Moonlight Medicine: Inoculation (36 page)

Evelyn stepped forward into the dining room to get a better look at the package while David glowered at her. “Evelyn, this is serious, especially if there’s a spy in the ranks.”

She bit her lower lip. David had a point. A bomb wasn’t a Vulke M.O., but it could certainly be a spy’s.
But is Roberto really sloppy enough to let a spy know where we are?
Stopping, she leaned forward to look at the address.

“Looks like Roberto’s handwriting. What’s the return address?”

David stared down at the package, mouthing the address. “Hmmm, it’s Sault Ste. Marie. Maybe Clem’s sister? But it’s definitely not Clem’s handwriting.”

“No, definitely not.” Evelyn huffed. “Well, either we open it or we don’t.”

Kim hadn’t left the kitchen, but she was just inside the doorway, listening. “Why don’t we just call Roberto and ask him if he sent it?”

Glancing at David, as Evelyn’s eye met his, she couldn’t stifle a giggle. “Man, how dumb are we?”

David battled a creeping smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just going to suggest that.”

As he pulled his cell phone from his pocket, David paced towards the kitchen and gestured Evelyn to go in ahead of him. Kim backed up a few steps, covering a smile with her hand as she and Evelyn watched David. His finger poised to dial, all of their cell phones simultaneously announced a received text. Evelyn plucked hers from her pocket and Kim picked her phone up off the kitchen table while David checked his own text.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Thanks, Roberto.”

Evelyn looked down at her own message: package for you arriving today.

*

The package contained an open, dented power bar box with two bars left in it, and a note from Roberto: Caroline’s team extracted from little girl’s home yesterday. Kim’s eyes widened when she saw the box. “Those are the ones I bought! The ones on sale, Super Power Plus Bars.”

“We have to test these bars right away! We have to know if Nicolas was telling the truth about them.”

David rubbed his chin and looked over at Kim. “Are you okay with postponing the trip to see your mom?”

With a smile that didn’t extend to her eyes, Kim nodded. “For this? Of course.”

Glancing up at the clock, Evelyn grimaced. It was only just after 2pm, hours before the lab would be safely free of students; hours of impatient waiting. “Crap. We won’t be able to get into the lab until nine at the earliest, and even then there still might be students finishing up for the night. What are we going to do until then?”

David set the box of power bars down on the table. “Well, Kim and I still need a shower from this morning’s run, so if you want to shower first, Kim, I’ll help Evie with some research on the power bars. Roberto’s probably already got people breaking down the doors of the factory, but you never know what information is going to be important. And the more information we have, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to spot any inconsistencies in Nicolas’s story.”

Evelyn nodded and Kim also bobbed her head. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time. Looks like we have an entire afternoon to kill.”

Pressing her lips together, Kim nodded then headed towards the stairs. The irony of the situation was not lost on Evelyn. They had so little time to find a cure and to figure out a strategy against the Vulke, yet at every turn they seemed to just be wasting what precious time they had.

“I’ll go get my laptop.”

Evelyn trudged down into the basement and returned to the dining room, laptop under her arm. Plugging it in and setting it up on the dining room table, she began with a Google search of the power bar company, Energinc. David sat down next to her and they both scanned the company’s webpage. In addition to power bars, they made energy drinks, energy gels, protein bars, protein drinks, and vitamins. According to the site, they had only one factory located in Duisburg, Germany, but shipped their products worldwide. Evelyn searched again for recent news stories involving Energinc, but came up empty. She sat back in her chair.

“This is ridiculous! Why hasn’t Roberto gotten us a private lab? Does he really think that I can get anywhere only being able to use a lab half a day at a time!”

“I think his resources are stretched a little thin right now, Evie. It’s not like there are just state of the art labs waiting for someone to waltz in and use them with no grant or credentials.”

“I’ve got credentials!”

“You know what I mean. And it’s not like he didn’t already build us a lab. That took months.”

Evelyn glared at him. “Do you think I don’t know that it’s my fault that we lost the Tennessee lab?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Hot tears stung her cheeks and she looked away. “You didn’t have to.”

