a damn good vampire and now I was going to die human and weak, taken out by a werewolf created by a mad scientist who’d wanted the same thing I wanted: to be something other than human. It was ironic. Or maybe just tragic.

A blur of white flashed in front of me and the wolf flew backwards. It hit the pavement with a wet, sickening thud and stopped moving. The blur resolved and Sean stood between me and the wolf on the ground, his back to me, shaking out his hand out like it had a cramp.

“You okay?” he asked without turning. I nodded until I realized he might not catch the motion.

“I’m okay,” I confirmed, stepping up beside him. The knees of my work pants were torn and ruined and I could see blood where skin used to be. My hands were much the same. But otherwise, I was intact.

The wolf’s fur faded, turning to skin as the its body convulsed and twisted, shrinking and shaking. Bones shifted and re-formed until the creature became human once more. It wasn’t Jake, and I didn’t recognize him. “Is he dead?”

Sean shook his head. “Heart is low but steady. The two in the lab are dead, however.”

“Oh, shit, Neha!” I raced back toward the open door before Sean’s words really clicked and was confronted with one of the bodies. It was collapsed halfway on top of a desk. He was naked and his skin was covered in angry purple bruises. He wasn’t moving.

My shoes crunched on broken glass and debris. The lab was completely trashed, like someone had tossed Thor’s hammer around and then set off a few bombs for good measure. Glass and metal littered the floor. A broken laptop with a cracked screen had fallen off a worktable. The small storage fridge they kept out front had been torn out of the wall, opened, and tossed into Neha’s workstation, which had been reduced to scattered pieces of broken lab equipment. The air smelled like bleach and corrosive acid.

Neha stood in the doorway from the kitchen-area-slash-break-room, holding an ice pack to her forehead. Blood had trickled down from her hairline and down her cheek before it dried. Her hair was mussed and she had no shoes on over her nylons, but she was alive. Relief swept over me at the sight of her alive. I guess part of me still gave a damn about her despite everything.

In the room behind her, I saw another body, prone on the floor and completely still. The third attacker’s body.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Three big guys showed up and demanded more of Ray’s wolf drug,” she said, her voice shaking. She limped over to a chair and took a seat. “Didn’t have it. They didn’t like that.” She pointed her chin toward the wrecked lab. I rolled the body over that had fallen over the front table. It wasn’t Jake, either. I was weirdly relieved about that, though I didn’t know him any better than the man in front of me. I doubted I’d recognize the dark-skinned guy lying on the floor in the kitchen-slash-break-room, either. I sincerely hoped that these men, along with Jake, were the sum total of Ray’s lab rats. The last thing we needed were more increasingly enraged werewolves in need of booster shots. I wondered if Jake knew these guys, if he had been part of the attack. Didn’t werewolves in stories always work in packs?

“Are you okay?” I asked Neha. Her nylons were torn and bruises were flowering on her cheek and legs.

“I’ll live,” she said. “I think one of my ribs is broken, and my ankle is twisted. Goddamn heels. But nothing that won’t heal. Thankfully your friend was here or I’d be dead by now.” Her eyes flicked to someone behind me and I turned to see Sean. He’d brought the wolf man who was still alive inside the lab and was now laying him down on an empty work surface. The lab equipment it used to hold was broken and ruined on the floor beneath it.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Sean.

He smiled wickedly. “Satisfying my curiosity, of course, my dear Henrietta. I saw the lab in your blood. I wanted to see it in person.”

I swore. Of course. I’d said it myself: blood was like an HDMI cable for vampires. They could see into your head. Depending on how good a person was at guarding their thoughts, vampires could rifle through their memories while they drank. He’d found the lab because I’d shown him where it was by letting him suck on my neck. God only knew what else he’d pulled out of the exchange. It was careless of me. I knew better than that. It was another lapse of mortality. Vampires could control what they sent through the blood but mortals couldn’t.

“I’m such a fucking idiot,” I said, massaging my forehead. I caught a glimpse of my left palm. It was red and black with blood and road grit, the top layer of skin scraped away in places.

“Never an idiot,” Sean said. “Careless about the consequences of your actions, perhaps. Which is how you got yourself into your current unfortunate situation.”

