Moonlight Medicine: Inoculation (12 page)

“Are you just getting home?”

Evelyn flinched at the sound of his voice and jerked her head towards him then relaxed again. “David, yeah, I…it’s a long story, and I don’t want to get into it right now, I need sleep, but I’ll tell you later. Did you guys have fun last night?”

Memories of the previous night’s events flashed through his mind and guilt made his chest feel achy and tight. He swallowed hard and tried not to let his thoughts show on his face. “Yeah, we did, maybe a little too much fun. I haven’t drunk like that it a long time. Now I remember why.”

Evelyn’s smile made her look like she had toothache. “Oh, well I’m glad that Kim had a nice birthday.”

There was an awkward lull in the conversation then Evelyn glanced at the dining room table which was piled high with assorted boxes and bags of food from Kim’s apartment. “I got a little work on Kim’s food done last night too. I wrote you a note, but basically there’s a new spreadsheet on your computer in the public documents file, and I got through everything in the pile on the left.”

“Great. Er…any standouts?”

Evelyn yawned noisily. “I don’t know, maybe, anyways, we can talk more when I’ve had a nap.” Her eyes flitted up the stairs. “Is Kim up yet?”

“Ah no, I don’t think that she’ll be up for a while yet.”

“Hmmm. Well, goodnight.”

Evelyn turned her back to David and headed up the stairs. He almost called her back, but then asked himself what more he wanted to say to her right then.
Do I really want to confess to her about kissing Kim last night?
No. Not now. Not days before the confrontation with the Vulke.
In fact, he had to put the whole complicated mess out of his head and focus on tracking down the oral source of the mutant infection and preparing for the meeting with Roberto the next day. He had done substantial research on war strategy and tactics on the internet, but none of it seemed feasible or appropriate for the kind of fight he was anticipating.

One of the most difficult hitches of the whole situation was that, even though the strays were now part of the Vulke army, David couldn’t get past the idea that they were innocent victims in all this, so to kill them outright just didn’t sit well with him. The more he mulled things over, the more he felt that a similar sort of distraction to the one he’d used against Christoff was the way to go. If they could draw the strays away from the main fight, then they could deal with them separately from the Vulke who, at least on some level, knew what they were getting into. David’s mind went to using food, likely deer carcasses, to distract the strays, but they had to somehow appear in the middle of the fight so that the Vulke couldn’t prepare for them, counteract them, or negate them. David hadn’t worked out the details, but he was counting on the meeting with Roberto to be fruitful in that respect.

David brought the toast and coffee out to the dining room table, opened the laptop, and grabbed a cereal box from the pile of Kim’s food. After about ten items he took a break to check his e-mail and found that four other packs had provided lists from their strays. He shot off an e-mail to all of them, asking if the other strays’ homes had been broken into and ransacked like Kim’s had. Afterwards, he briefly glanced over the lists and noted a lot of the same food items, bread, milk, butter, cheese, flour, sugar, etc., but as yet no matching brands. Staring at the words on the computer screen was making his head hurt, so, rubbing his eyes, he went back to picking through Kim’s food.

The boring and tedious work left plenty of time for his mind to wander. He thought back to his kiss with Kim the previous night and his heart sped up, but then his thoughts drifted to the first time that Evelyn kissed him in the hotel room in Sault St. Marie. With that memory, pain surged in his chest and spread to his throat and stomach. Others had accepted what he was before that moment, but Evelyn had been the first person to forgive him for the monster that he felt he’d become. Kim didn’t even know half the things that David had done. He hadn’t told her about James or Tommy, or any of the details of his fight with Christoff. In retrospect he saw just how wrong it was for him to have kissed Kim, to have toyed with her emotions when she didn’t really know him or what she might be getting herself into by starting a relationship with him. He had thought that a relationship with her would be so much simpler than one with Evie, but really, he was the one tainting everything.