David reached out and touched Evelyn’s shoulder. “Listen to me. None of this is anyone’s fault but the Vulke. We couldn’t know that any of this was going to happen. There was no way that we could’ve been prepared for all this. But we have to work with what we have now.”

Evelyn turned back to him. “But all we need is like an empty warehouse that we can set up a new lab in.”

“Sure. And just one PCR machine wouldn’t take like a week to get there. I hear minus eighty freezers are now on overnight delivery.”

Fire sprang up from Evelyn’s belly and threatened to spew from her mouth, but logic quelled it just in time. He was right. It would take too long to set up a new, well-equipped, functioning lab.
Damn him.

“Well, actually, you can get new minus eighty freezers overnight delivered because if one breaks down, all the samples will be lost if they aren’t transferred to another one as soon as possible…” she stuck out her tongue at him, “but I see what you’re getting at. It’s just…it’s just so
frustrating
.”

“I know.”

“And what if the Vulke are still researching
Languorem luporum
? What if they do find a way to transform at will, or…or something worse?”

“Then I know you’ll think of something to stop them.”

Lost in David’s green eyes, Evelyn tore her gaze away. “You have a lot of faith in me.”

David squeezed her shoulder. “Yeah, I do.”

*

Evelyn tried to nap around four. She figured that if she was going to whine about not having enough time in the lab, she should really be awake enough to make use of the time she did have in the lab. But even in a darkened room, and with a fairly comfortable bed, sleep would not come. The pressure of finding a cure for the Wolfkin virus was one thing, but David’s unwavering faith in her was another. On the one hand, she hoped that it wasn’t an act to keep her from giving up. On the other hand, she couldn’t bear to let him down. But in her mind the research kept spinning in circles and she felt like she was hardly any further now than she’d been two years ago.
That’s why you have to stop thinking about it twenty-four seven, Evelyn dear. But there’s so little time! The brain needs rest. Work at the lab. Relax out of the lab. Relax when the Vulke are poised to take over the world!? Don’t be so dramatic. And yes. Why beat the virus to driving yourself insane? You realize that talking to yourself is not necessarily considered sane. We’ve always talked to ourselves…Sad but true. Rest now!

Rolling over, Evelyn cleared her mind, casting out thoughts of her research, of the war, and of werewolves. It seemed like she’d thought of nothing else for two years, but when she tried to think of a happy memory, David’s green irises filled the vision of her mind’s eye. She felt his lips on hers, smelled the ‘David’ smell of his hair, tasted his salty skin, and then she slept.

*

Dinner was a quick and brutal affair of boxed macaroni and cheese, though an organic brand instead of the kind in the blue box, which made it very marginally better. There was almost no chit chat as the three of them stuffed their faces, cleaned up, and then piled into the car. As the anxiousness to be doing something buzzed through the vehicle, Evelyn had to consciously rein in her desire to speed through the East Lansing streets to get to the lab just a few minutes sooner. Once at the lab, blissfully student-free, Evelyn wasted no time in assigning Kim and David tasks as she prepared to extract DNA from a sample of the power bars, and after her initial instructions to the others, a diligent silence permeated the lab.

Hours later, David roused her from a scientific stupor. “Hey. How’s it going?”

“Slow, but going. The power bars have a lot of other stuff in them so it was a bit of a pain to separate out what I think is the viral DNA, but I managed to get about a nanogram to work with.”

“It’s in the PCR machine now?”

“Ayup.” Evelyn sighed grumpily. “But all it’ll really tell us is that the bars do contain mutant virus.”

“Which confirms what Nicolas told you.”

Evelyn nodded.

“Is it enough to trust him?”

Evelyn looked into David’s eyes then closed her own. She thought back to the night of the battle and the time she’d spent with Nicolas. There was an intensity about him and an earnestness in his actions, both as a Wolfkin and as a human. Evelyn felt something that wasn’t trust exactly, but she believed that Nicolas would tell her the truth. Opening her eyes, she looked up at David again. For a moment a mirage of pale blue eyes, Nicolas’s eyes, stared back at her, but then Evelyn blinked and David’s eyes were green once more. She cleared her throat. “Yeah.”

David studied her face. “Okay, but we’re still going to take precautions. You may trust him, but I don’t trust the Vulke.”

