by Chloe Garner
“I’m Tina,” she said.
“Adam,” he answered. “Hi.”
She grinned, looking him up and down.
“He did good,” she said. “That’s all I’ve got for foreplay, though.”
She bit him, the first rush of blood going to her head reminding her just how much pain she was in, and then a surge of energy that started to go after the bullet holes again redoubling that pain in an excited sort of way. Adam held her like a lover, his head tipped back and away, and her appetite cut out long before her need for blood did. Her fangs retracted and she put her thumb to the spot on his neck where the holes had been. Resting her forehead against his jaw for a moment and appreciating the reaction her body caused in his for just that long and no more, she stood, giving him a little bow.
“Thank you very much for your service.”
She turned and pointed at Hunter.
“You, upstairs, now.”
He grinned like a lightbulb going on.
“What happened?” Colette asked. She’d been in the kitchen when Tina had come in, but she’d moved since then, and Tina had been too preoccupied to notice.
“We won,” Tina said, taking Hunter’s hand, fingers through hers, and heading for the stairs. “What did you think was going to happen?”
“Where’s my brother?” Colette asked.
“He stayed,” Tell said, not talking specifically for Tina’s or Hunter’s benefit. “But they aren’t going to kill him. Elroy is dead.” There was a brief pause, and then Tell spoke again, looking up at Hunter and Tina on the stairs. “Be gentle with her.”
Hunter pulled Tina to a stop at the top of the stairs, standing against her and putting his hands on her neck.
“What happened?” he asked softly.
“I’m full of bullet holes,” Tina said.
“What?” he asked.
“And probably some bullets,” Tina added. “I’m not sure it even helps to count holes and see if the number is even or odd, at this point.”
He unbuttoned her jacket and put his hands down the collar to ease it out over her shoulders. They let it drop onto the floor and he started to pull at her shirt.
“Not here,” Tina said. “Not here.”
He nodded, working his jaw.
“I told you to get out,” he said.
“I’m actually okay,” Tina said. “I’m hungry, but I’m okay.”
He held her eye, nodding after a moment.
“Okay.”
She reached up to take his hand from her shoulder and holding it once more, leading back to their room, where she let him take her shirt up over her head.
“Tina,” he gasped. She looked down at her skin and nodded.
“Yeah, I ought to shower. Don’t want to get that all over the sheets. You want to wash my back?”
He took a step back, his hands sliding off of her hips without falling to his sides.
“You’re a mess,” he said. “But damn you’re a beast.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Was that a yes or a no on my back?”
Tina and Hunter were getting out of the shower most of an hour later, all slick skin and fingers and mouths, when Tell opened the door to Tina’s room.
“I’m not looking,” he said. “But Vince just texted me that there’s a man downstairs who wants to see Colette. Answers to Kyle.”
Tina extricated her face from Hunter’s neck even as he held her firm against him still.
“What?” she asked. “You going to let him up?”
“Told Vince to frisk him good and put him on the elevator. I’d say you’ve got about ninety seconds before he hits the doors.”
Tina looked up at Hunter and he glowered.
“You’re going to want to be down there to see what happens, aren’t you?”
“He said he was going to try to kill her with his bare hands,” Tina said. “Tell and I were betting on the over under before she put him down.”
“I’d take a piece of that action,” he said. “He have anything like a sporting chance?”
“He’s a full-time gamer in his mid-forties,” Tina said. “He has delusions of competency.”
Hunter nodded, putting his cheek against her forehead and drawing a deep, slow breath, his body pressing against hers, then he nodded again.
“Ten minutes,” he said. Tina slipped away, shaking her head.
“At least fifteen. There’s going to be more shouting than that.”
She heard him laugh as she went back into the bedroom and dressed quickly, making it to the railing before the elevator doors opened and Kyle stepped through.
“Colette,” he called in a voice that Tina could only imagine was supposed to be thundering, but sounded rather more drunk to Tina’s ears.
“I’m here waiting for you, you twerp,” Colette said. Kyle looked up at Tina as Hunter came to stand behind her, putting an arm around her and leaning on the railing.
“You ruined everything,” he said, looking down below Tina again. “They killed Elroy. She did.”
He pointed a finger at Tina with an attitude like he’d wished it was a projectile. Tina raised an eyebrow but kept her mouth shut.
“And I’m glad someone finally stopped that monster,” Colette said. “You knew. You knew that I was right, and that they’d killed a man, and you went along with them anyway. After they made me disappear so that they wouldn’t kill me.”
“You betrayed him,” Kyle said. “You deserve death. You all do.”
“Hey,” Hunter protested, but Kyle ignored him.
“You have no idea what you were getting yourself into,” Colette said. “I saw it. You didn’t belong there.”
“What do you know?” Kyle asked. “You let me think you were dead all these years. Elroy was the one who told me that you just ran off.”
“Do you know what he would have done to me, if I hadn’t?” Colette asked. “What he would have done to you, if he’d known about you and thought it would bring me back?”