This epiphany was a rude awakening and it shook David to his core. In all his efforts to not become the monster that was now a part of him, he had become a different kind of monster, one who appeared safe and kind on the outside, but still wreaked destruction.  A cure for the werewolf virus, his holy grail, wouldn’t change that, the damage had been done. Still, he felt a strong connection to both women and a strong desire to protect both of them, but he hated to think about how much of that might be due more to instinct than human emotion. They were a part of his pack after all, so his attraction to them now could all be a sick reflection of his possessive Wolfkin nature.

David chastised himself for letting his thoughts turn so dark and brooding. Nothing mattered more right now than saving as many innocent lives as possible, and that included Evelyn’s and Kim’s lives. He was responsible for Evelyn’s involvement in the Wolfkin subculture and for her infection, and although he wasn’t directly responsible for Kim’s infection, he was now responsible for her as her Alpha, and therefore anything that might happen to her would be on his head. He had to shield them as best he could from what was coming in just a precious few more days, but he wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to. Evelyn would not be ordered to stay away from the fight, not by him or Roberto or Clem or anyone else, but there was a slight possibility that he could guilt her into staying back in the lab by telling her that she was the only one capable of finding a cure. It was also possible that he might be able to convince Kim in a similar fashion by telling her that Evelyn needed her.

David hated himself for thinking such things because they we conniving and condescending, and he respected both Kim and Evelyn more than that. Additionally, if things went poorly during the battle, Evelyn and Kim would be all alone. They would be hunted down by the Vulke and slaughtered, or worse, forced to turn their research of
Languorem luporem
towards making the Vulke stronger or able to change whenever they wanted. David knew that Evelyn would rather die, but what if they had her mother and father or her sister and nieces and nephews? No, Evelyn wouldn’t let it come to that. He thought about how she had prepared the syringe of euthanasia solution to kill herself if he had lost the challenge two years ago. She would end herself before the Vulke got the chance to torture her and her family, and he wouldn’t be there to stop it.

20

Evelyn was dead to the world until well after dark, and it took her a long time to focus enough to remember the last twenty-four hours. She groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. In the dimness she could just make out Kim’s empty bed. Though Evelyn wanted nothing more than to escape into the oblivion of sleep once again, she knew that she had to get up and get ready to go back into the lab. Even before that, she had to tell David and Kim what happened at the lab with Melissa. Evelyn made brief and uninspired efforts to wash her face and pull back her hair. She dressed in scrubs, only technically a step up from her pajamas, and went downstairs to look for Kim and David.

She found Kim reading articles on the couch looking a little under the weather and David at the dining room table on his laptop. It appeared, from the lack of piled foodstuffs on the dining room table, that he was able to get through logging in Kim’s food into the spreadsheet. Kim looked up at Evelyn when she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Did you have a nice nap?”

“Yeah, sort of. Did you guys have a good time last night?”

Kim flicked her eyes to David who had turned his head towards the girls when they began talking. “Yeah, I had a really good time, but I won’t be drinking like that again for a long time.”

Evelyn didn’t want to beat around the bush with small talk, so she jumped right into the deep end without any water wings. “I think one of the vet students accidentally infected herself with
Languorem luporem
.”

“What?”

“How?”

“She mixed up one of David’s blood samples with one of her own samples and then broke a glass tube full of it and cut herself.”

David cursed violently to himself and Kim sat up straighter on the couch. “How could this happen? What did you tell her?”

Evelyn was tired of standing, so she plunked herself down into one of the armchairs before continuing. “Freak accident really, but it might be kind of a not so bad thing.”

David’s face was full of disbelief. “How could it
not
be a bad thing?”

“Well, we caught the infection within around twenty-four hours and I’ve started her on an antiviral regiment. With luck the virus hadn’t had time to integrate into her DNA and the antivirals will prevent it from doing so. And if we are super lucky, the antivirals will help her immune system to clear the virions from her body. If we aren’t lucky, the virus will already be a part of her DNA and we’ll have another new Wolfkin to worry about in a few days, but at least we’ll know that DNA mixing occurs in twenty-four hours or less.”

Kim nodded. “And if there isn’t viral integration already, then this will be a good test of the antivirals we plan to use against the virions in the bloodstream, right?”

“Right.”

David still looked dubious, but Kim went on. “Did you already test her blood for virions and her DNA for viral sequences?”

