by Julie Frost
“Nick.” She shrugged, not bothered. “He was never one of the nicer ones. No one will miss him.”
The food arrived, and they dug in for a few minutes. Alex made an effort to shut his mouth and let her think about his offer, and instead concentrated on enjoying his lunch. He really needed to get the recipe for this, he thought, because it was perfect.
McFoucher waved her fork at him. “Say I come work for you. What exactly do you expect me to accomplish as far as Lockwood goes?” She lowered her voice and looked around before continuing. “I know the procedure turned him into a vampire, and I’m pretty sure that’s a permanent condition.”
“Yeah, it’s gotten complicated. But the research at Ostheim is on the cutting edge of that stuff, and you personally were right there at the forefront. If anyone can help him, it’s you.”
“Mr. Jarrett. Help him what?” She stabbed a piece of lobster. “Is he adjusting badly to his new status?”
“No,” Alex said thoughtfully. “He’s eerily calm about it. Which is okay, I guess, but it’s kind of creepy.”
“That’s a vampire thing, I think. Mrs. Ostheim is pretty serene about stuff that would have most people running around in circles and screaming.” She swallowed her last bite of lobster. “This is really good. I’ve never eaten here before.” Setting her fork aside, she said, “I still don’t get what you’re trying to accomplish with Lockwood. I’m sorry to say but I think he’s stuck.”
“We don’t know until we try, right? Can we at least do that?”
“Are you sure he even wants me around? I mean, really. My last interaction with him was …” She shook her head. “I’m betting he doesn’t like me very much.”
“You’re the best in the business at what you do. Believe me, I’ve checked.” Alex waved the waitress down for the bill. “He’ll understand.”
O O O
The front door of the mansion opened, and Ben’s nostrils twitched. Red rage mists tinged his vision, he wasn’t sure quite from where. Before he was consciously aware of what he was doing, he leaped into the middle of the living room with fur sprouting on his back, his muzzle and teeth lengthening, and his nails sharpening to claws—tense and ready to attack.
Janni made an “eep!” noise.
Ben had smelled McFoucher before she’d come into the room behind Alex, who stopped dead at the entryway. “Whoa,” he said. “Ben?”
“You didn’t say you were bringing her here.” The words were distorted by his teeth and the changed shape of his face, but understandable. Static buzzed across Ben’s nerve endings as he fought to get himself under control, and the fact that it was moon time wasn’t helping in the slightest.
“This is where we’ve done all the work,” Alex said, which was perfectly reasonable.
Ben’s wolf wasn’t interested in being reasonable.
But Janni was hyperventilating behind him, and Ben realized, belatedly, that she hadn’t actually seen him as a wolf yet. An explosion of violence on top of his new shape would scare her even more. Moreover, he was a man, not a monster. It wasn’t like McFoucher could or would hurt him here, on what was ostensibly his home ground. He squeezed his eyes shut, made an effort, and put his fur, teeth, and claws back where they belonged. For Janni.
Everyone relaxed, marginally, but Ben kept himself between Janni and McFoucher. “She can help?” Ben asked.
“I think so.” Alex hadn’t moved from between Ben and McFoucher either. Seemed they were both being protective. “Wouldn’t have brought her onboard otherwise.”
Ben took a couple of steps back, allowing them access to the lab. “Come at me with a needle and I’ll rip your face off, McFoucher,” he said, more calmly than he felt.
She stuttered a little. “W-w-wouldn’t blame you a bit,” she answered as she and Alex sidled around him and headed for the basement steps.
“Just so we understand each other.” He knew his eyes were still amber from the state of his vision—far too sharp, colors and movement standing out. “Brandon’s in the lab, by the way. Doc Allen is keeping an eye on him.”
“Oh, good,” Alex said. “Right this way, Dr. McFoucher.” And they disappeared around the curve of the staircase.
Ben blew a shaky breath out and turned to face Janni, wide-eyed on the couch with her hand covering her mouth. “Sorry about that,” he said, quirking one side of his face.
