Perfect. Just what he needed right now.
John stared at the oozing puddle of clear albumin and the splash of yellow lipids creeping its way across the floor, utterly apathetic to his plight. Behind him, a child’s laughter broke the silence. John turned his stunned stare on his four year old son, Michael.
“Daddy made the egg go splat!” Michael clapped his hands together with gusto, just in case his meaning hadn’t been clear enough.
John glanced at the clock again, anxious energy rising in his chest. With a force of will, he took a deep breath, let it out, and showed Michael a wide smile. “And there’s today’s lesson on how not to cook eggs, buddy.” He did his best to quickly mop up the mess with a few paper towels, then he put the intact eggs in the fridge and grabbed the box of granola from on top. “Looks like it’s carbohydrates for us this morning.”
Michael’s hands shot up in victory. “Treat day! Treat day! The car high rates are so much better anyway, Daddy—like candy instead of…” His brow wrinkled in thought.
“Eggs?” John asked.
Michael nodded enthusiastically. “Eggs are stupid. And they taste boring and they take forever. Way longer than car high rates,” he added as John placed a bowl of granola in front of him and began to pour the milk.
“Don’t I know it, buddy. But eggs are full of the stuff that’ll make you grow big and strong.”
“But I don’t need that, Daddy. That’s what you’re for! If I need to be strong, then I’ll just say, ‘Daddy, come pick this up!’ and then you’ll come and then I won’t need to be strong.”
John decided now wasn’t the time to try to explain the value of self-dependence to his son and instead settled for tousling Michael’s hair before turning to finish cleaning the egg mess and prepare his own breakfast bowl, with Greek yogurt instead of milk.
A third glance at the clock confirmed that he was indeed going to be late for the first day of class. Not that a bunch of freshman biology majors were going to care all that much anyway. But maybe it would only be by a few minutes if nothing else went wron—
The buzz of an incoming comm call rumbled against his wrist with almost comical timing.
“Father have mercy,” John mumbled.
He tilted his wrist to check who was calling and nearly dropped the bowl when the name on the screen registered.
Lilly Cross.
His heart picked up, while his head began to formulate more productive responses—namely whats and whys. Like what in God’s kingdom Lilly Cross could be calling him for, and why it had taken her this many years to do so.
“Who is it, Daddy?”
John hastened to finish the mouthful of half-chewed granola he only then realized was still in his mouth. “It’s, uh… It’s—just a second, buddy.”
He set his bowl down and answered the call. As the holo sprang up and the comm worked to establish the connection, he popped in his earpiece. He couldn’t imagine Lilly would have anything to say that he wouldn’t want Michael hearing, but then again, he couldn’t imagine why she was calling after all this time in the first place. Unless…
A trill of excitement shot through his chest. He quickly stomped it down.
No. That had been a past life. Whatever this was—
Lilly’s golden hair and hazel eyes appeared on the holo and wiped away all other thought.
“John,” she said, almost as if she hadn’t expected to see him.
She searched his face, and he realized he was staring with a slack jaw.
“Lilly.” He almost stopped at Lil, but the name felt out of place on his tongue. Too familiar for the girl he’d barely spoken to for over a decade now. No. Not the girl. The woman. Because they’d grown up, hadn’t they? Gone their separate ways and never looked back. Or she hadn’t, at least, he assumed. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”
It was only then he noticed the view through the window behind her. “Are you at an airport?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh… headed out west.”
“I see.”
Why did she look as uncertain as he felt?
“Was there something I can help you with?”
Her face twisted through half a dozen expressions. Had he tried to conjure them from memory, he might not have been able to recall each facial tick, each Lilly-ism, but watching her now, they all spoke as clearly as if she were saying the words herself.
She was nervous. Afraid, even. And she was thinking twice about having called him. Clearly, she’d been on the fence about it to start.
“What is it, Lil?”
It just slipped out. He wanted to curse the softness in his voice.
Her expression turned guilty. “I shouldn’t have called. I’m not even sure why I did. I can’t, uh…”
“What’s going on?” he asked when it became clear the thought had drifted cleanly off.
Lilly had never been one to drop a thought. A little distractible at times, maybe, like plenty other academics he knew. But not like this.
She didn’t seem to be sure how to answer the question.
“Are you headed to a talk or something?”
She came back from wherever her mind had wandered off to with a slow nod. “Something like that. Spreading the work. You know how it goes.”
He frowned. Of course he knew how it went. Just because he was mostly teaching these days instead of running in the research wheel like her didn’t mean he’d forgotten the other side of academia. Why was she acting so strangely?
“Daddy!” Michael cried. “My milk is running away!”
John realized with a curse he’d given Michael the bowl with the crack—the crack that had apparently graduated to full on leak. Milk was slowly bleeding out of the blue ceramic to pool around the base of the bowl.
“You’re busy,” Lilly said. “I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have called. You take care of yourself, John.”
John glanced from the spilled milk to the clock.
8:36 AM.
“Dammit.” He gnashed his teeth, plopped another paper towel over Michael’s pooling milk, and stepped into the kitchen hallway. “Tell me why you called, Lilly.”