Evelyn wanted to ask Kim if it looked like she had spent twenty-four hours in the lab without any sleep, but restrained herself. “No, I haven’t had the chance yet.”

Kim got up off the couch and headed for the stairs. “We have a lot to do tonight.”

“Ya, but let me eat something first,” Evelyn said as Kim darted up the stairs.

“Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Evelyn rose wearily and headed towards the kitchen, stopping at the dining room table. “Have you gotten lists from other strays yet? Are there any matches?”

“There may be a few possibilities, but two of the other strays’ homes were also ransacked, so that’s made things difficult. Some of the generic items that didn’t come in a box or bag like fruits and vegetables could have all come from the same source, but we’d have to check with grocery store suppliers to know anything for sure. I had Kim look over the other lists, but she didn’t see anything that rang any immediate bells. I’ll have her take a look at my possibilities in the morning.”

“Yeah, but we’re running out of time. Even if we source the food, I don’t think that we’ll have the time to track the Vulke through it and prevent further contamination before the fighting starts.”

“Probably not.”

“Then you should let this go and concentrate on strategies with Roberto. Isn’t the meeting today?”

David checked his watch. “Uh huh. He should be picking me up here pretty soon.”

“Well, let us know how it went, text us at the lab, or send an e-mail or something. Let me know what we can do to help prepare, how we’re planning on dealing with the strays, and…in fact, maybe I should just go too.”

“No, no, we have to figure out whether that girl is infected or not as soon as possible. You need to be in the lab.”

Evelyn sighed and nodded. “You’re right, but I gotta eat something before we head out.”

*

Evelyn and Kim left for the lab about twenty minutes later, and David was grateful that they left before Roberto arrived. Locking up the condo, David got into the back seat of the black sedan with Roberto. He looked immaculate, but dark circles and bloodshot eyes betrayed his serene exterior. As the car pulled away from the condo and sped towards the expressway David spoke. “Did you get my e-mail about setting a trap to draw off the strays?”

Roberto didn’t turn his head from the window. “Mmmm.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think that this is something we need to discuss with everyone present.”

David was irritated, but didn’t press the issue. “So who’s going to be at this meeting?”

Roberto finally looked at him. “We have received word that there is a challenge location in Peru, and the Alonso will be defending their own territory there, so only members of the Wahya, Amaruq, and Inali will be at this meeting. I’m surprised that Evelyn chose not to come.”

“I assume that she told you about the possible infection in the lab. She’s dealing with that right now.”

“I see.”

“Where’s the meeting going to take place? The casino?”

“Yes. I believe that we are meeting in the concert hall. We have been able to muster most members of both packs, so around one-hundred Wolfkin should be there today.”

Roberto leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, but David persisted. “Have we heard anything more from the Vulke, or been able to track down any information on where they’re keeping the strays?”

“We have some leads, but nothing solid. I promise that I will disclose all that I know at the meeting, and that you will have a chance to ask questions and speak your mind as well. For now, please just let me rest.”

David tried to curb his frustration because he knew that Roberto was not just responsible to Evelyn and him, or even to the North American packs, but was trying to help all the packs around the world in this war with the Vulke. They were lucky that Roberto was here in person to give them support, but at the same time Roberto’s presence raised the fur on his hackles. David questioned whether he would have more control of the situation in Roberto’s absence, but then considered his relationship with Zachary and Caroline. Strained as things were, David decided that he likely had more influence in events with Roberto there, unless of course Roberto was as much of a bureaucrat as Caroline.

21

The meeting was big, impressive, and frustrating. David was stunned by the diversity of Wolfkin in the room, ranging from those dressed like they were at a business seminar to those dressed like they were at a rock concert, but the ages of those present were all within the range of seventeen to fifty. There were very few familiar faces in the crowd: Bill, the Amaruq who had ferried them over to Canada the first time they had gone to see The Scribe, Madeline, the feisty Amaruq Beta, and of course Caroline and Zachary. Zachary stood on the wing of the stage gazing down upon the crowd like a king surveying his realm with Caroline down on the main floor just in front of him.