by C. J. Lyons
The height gave me some perspective on the Lazarettos’ island itself. It was small, maybe ten city blocks in total area, with this monastery as its largest building running the width of the island. I glanced down at the roof of the modern building across the courtyard from the dock. Serious HVAC and ventilation systems—obviously their lab. The rest of the island was taken up with gardens and cottages, giving it the lush appeal of a retreat.
Appearances, deceptions—if the Lazarettos had a family motto, it should include those two words, I thought as I turned back to face the woman who’d brought me here.
She stood across the room, looking elegant in a wool dress and silk scarf. Thick wool rugs covered the stone floor and in the center of the room stood an octagonal, centuries-old slanted desk that had once been used by monks to illuminate manuscripts. Everything appeared serene, welcoming even.
Except for the very modern examination chair with thick restraints—a chair that eerily resembled the dental chair Tommaso had been strapped to when he took his own life. Tyrone stood beside it, grinning. Guess it was only fitting, a bit of a karma boomerang.
I decided to shake things up a bit—and hopefully convince them I was here to cooperate and wouldn’t need the restraints. First small step in my plan: lull the enemy into complacence.
Before my guards could escort me to the exam chair, I strode over to it and settled myself in, wrapping my robe around my legs so it wouldn’t trail on the floor. Best part: It put Tyrone out of sight behind me, making it easier to avoid his narrow-eyed glower. At least until he moved to stand beside Francesca at the desk in the center of the room.
From Leo’s memories of his discussions with Tommaso, I knew Francesca’s research needed two things from me: my stem cells to replicate the artificial prion disease and my eggs to inseminate and create a new generation of children who carried my unique mutation.
Both of which required time to prepare my body with special hormone injections—giving me a window of opportunity to escape. After the children received the cure.
That part still had me worried. Francesca had shown no hesitation in killing innocents. Were Tommaso’s research and my DNA enough to convince her to keep her word and save the children back home?
The only way for her plan to save her family to work would be if she kept the cure secret, a precious commodity to be doled out to the highest bidder. I could almost imagine Daniel’s nod of approval that I was finally shedding my sentimental view of the world and instead seeing human lives in terms of the commerce and power they could be bargained for.
Francesca took a tablet from the standing desk and arched an eyebrow at me. Maybe her appearance was colored by Daniel’s memories filtering through my mind, but although I knew she had to be in her late fifties, she appeared much younger. Her face was creaseless, her hair even darker than mine without a hint of gray. Only her eyes, piercing and merciless, revealed her age.
“Your Mr. Price won’t release Tommaso’s research until he has confirmation that you arrived here unharmed.” She turned the tablet, and Devon’s face appeared.
From the equipment behind him, I realized he was at Good Sam’s, sitting in one of the ugly visitor chairs. The view shifted the slightest bit, revealing Flynn beside him in a hospital bed. She winked at me, letting me know more than Devon couldn’t mention or show: Ryder was okay, the children were okay, everyone was okay.
“Angela, are you all right?” he asked, shifting the screen to focus on his face, which revealed no emotion, appropriate for negotiations. Any stranger viewing the feed would be hard-pressed to interpret that quick glimpse of Flynn in the background.
“I’m fine. As soon as Louise verifies the cure, you can release the research.” I waited, hoping he got my message to stall. I wanted the children to get the treatment they needed, but I also wanted to make sure they got the right treatment. After all, the Lazarettos were masters at the art of poison.
Without missing a beat, he nodded. “Of course. Let me know when—”
“That was not our agreement,” Tyrone interrupted.
“Of course it was. Angela’s cooperation in exchange for the cure. I’m not a physician. I’ll need to confirm the treatment before we use it on children. Then I’ll send you the research.”
Once I knew the treatment worked and the children were safe, all I needed to do was ensure that Francesca would never again be able to infect anyone with the prion disease that the children and I carried. That was the gaping void in my nebulous plan, but I’d only just arrived. Hopefully, a little time spent with Francesca and her research facilities would provide a solution.
Francesca ended the video call and waved my attendants away. They drifted down the stairs. Tyrone lingered despite Francesca’s pointed glance. “Mother, surely you’re not going to negotiate with these outsiders?”
“Leave us.” Francesca settled into the only other chair in the room, a leather armchair suitable for a CEO.
He glared in my direction and left.
We were alone. Mother and daughter.
Blood enemies.
Her gaze was one of appraisal. “I could take what I need from you.”
“You could try. But you’d also risk damaging the only…what do you call people like me? Vessel. I understand we’re quite rare. And valuable.” I felt like I was playing a role in a movie, repeating lines fed to me by another woman, someone much calmer, more in control than I was. I have no idea who I was channeling, maybe Sister Patrice with her serene refusal to accept defeat, no matter how overwhelming the odds.
Whoever I was pretending to be as I settled back and raised an eyebrow at Francesca, she bought it.
“Maybe I don’t need to give Mr. Price the treatment,” she countered. “After all, if Tommaso was able to create a transmissible form of the Scourge with access to only a sample of your blood, think what I and my team can do with an unlimited supply of your stem cells?”
Tommaso had had a sample of my blood? The image of a blood bank bag of plasma floated across my vision. I thought back, remembered the Good Sam blood drive from last year. Nice to have at least one mystery solved. But it wasn’t helpful as far as the current crisis.
“It took Tommaso over a year—do you have that long?” I nodded to her hands, both shaking with tremors. It could have just as easily been me unable to control my muscle spasms, but I’d take whatever luck threw my way.
She clamped one hand over the other, pressing them against the arm of her chair. “There are other ways to force you to cooperate. Your adopted family, I imagine you’re quite close to them.”