She deliberated for a few more seconds. “It’s just work stuff,” she finally said. “Probably shouldn’t get into the specifics right now, but umm… Shoot. Look, I know this is going to sound kind of strange—okay, really strange, probably—but umm… Would you mind checking in at my house over the next couple weeks to make sure everything’s okay?”
“What?”
Lilly opened her mouth to say something, but John pushed on, broken eggs, spilled milk, and a holo display that read 8:37 AM all churning in his head.
“We don’t have a real conversation for eight years, and you decide to just call me out of the blue to tell me you think your family is in danger or something? What the hell’s going on, Lilly?”
Lilly glanced nervously at her surroundings and touched at her earpiece as if to make sure their conversation was still private. “I know. And I didn’t say anyone was in danger. I just… I’m worried that the project I’m working on right now might draw the wrong kind of attention, and I… I didn’t know who else to call. I’m sorry.”
There was a brittle cracking sound from the kitchen, followed swiftly by a cry of, “I didn’t do it!”
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
“Well gee,” John half said, half growled. “Did you think about calling Robert?” The words left his mouth before he’d given them permission, and with entirely more bite than he’d intended.
For just a second, Lilly looked like she’d been slapped. The pain in her eyes struck straight into his gut, amplified a thousand times.
He shouldn’t have said that.
“You’re right.” Lilly gave a single nod, all traces of vulnerability disappearing behind a nearly perfect mask of professionalism. “I made a mistake. Take care, John.”
“Lilly, I—”
She ended the call, and her holo winked out of existence, leavi
ng the image of her cool facade burned in his mind.
Grab knife. Twist.
Michael was sitting in front of a shattered mess of blue ceramic and soggy granola with his head hung low when John walked back into the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to spill the milk. I was trying to fix it.”
John tried to make some response but couldn’t seem to bring himself to do much more than stare off into space.
“Was that your friend on the comm, Daddy?”
“Yeah, buddy.” He patted Michael’s head and scooted him toward the door. “One of Daddy’s good friends from college. Now go see if you can tie your shoes today. We gotta get you to daycare.”
Michael hurried off toward the front hall, clearly surprised and delighted to have escaped the stern chastising he’d been expecting.
For a long moment, John only stared at the mess on the island counter top.
What on earth could Lilly possibly be up to that would have her so worried she’d call him? And not only that, but ask him to check in on her family?
And why him? He was a biology professor, for heaven’s sake. Even if she’d somehow gotten caught up in something questionable or dangerous—and he didn’t see how she could have—what could he possibly be expected to do about it beyond—
“Daddy!” came Michael’s call from the front hall. “I tied a shoe but it doesn’t look right!”
8:42 AM.
Crap.
“Be there in two seconds, buddy!” he called back.
Whatever Lilly was up to, he had a life to tend to before he could do anything about it.
With a heavy sigh, John set about mopping up milky granola and sweeping the broken pieces into the garbage.
2
Lilly Cross swiped her comm holo away and slumped in the stiff airport chair, feeling worse than she had before she’d decided to call John.
What the hell had she been thinking?
Don’t answer that, she told herself, but her mind carried on all the same.
She’d been thinking that this was all completely, totally, unequivocally insane. That she needed someone to tell her so, someone she could trust. And, lastly, given that Ren had truly believed every insane thing he’d told her to be true, Lilly was thinking she was quite possibly being watched right now, and that none of the people in this airport—or anywhere, really—were safe.
Yep. This was insane. And yet she couldn’t refute the evidence Ren had brought her.
The eclectic nomad had come for one of his rare visits a few months earlier, bearing strange stories and even stranger gifts. If a quarter of the tales Ren had told her throughout the years were true, he’d been around the block three times over and twice again. He’d seen pretty much every vile evil this planet had to offer. But when he’d showed up on Lilly’s door claiming he was being hunted by uber-strong telepathic monsters with glowing red eyes…
Well, suffice it to say Lilly would have had a hard time believing any of it if Ren hadn’t brought her one of said monsters’ severed hands.
Vampires, for god’s sake. He’d called them vampires.
Yes. It was absolutely, most certainly insane. And yet she couldn’t deny the existence of the scaly green hand he’d brought her. It wasn’t some lifelike prop. She’d made damn sure of that pretty much every way she could think to do so.
The prospect of calling them vampires still made her want to roll her eyes, but whatever creature that hand had been attached to was like nothing she—or anyone else in the known world—had ever encountered. It was alive, and it was, dare she say it, utterly alien.
So maybe it wasn’t insane. Crazy, yes. Definitely crazy. But, slowly, she’d started to wonder. What if Ren’s story were actually true?
She knew now that it had been, of course. That these creatures, these vampires, were real. That they seemed to be up to something—had eyes and ears everywhere, at every level of the world order.
And now Ren was dead, and Lilly was sitting here contemplating what basically amounted to biological warfare—and maybe even mass terrorism, if you looked at it from the wrong perspective.
So maybe she could forgive herself the moment’s weakness of reaching out for the comfort of an old friend. Even if it had been kind of stupid, making a suspicious call when these things—these vampires—might be watching in any number of ways.