Evelyn nodded and eyed the timer on the PCR machine. “Of course.”

58

The night at the lab ended with Kim testing some new virus primers and Evelyn confirming the presence of mutant
Languorem luporum
in the power bars: small steps in terms of the research, but not without importance. The plan now was to head back to the condo briefly, grab a little breakfast and head straight straight out again to get clear to call Nicolas then continue on to Tennessee and Kim’s visit with her mom. Wired at the prospect of learning something new and useful about the virus, Evelyn hardly needed the cup of coffee she downed at the condo or the one she stowed in the travel mug to keep her awake for the first shift of driving.

Excitement and expectation tingled inside Evelyn’s chest as she pointed the SUV south. Too many questions she wanted to ask Nicolas jumbled up in her mind as she tried to prioritize. She should ask him what the Vulke were planning strategically, if they were going to launch any surprise attacks against the allied Wolfkin, if the Vulke were watching them or their families, how many more strays had they infected, and then, finally, what could he tell her about
Languorem luporum
that would help her cure it. She should also ask if Nicolas knew who the traitor was. So many questions.

Deep in thought, Evelyn twitched when her cell phone rang. Both David and Kim were dead to the world after the overnight in the lab, so Evelyn carefully answered, slowing her speed and tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder.

“Hello?”

“I want to talk to you about Nicolas.”

It was Roberto. He sounded…concerned. That did not bode well.

“Okay.”

“I’ve done some checking, and this man, Nicolas, is very high up in the Vulke ranks. He is very close to the new Vulke Alpha, Taras. I do not know what the Vulke are playing at, but I do not think we can trust him.”

Evelyn bit her lip. “But I sent you the information about the power bars, he was right. They’re contaminated with
Languo
—with the mutant strain. Why would he tell us that?”

“To confuse us, gain our trust? I do not know and we cannot assume that those bars are the only source of infection. I have made up my mind on this, do not contact him. It is too dangerous.”

Evelyn bit her lip harder. What would Roberto do if she deliberately went against his direct order? What
could
he do? In a way that she couldn’t even explain to herself, let alone Roberto, she knew that Nicolas would tell her the truth.
Or do I?
Maybe she was just making up some romantic notion since he’d saved her life. But surely, surely, this type of subterfuge was out of character for the Vulke and they really had no need of it. Certainly it would have been much easier and more effective to have just killed Evelyn. The cell phone hissed static as she drove under an overpass.

“Evelyn?”

Evelyn realized that she’d been silent too long, but couldn’t bring herself to lie to Roberto, or at least didn’t trust herself to do it effectively. Grabbing the phone, she held it out away from her face. “Roberto? Roberto? Sorry, I’m in the car, what did you say before? I can—“ Evelyn touched the end button and then turned off the phone. A stupid and useless gesture really, considering he would just call David and or Kim to reach her, but Evelyn had a plan.

“David! David, wake up!”

Evelyn reached out and poked David roughly just as his phone started to ring.

“Wha-
yawn
-what’s going on?”

“Roberto is calling you, and you have to tell him that I went on a trip, alone to…to Ohio to meet with a colleague of mine to discuss something about the virus.”

David’s sleep clouded eyes cleared. The phone kept ringing. “What? Why?”

“Please, I’ll tell you after. Just do it and try to make it sound like you aren’t in a car.”

Frowning, David fished out his cell phone and answered it. “Hello?” A false smile settled onto David’s face. “Oh, hi Roberto, I—

“Evelyn? No, er…she’s not here. She left earlier this morning to meet up with a buddy of hers in Ohio. Guess he’s some kind of virus expert and she wanted to ask him a few things about—

“Why in person?”

David shot Evelyn a look of panic. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of a single reason that she couldn’t have e-mailed her supposed colleague a question.

“Um, well, you know…she hadn’t seen him in a while and he said that he’d be happy to answer her questions if she could find time to have a cup of coffee with him. She—“ David paused and rubbed his forehead before continuing. “Uhuh, well, I guess they were important questions. Well, if I hear from her I’ll tell her you call—“ David paused again, his face darkening as he listened to Roberto. “Right, I understand. I’ll tell her.” David hung up the phone and stared out the window. “He doesn’t want you to contact Nicolas.”