“I was going to be one of the resurrected,” Kyle said. “Elroy said…” He rubbed the back of his arm across his nose. “Elroy said I was select.”
“He picked you to get to me,” Colette said. “And it worked. Look. Here I am. They risked their lives tonight, to get you out of there before the Order killed you.”
“You were the traitoress,” he said. “They all hated you. The ones who didn’t like me, it was because of you. I wish you had been dead.”
“Shut up, Kyle,” Colette said, stepping forward to where Tina and Hunter could see her. “I’ve had twenty years to think about what I wanted to tell you, all of the things I didn’t get to say before I left. You’re going to stand there and you’re going to hear them. I love you. I have always loved you and I have always hoped for a happy life for you. Jenny Reynolds broke your heart and I watched you decide that it wasn’t worth it, and you haven’t been happy since. Not ever since. You go play your games and you pretend that you’re big and strong and powerful and it’s because you’re miserable on the inside, and I want so much more for you than that. But the Order isn’t going to give that to you. They were using you because Elroy didn’t like that I betrayed him and he wanted me to suffer for it. They were never going to make you happy, and they weren’t even going to make you powerful. They were going to let you die.”
“How did you know about Jenny?” Kyle asked after a moment.
“I kept up,” Colette said, her voice still heated. “You think I walked away and just forgot about you?”
“They were,” Kyle said after a moment’s pause. “They were going to resurrect me. I went through everything. I was just a couple of days away. Elroy was going through all of it, telling me how it was going to work… You… She killed him.”
“Self defense,” Tina muttered. “I swear.”
“You certainly weren’t someplace you shouldn’t have been, picking a fight with lunatics,” Hunter murmured in her ear. She smiled.
“Look at h
er,” Kyle screeched. “Look at her smirk. She knows. She knows what she did. She took it all away from me, and she did it because of you.”
He rushed at Colette, his fists up, and Tina and Hunter leaned out over the railing, as Colette put up the heel of her hand, hitting him in the nose as he ran at her.
He stumbled over backwards, landing on his back on the floor.
Tina looked at her wrist and Hunter brought out his phone.
“Seven,” he said.
She grunted.
“He jumped the gun,” she said.
He was unmoving.
“Is he okay?” Colette asked.
“His heart is still beating normally,” Tell said. Hunter’s fingers left the railing to wrap around Tina’s stomach.
“I won,” he growled into her ear. She turned her face in toward him.
“I want to hear the rest of the conversation,” she said.
He looked over the railing again.
“You’ve got at least thirty minutes,” he said, pulling her back toward the hallway again.
She turned, pulling his head down to hers and stilling both of them with his forehead against hers. He put his other hand on her waist and they stood, eyes closed for several moments while Tell and Colette spoke to each other downstairs.
“I haven’t got thirty minutes before sunrise,” Tina said. Hunter licked his lips.
“Then let’s not waste it,” he said, pulling her against him and walking backwards toward the hall again. She smiled, tipping her face back to kiss him. He kissed her gently, then grinned and kissed her harder, lifting her ribs up toward his chest and sweeping her away.
Kyle came to some time after the sun put Tina in her bed, his pride badly bruised, and he’d ranted at Colette for a while longer before Tell had put him on the elevator and told him not to come back again. Colette had gone to bed in the other bedroom, and then Tell did indeed leave before Tina got out of bed the next evening.
Tina spent the night thinking things through, what had happened with Colette, what had happened with Solomon, with Kyle, what would happen if she did manage to distill a cure.
Around the time that Tell got up that morning, Hunter rolled onto his side and kissed Tina’s forehead, then shifted her to lay against him.
“Can you talk?” he asked.
“A little,” Tina answered.
“You almost died last night, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
It was the truth.
That many bullet holes, she certainly shouldn’t have been fighting, and yet she had. She didn’t know what it meant any more than he did.
“Ginger liked to do wild stuff,” he said, shifting to put his hand under his neck. “I mean, crazy stuff. But she never went up against anyone she wasn’t certain she could squish with her thumb. I’ve seen her work angles for decades, building up the means to go after someone, making the right friends, getting the right leverage. And I’ve seen Tell walk into kill boxes that a radioactive cockroach wouldn’t have gotten out of, and I never even worry about it. I mean, if the dude needs rescuing, I turn up, obviously, but… I didn’t realize how much I was going to hate you going until after you were gone.”
“What are you saying?” Tina asked.
“You have to stay,” he said. “If I run. You have to stay here, because I can’t protect you, and you’re just going to keep getting into trouble.”
“You proposed,” Tina said.
“I did,” he said slowly, kissing her forehead. “And I still… I wish I meant it. I do mean it. But… There’s no way to get away from it. Sophie is… She’s a piece of work. Tell hasn’t thought of anything, you haven’t thought of anything, I haven’t thought of anything… We can keep staring at it as long as we want, but if nothing is going to change…”
He wrapped his arm tighter around her and she sighed.
“I know.”
She wasn’t going to be a vampire.