In the adjacent row of seats, a guy in a smart-looking business suit looked over to give Lilly a cursory glance, and a twinge of panic shot through her chest.
Eyes and ears everywhere, Ren had said.
At least that airport security guy had finally cleared away while she’d been on the comm. It probably hadn’t been her he’d been watching anyway—almost certainly not—but it was getting pretty hard to distinguish appropriate caution from paranoia right just now.
John’s words echoed back to her, unbidden. Why hadn’t she called Robert first?
Because she couldn’t. This was too much. Too big. Too crazy to just drop on her husband’s lap without warning.
She would tell him. Soon. In the meanwhile, she’d just needed a moment’s reassurance from someone who might be able to leave it at that.
But for her to call John of all people… And that stuff she’d said about checking in at the house… What the hell had she been think—
No.
That was the least of her concerns now. Right now, she needed to pull herself together and stop putting off what she’d come here to do.
Lilly stood and adjusted her messenger bag around to her hip. The fact that she’d been clutching the thing to her front like a security blanket probably hadn’t done her low profile any favors, but it didn’t matter now.
She ignored the visceral panic squeezing her insides, stepped past the man in the suit, and set off through the steadily growing crowd of Hartsfield-Jackson airport for the nearest stairs. Standing safely—or stationary, at least—on the escalator down, she lifted the flap of her bag, withdrew a small squirt bottle, and applied a few squirts to the handrails on either side, doing her best to avoid the strange looks this drew.
She stepped off the escalator at the bottom and turned for the airport train, which happened to be arriving just then.
The train stopped and the doors parted. Lilly put on her best inconspicuous look and waited to the side for its occupants to deboard, then she followed the swell of travelers sweeping into the tram to occupy the newly opened space.
The doors slid shut, and a mechanical female voice proclaimed, “Welcome to the Plane Train!”
With that, the train lurched forward for the next stop.
Lilly moved through the compartment, keeping her squirt bottle handy as she went. A squirt here, a squirt there. Upright or horizontal, she tagged every handrail she could without being too obvious about it.
She still got plenty of weird looks anyway.
“Disinfectant,” she said quietly to an older woman giving her a particularly appalled stare.
She’d nearly made her way through the compartment when a voice from behind froze her in her tracks.
“Excuse me, ma’am.”
Crap.
That wasn’t the tone of someone pardoning his step or looking for directions. That was the voice of authority.
She was screwed—finished before she’d hardly started. She’d be arrested, tried, convicted.
Or worse.
What if it was one of them behind her—one of Ren’s vampires? What if it wasn’t legal doom she was facing, but death by exsanguination? Did they even exsanguinate people?
Did it even matter right now?
She was screwed, screwed, screwed. She needed to run. Needed a way out.
All of this raced through her head as she turned to face her doom with what she hoped to god was an innocent, curious expression.
Her doom, it turned out, was a young chubby white guy with a mustache that could have passed for a small living mammal residing over his lip. His uniform designated him
as belonging to airport security.
Not a vampire, then. Right?
If anything, he looked hungry for a donut, not blood.
But after everything Ren had told her, who knew?
If her cloak wasn’t activated, she could have just reached out with her senses and known in a second if there was anything off about the guy. But that worked both ways, and after everything Ren had said, it was too dangerous to walk around in public with her mind shining like a telepathic lighthouse.
She realized she’d gone entirely too long without saying anything to hope to fall into the category of normal airport traveler, nothing to see here!
“Uh, yeah?” she asked.
He gave her a look like she was mentally ill. “What are you doing?”
“Heading to Concourse A, I hope,” she said.
Technically, it wasn’t even a lie.
He was less than amused as he pointed at the squirt bottle she’d tried to conceal behind her bag. “What is that?”
“Disinfectant.” With a significant force of willpower, she offered the squirt bottle out to him. “Sorry, I know it’s weird. I’m just an enormous mysophobe.”
“A what?”
“A germaphobe. Sorry.”
He scowled and swiped the bottle from her hand.
“TSA cleared it already,” she added. “Regulation size and everything.”
His scowl only deepened, and he proceeded to turn the bottle over in his hands, looking more closely and even giving it a sniff as if he expected maybe he’d somehow be able to smell the presence of any dangerous toxins or pathogens.
Apparently his miraculous lab-on-a-schnoz needed some calibrating, because he looked entirely too appeased as he handed her back the squirt bottle chock full of her deadly designer virus.
“Just keep it to yourself, lady,” he said, already turning to head for the nearest door as the train slowed for the next stop.
“You bet,” she mumbled.
Not that she actually would, of course. She’d wait until she was off the train, away from suspicious eyes, and she’d go right on squirting every commonly touched surface she could.
As outrageously contagious as her little virus was, it’d probably be thoroughly spread through the airport’s population in a matter of hours, but it really couldn’t happen too fast, and the more travelers they caught, the better. It wasn’t an easy undertaking, after all, trying to infect the entire planet with the virus that could save them all—assuming it actually worked on their shadowy hunters.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 120