I ignored that. He’d never understood. I had taken care of his fledgling from the 1950s, a young man named Ryan who had gone mad with grief over the death of his twin brother. Sean had been able to save Ryan, but not the sibling, and Ryan hadn’t lasted long. Sean had left the moment Ryan got “difficult,” insisting that he could only offer people a chance at immortality and not be held responsible for those who could not endure. When Kate had crossed my path, I’d seen some of Ryan in her. And some of myself. I’d wanted to save her from a similar fate. But Kate, like Ryan, wasn’t ever going to thrive as a vampire and in the end, she made her own choices.

Compassion had gotten me into my current situation. That, and a stupid desire for friends that I regretted now. I’d probably had it right when I chose the lone wolf routine, to use a very bad turn of phrase. But even immortals needed to connect to others sometimes. It was why people flocked to Cazimir’s factory and other places like it around the world. I’d met Kate and seen a chance to make a connection, and then extended that to Neha. It had been stupid and reckless, I could see that now, but at the time, I’d only wanted to feel less alone.

But there was no point in explaining that to Sean.

He slapped a hand down on the chest of the nearly dead wolf man. “Did not expect werewolves, though. That’s new. I was quite certain they were a myth.”

I ignored him and turned to Neha. “Why’d they trash the lab?”

“At first, they wanted to find the drugs they were convinced I was keeping from them. When they didn’t, they resorted to smashing things. Including me, into the wall. I would say increased violent tendencies are a side effect of whatever Ray gave them. Or maybe they were just fucking assholes.” She shook her head and adjusted the ice pack. “The idiots destroyed the server room and any chance I had of recovering Ray’s work. Our data is lost forever now. All of it.”

My body tensed. “All of it?” I asked.

She knew what I meant and hesitated, looking from Sean and me and then back to the floor littered with her smashed equipment. “All of it. Even the Cure.”

I hissed out a breath, my emotions veering wildly from side to side. On one hand, the lack of the Immortality Cure in the world was probably a good thing. Not for the Weepers or future Kates, but for the vampire species as a whole. On the other hand, without a Cure, there could be no antidote. There could be no vials of magic to trade to some regretful vampire for immortality.

“Well, then, all that’s left is to clean up, and pretend none of this ever happened,” Sean said. His tone was cheery, but Neha understood his meaning. She leapt to her feet, ready to flee or fight. Terror lit up her eyes. She might have wronged me, but no one deserved Sean’s wrath.

“You aren’t killing Neha,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. I folded my arms over my chest and stepped in front of her, as if something that futile could stop a vampire from barreling through me and breaking her neck. “She just said the Cure was destroyed. There’s no reason to damage anything else.”

Sean’s smile was vicious and he bared his fangs. “She might remember it. Human brains are wondrous things.”

“She won’t,” I said.

Sean frowned. “She must die, Henri. She’s found a way to destroy our—my kind.” The correction hit me like a slap. “I cannot allow her to repeat the experiment.”

“Then why did you save her?” I asked, my patience fraying at the seams.

“I had to make sure the Cure was destroyed before I ended her. You understand.”

“It’s gone, Sean. She doesn’t have the formulas in her mind. It’s too complex,” I said, the words burning in my mouth like acid. I itched for an Altoid, but they were in my purse outside. “Leave her alone.”

Sean stared at me, eyes like penetrating lasers. My heart did its best hummingbird impression, but I forced myself to hold his gaze. If he wanted to rip my throat out, he was going to look me in the eye while he did it.

No one moved. The air in the lab was ice-cold. Neha’s breath was loud behind me. I could almost feel her frantic heartbeat in the air, beating rapidly in time with mine.

I didn’t let myself break eye contact with Sean.
Don’t you fucking dare
, I thought. But Sean had never been much of a mind reader without his fangs in my neck.

“Henri.” Not a plea. A warning. I stiffened and folded my arms over my chest.

“Not your call, Sean. She wronged
me
. That means I decide her fate.”

“If I bring her to Cazimir—”

Neha squeaked. I gave her a funny look. “You know Cazimir?” I asked. She had gotten other vampire test subjects, I realized, and she’d lived with her vampire girlfriend for two years. Kate hadn’t wanted to be part of the vampire world, but that didn’t mean she was totally ignorant of it.

“Of him,” Neha said.

I considered. Kate had never told me who had turned her. Only that she would have died if he hadn’t saved her by giving her immortality. Someone had attacked her and left her for dead, and the vampire had come along and given her the choice to live by being undead. Come to think of it, hadn’t I just heard another tale of a savior vampire swooping in to save an injured girl?