“Is she—?”
At his nod, she put her hand down and glared toward the basement. He grinned affectionately, because now Janni was the one being protective.
“She comes at you with a needle, and I’ll help you rip her face off.”
“Ah, fierce Hermia,” he said, plopping down next to her and wrapping his arm around her shoulder. He almost said “Marry me” right then and there, but the ring was hidden back at their apartment and he wanted to ask her right, dammit.
He needed to find an excuse to go home. “You know, I’d kind of like to have my own clothes,” he said.
“Oh, I can go get you some.” She leaned over and picked up her sketchpad, which had landed on the floor when Ben had jumped up.
“That’d be great, honey.” He had a sudden thought about the ring and where it was hidden. “And could you bring me my Glock? It’s in the brown suede case in my sock drawer.”
She looked at him sideways. “What do you want the Glock for?”
“Alex has a range in the basement, and I should get some practice in.” He tried to look casual. “Honestly, I feel a little naked walking around unarmed right now, even if I can bring fangs into play any time I like. I mean, how many times does a guy have to get kidnapped before it starts being a pattern?”
She leaned into him. “I know. At least I got my purse and my little gun back. I have the feeling this isn’t over yet.”
“You too, huh?” He kissed the top of her head before going back to chasing internal Jarrett Biologicals memos. Alex was going to be unhappy with what he’d dug up about some of his board members.
Chapter Fifteen
Alex escorted Michelle McFoucher downstairs and found a disgruntled and incredibly intoxicated Brandon Kincaid there, slumped in a chair, making noises about unlawful detainment. He stopped and gulped when he saw his boss.
“Hello, Brandon,” Alex said. “Anything you want to tell me?”
“Not in particular, Mr. Jarrett.” Brandon slurred his words, but enunciated “particular” very carefully. Alex lifted his eyebrow, and Brandon backpedaled a little. “I mean … whadya wanna know?”
Alex cut right to the chase. “Did Reed figure out a way of reversing the lycanthropy? Why add the extra strand of DNA? Why lycanthropy, for that matter?”
Brandon stared at him for a second, his face green. Then he vomited, fell off the chair, and passed out.
Alex heaved a sigh. “Well, that was useful.” He knew from personal experience that the only real solution to this was to let the man sleep it off—unless he wanted to inject him with some sober-up nanotech without asking his permission, and injecting people with nanotech lately had complicated everyone’s lives, so … no.
“I can answer a couple of those questions,” Michelle said.
“Yeah? Do tell.”
“The disease Idna has breaks down DNA, but it doesn’t affect werewolves or humans. It’s vampire-specific. So we thought that by introducing werewolf DNA, we might be able to halt its progress or even reverse it.” She shrugged. “Ostheim tried biting her, and it didn’t work, something about vampire physiology not processing natural lycanthropy under ordinary circumstances. So he got the idea of adding a strand of DNA via the nanotech.”
“Which did work, apparently.”
“Only after we ran it through Lockwood first. It needed the extra oomph of the living human catalyst. Hormones, I think. Reed knew more about it than we did.” She frowned. “Even when we gave her a lot of his blood, it just slowed the progression of the disease without stopping it.”
“Three pints,” Alex remembered, with a hi
nt of anger. “You nearly killed him even before you decided to use him as a live dialysis machine for a fucking vampire.”
“Ostheim planned for him to die, Mr. Jarrett.” She sounded tired. “He didn’t particularly care when or how. Lockwood killed his nephew, and he was pissed about it.”
“The nephew who tortured Ben with a cattle prod—and then we caught him on the hill overlooking my garage with a sniper rifle? That nephew?” Alex clenched his fist. “Yeah, no sympathy.”
She raised her hands defensively, offering no excuses. “I’m not saying that what we did was anything like ethical. I’m just giving you Ostheim’s rationale. He can be really … single-minded, when he wants something.”