There was a cure. Ella said it, and Elroy found the start of it, and Tina was going to find the rest.
It was all tangled up.
Tell found Elroy’s lab a few hours before dawn the next day. Tina went over and took copious notes on everything as he dismantled it bit by bit and drove it away somewhere else in town, using her car because it had more storage space to get stuff out in fewer loads.
It was an astonishing quantity of equipment, supplies, notes. Everything on paper using what looked like a fountain pen to write, everything encoded. It wasn’t the same handwriting as the two notebooks out of Reggie’s cellar, and the encoding looked different, as well, but Tina was rather certain she could work it out. There were no machines involved in it, which meant that it had been simple enough for him to work it out in his head.
Tina had to work faster than she liked, taking pictures of all of the setups and writing down everything she could think of before Tell tore it down, but by the time she went back to Viella, it was all hidden away.
The Order would never have it again.
Which left Tina with a mountain of information and a few threads of theories.
She went to a late dinner with Tony, a week later.
“It’s the clotting,” she said to him, taking out three notebooks worth of content and laying them out across the table. “It’s a mess, and none of the theories make sense with all of the information, but that’s it.”
“What do you mean, all of the information?” Tony asked. “Did you get more?”
“Oh, my gosh,” Tina said. “I’m only struggling with how much to tell you, because it’s all dangerous. The people who were trying to kill me? They knew things. And none of them actually managed to cure me, but they get rid of symptoms temporarily.”
Tony frowned, translating what she’d said for a moment, then nodded.
“Trying to kill you,” he said. “That’s a potent weapon.”
“Yeah, it is,” Tina agreed.
“You know you forgot to text and tell me that you were alive, right?” Tony asked.
“Shoot,” Tina answered. “I did.”
“You survived, though,” he said, and she nodded, pointing.
“Because of you, actually. They would have killed me, without a doubt, if I hadn’t been able to counteract what they were doing, and it was what you called and told me about, all of it, that got me to a counteragent.”
Tony crossed his arms, leaning on his elbows.
“You’ve got to be more specific,” he said. “Are you afraid there are people here listening?”
She looked around the room, counting heartbeats, the hubbub of it all overwhelming her ability to tease out whether everyone there was human.
Or at least living.
“I…” She paused. “It’s important that this stay secret,” she said.
“Then we should go someplace where it will,” he answered. “Meeting in public is fine if you’ve got your reasons, but if we can’t talk…”
She nodded, looking around the room once more, then sighing. She lowered her voice to the point that his head almost had to touch hers to hear it.
“They had a chemical compound of some kind that would turn vampire tissue to human tissue, so it wouldn’t heal normally. Both Tell and I injected doses of vitamin K and it counteracted the effect completely. It’s all related, I just can’t puzzle out how.”
“Have you figured out what the compound is?” Tony asked.
She laughed.
“You think I have a mass spectrometer sitting around at the apartment?”
“You have an MRI,” he answered.
“Fair enough,” she said. “Maybe I’ll just get one, I don’t know. I do have detailed notes on how it was made.”
“Show me,” Tony said, and she shook her head again.
“They’re in code, and I’m still working through it, trying to make sure that I’ve decoded it correctly. The details matter.”
“They do,” Tony said. “Can I see what you have?”
“It’s in here,” Tina said, turning and opening the second notebook. “Some of these inputs… I’m working through what they mean. They appear to be references to ancient natural ingredients, but I’m pretty sure he was getting them from modern pharmaceuticals. The whole process…”
That had been what had ultimately driven Kyle from the apartment, defeated.
Colette had laid out the steps in the process that led to Solomon’s resurrection, and Kyle had realized that Elroy had skipped one.
A key one.
The Order had intended to murder him with his own consent.
She shook her head.
“It’s so involved, what they were doing…”
“What were they doing?” Tony asked.
“Oh,” Tina said. “I guess that matters. They were resurrecting people. Necromancy.”
“What now?” Tony asked. She nodded.
“Yup. Successfully.”
Tony blinked.
“You have to tell me how,” he said. “There’s an ethical imperative. I can conceal where I got it, but…”
“No,” Tina cut in. “The men who had been resurrected were empty. Still dead, I think. They hate their existences, and they can’t die.”
“They’re zombies?” he asked and Tina snorted.
“No. They’re actually a lot like us, like… vampires… except that they have normal temperatures, their hearts beat, and they seem to be alive by any important metric I could take while trying not to let one kill me.”
“So how does that make them like you?” Tony asked.
“When you shoot them, the wound closes over like it never happened,” Tina said softly. “They appeared to have dramatically improved sensory perception. And the things that makes vampires use-y jerks? Appeared to have hit them tenfold.”
“So they’re massive creeps?” Tony asked, and she shook her head.
“No. They’re completely dead inside.”
“Huh,” he said.
“Yeah. So, no, you can’t take this and go try to cure death. Death is important. It makes you human. I can’t wait to be human again.”
He shook his head.
“It’s really that bad?” he asked.