Alex rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He’d been on the receiving end of that single-mindedness, more than once, and Ostheim was a force of nature when he was set on a course of action. He wanted to ask her if it had crossed her mind, even once, to object to what they were doing, but she’d already told him that she felt pretty rotten about it, so he decided to leave it alone. “Can I assume you didn’t look for a way to reverse the effects?”
“Why would we have done that?”
He gestured at the chair in front of the computer. “Well, you’ve got a reason now. Curing the vampirism is at the top of our list, too.” Which meant he had two things at the top of his list, but he was used to multitasking.
“Do you know how long we’ve hunted for that?” Michelle asked her. “Ages. I’m nearly convinced there isn’t one.”
“And we’re going to try anyway,” Alex said, “so let’s get to work.”
“Before you bury yourself in research again, Mr. Jarrett,” Megan said, walking over from the other side of the room, “I need you to sign these documents.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m on a roll here.”
“If you’d just sign them without arguing with me, you’d be done a lot quicker.”
“Shouldn’t I, I don’t know, read them first?”
She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t trust me?”
He snatched the pen out of her hand. “I trust you implicitly, Miss Graham. Where do I sign?”
She pointed, and he scribbled his signature several times over everything she told him to. For all he knew, he’d just made a million-dollar anonymous donation to the local animal shelter—which wasn’t a terrible idea, now that he thought about it, and he made a mental note to tell Megan to remind him to do that.
“Happy now?”
“Happier. Thank you, Mr. Jarrett.” Her heels clacked across the floor as she walked over to her desk again, and he surreptitiously admired the sway of her ass and the line of her calves, because it was what he did. He looked away before she caught him, because that was what he did, too.
Doc Allen, whom Alex had nearly forgotten, was sitting in a corner going over some paperwork. He grunted and blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “I really need to do a proper workup on Ben to see how he ticks now that he’s a vampire. Not that I had the chance to get much of a baseline before, but now would be an excellent time.”
Alex cast his gaze around the controlled chaos of his lab. “We got any live rabbits in this room?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then I guess we can bring him down.” Alex remembered Ben’s reaction to the catheter in the back of his hand when he woke up from the surgery, and the fact that Janni had to be there when they’d drawn blood the previous day—and he realized something. “Dammit. We’re going to have to do yet another blood draw on him, because he got bitten by Ostheim last night, and we’ll need to see if and how it affected him.” Alex’s mouth twisted. “The poor guy’s got a thing about needles anyway, and he’s been poked with enough of them lately for several lifetimes.”
Michelle flinched and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Something to say, Dr. McFoucher?” he asked between his teeth, remembering the needle marks on Ben’s chest.
“I don’t want to be here when you stick him, is all,” she said. “You heard what he said to me. I think he meant it. Jesus God, a thing about needles.” She buried her face in her hands. “That, on top of everything else—I feel horrible.”
Okay, then. “Hey.” He touched her shoulder. He had a soft spot (in his head, Megan often remarked) for pretty women, and she seemed genuinely distressed. “Help us fix it, and it’ll go a long way towards making it better.” He hit the intercom button. “Ben? Could you come down here, please?”
“Sure thing.” He trotted into the basement a few seconds later, Janni behind him. “What’s up?”
“Doc Allen wants to do some tests and stuff on you, get a baseline on your physiology, things like that. You up for it?”
“Suppose so.” His expression was resigned. “As long as you don’t need to stab me with a syringe. Again.”
“About that …” Alex said uncomfortably.
Michelle leaped to her feet. “I’ll just—I have to go to the bathroom.” She made a precipitous exit.
“What?” Ben said, watching her go and baring a fang.
“Well, you did threaten to rip her face off if she came at you with a needle.”
Ben recoiled. “For fuck’s sake, Alex, tell me you weren’t considering having her do a blood draw on me.”
“No, no. She just doesn’t want to be in the room when it happens is all. She feels pretty guilty.”
“She should,” Janni said, her tone dripping acid.
“Anyway.” Alex tried desperately to regain control of the conversation. “You got bitten by a werewolf last night, Ben, and so we want to see if that actually did anything or if the vampire physiology blocked the effects somehow.”
Ben sank into a chair. “So much hate for this …” But he endured it with his face in Janni’s shoulder and her hand stroking his hair. Some fur sprouted on his back, which no one remarked about, and it didn’t take long.
He sat there and breathed, carefully, for a few seconds longer, before giving Janni a shaky smile.
She kissed the top of his head. “Okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. You can go now.”
She nodded. “Okay. Can I borrow your driver, Alex?” Janni asked. “I want to go back to our place and pick up some clothes and stuff.”
“You can borrow my driver and my chief of security, along with his head assistant.” Alex grabbed his phone and made a couple of calls.
They had no reason to think Ostheim would come after Janni again, since he’d gotten what he wanted, but there was no sense taking stupid chances, either. They’d used her as leverage once; they might decide to do it again.
“They’ll meet you in the garage,” Alex said as he hung up.
“Great. Thanks. Will you be all right?” she said to Ben.
“Sure, honey. If anything looks wrong, you just turn the car around and come back.” And their eyes met to exchange silent promises. She left, flipping them all a wave.
Ben’s eyes stayed on the door after she was gone. “So, Doc Allen, what do we need to do?”
Doc Allen stood up and put his cigarette out. “CAT scan for starters. Can’t do an MRI because you’ve still got bullet fragments in your chest I couldn’t get out, more’s the pity. Come on back. We’ll skip the contrast agents for now.”
“You’ve got a CAT scanner and MRI in your basement?” Ben said to Alex.
“I don’t do hospitals, and I have enough money to buy whatever equipment Doc Allen needs to keep me and mine alive and functioning.” Alex wasn’t as phobic about hospitals as Ben was about needles, but it was a near thing. “So, yeah.”
“Okay. Wild,” Ben muttered, following Doc Allen toward the room where he kept his CAT scanner.
Michelle came back in after Ben left and sat back at her desk, drumming her nails on it. “I don’t know from nanotech,” she said, “but what if we introduced a nanoretrovirus that would eat the extra DNA strand? Do you have anything like that?”
Alex pondered. “I might have something I can modify to
do the job. It’s exotic DNA; you’d think the body would reject it anyway, but it doesn’t. Somehow it’s fooled Ben’s system into thinking it belongs there, and I’d have to deal with that, otherwise the retrovirus would eat his own DNA. That would be bad.”
“You think?” Megan snorted from across the room.
“No comments from the peanut gallery,” he shot back.
She didn’t look up from her phone. “Just test it on your demon bunnies first before you go fiddling around with Ben.”
“Of course I would,” he said, offended. “What do you take me for?”
“A scientist on the verge of a breakthrough who might not think about all the ramifications before he tried something drastic on someone he cared about because he’s so eager to help him.”
Alex opened his mouth, stopped, and closed it again. That … was fair, actually. Sometimes he thought Megan knew him too well. “Have you given yourself a raise yet?” he asked.
“Yep,” she answered promptly. “In fact, that was one of the things you just signed.”
“Good. Add a fat bonus to that for keeping me grounded.”
He didn’t miss her sly smile, although she was rubbing at her lower back and abdomen again. “Yes, sir.”
“Take off as soon as you need to, Miss Graham. I know you’re in a lot of discomfort.”
The smile softened. “Thank you, Mr. Jarrett. I will, pretty soon.”
Alex set about programming the nanotech fabber to build the first set of DNA-eating bots, and put Michelle onto the task of seeing if she could find a cure for vampirism.
“I need to find the actual cause first,” she pointed out.
“We’ve got the funds and the rabbits; do it.” Alex tapped his computer keyboard, and the fabber hummed to life. “Let me know what you need and I’ll get it for you. Bunnies are back there.”
“All right. I have to write up a protocol, obviously.”
“Whatever you need.”
“Mr. Jarrett, I’m just about ready to wrap things up here,” Megan said. “Anything else I can do for you?”