“My real family. The family my father chose. Instead of staying with you.”
Her hands tightened into fists, and the muscles around her mouth tightened. I knew that look, had seen it often enough in the ER when things didn’t go the way people wanted them to. She wanted to hit me. Good, I’d struck a chord.
I relaxed in my chair as if it was a chaise lounge instead of an instrument of torture. Waved a hand toward the windows with their exquisite views. “Does everyone here have fatal insomnia?”
She blinked at the change of topic. “Yes. No one comes here who doesn’t suffer from the Scourge. This is our sanctuary.”
“Actually, I think the word you’re looking for is cemetery. How convenient it must be for the rest of the family, the healthy ones, to exile the people who actually contribute the most. They take the credit, enjoy the riches and power you—”
“We,” she said pointedly.
I shrugged away her correction, refusing to associate myself with this band of cutthroats. “The riches you create and share with them. That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t it? If you have control of the prions, a way to spread them, as well as the cure, then you have all the power.”
“Maybe you are a Lazaretto after all. What do you really want?”
“Only what we asked for. The cure for the children and myself. Along with an end to this nonsense about spreading prions into the populatio
n. You’re a scientist, you must see the danger in that.”
“Danger we’re immune to,” she countered. “Why do you think it’s nonsense?”
“I know that, until you found me, your other cohorts were failures.”
Her hands relaxed, and I knew I’d made a serious mistake. She shook her head at me as she smiled. Despite the sunlight streaming through the windows, the room felt chilly. “You think the other cohorts were failures?”
“Isn’t that why you had Tyrone and his brother kill them?”
“No. My dear, we didn’t destroy the other cohorts because we failed to infect them with the Scourge. We destroyed the evidence of how successful we were. Too successful by far—the Scourge we created killed everyone, burned out of control. They were dead before any of them could ever have been useful as a Vessel. Dead before we could even begin to attempt a treatment.”
My playacting failed me, and I sat up, alarmed as I glimpsed the full extent of what she’d done. “How many cohorts were there? How many types of prion disease were you playing with?”
“I created new mutations in each of my children. Those formed the basis of my clinical trials,” she replied with the smile of a proud mother. “Twenty-seven in total, including you.”
Twenty-seven new strains of deadly prions? All transmissible, able to infect anyone in the world? I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even begin to form the words, much less get them past my lips clamped tight against the horror.
Then I realized one other thing. The final proof of just how terribly I’d miscalculated. “You don’t have a cure, do you?”
“I never used the word ‘cure.’ That was Mr. Price.”
“You’ve destroyed the other prions, right?” Desperation colored my voice.
Her eyes crinkled in delight as she realized she’d found the price of my cooperation. “Our family has protected the Venetian Republic for centuries. We saved them from the Black Death by inventing the concept of quarantine with island sanctuaries such as this one.”
I frowned at her answer—or lack of one.
“Do you know what they call quarantine islands, the Italian name?”
I shook my head, still reeling from the realization that one woman had control of twenty-seven different plagues that would make the Black Death seem like the common cold if any one of them ever escaped into the world at large.
“Lazaretto,” she answered her own question. “They named them in our honor. Our family has a long tradition of quarantining the dangers that threaten the world. I’m merely continuing that tradition.”
It took me a moment to translate. “You didn’t destroy the prions.”
“Of course not,” she answered. “They’re all stored here, safe and sound. Ready for when I need them. The perfect weapons. To protect my family. Maybe even someday to save our world. After all, we are immune.”
I leapt from my chair, wanting to run, wanting to throttle her, wanting to do...something. And immediately realized how helpless I was against the threat she wielded. How could I have been so naïve? Thinking all I needed to do was save the children and prevent any further use of the prions we carried? “We, this family, are a few hundred people in a world of seven billion innocents who are at risk.”
“Exactly. A world run amok, filled with despots and needless suffering. But you, my dear, lost daughter, are going to help me save first our family, and then the world.”
Chapter 44
RYDER FOUND FRESH clothing hanging in the closet of his hospital room: a T-shirt and jeans, clean socks and underwear, a pair of sneakers. His sister’s work, most likely. He’d asked the nurses to send all visitors away—he had enough on his hands trying to ignore the drumming in his head and pain spiking his chest with each breath, not to mention his worries about Rossi. Was she okay? Where had they taken her?
A thousand visions of exactly what they could be doing to her gave him the strength he needed to make it from his bed and across the room. It took him the better part of an hour, and he felt like he might throw up, but he’d made it.
The simple act of dressing took even longer. He glanced in the mirror attached to the closet as he opened the door. The surgeon had shaved his head, and a horseshoe of staples surrounded an area above his ear that was stained brown-red with bruising. The two black eyes surprised him. Although most of the swelling had gone down, they were dark indigo and purple with a green-yellow tint to the skin below.
He took a breath, regretted it. Shrugged free of the patient gown and spotted the matching bruises along his rib cage. Sent a prayer heavenward, in thanks to whoever had invented ballistic vests. Slowly, with agonizing movements, he managed to dress himself. Only had to fall back against the bed four times when the room threatened to turn turtle.
Tying his shoes turned out to be the most logistically difficult maneuver. Bending over was out of the question, not without his crap balance sending him to the floor, and pulling each leg up to his chest made breathing impossible as pain exploded in his chest. He ended up tying the laces loosely, just enough so they wouldn’t drag and trip him, dropping his shoes to the floor, then sliding each foot in.
Mission accomplished.
He shuffled out the door and down the hall. A quick glance at the board behind the nurses’ station gave him Flynn’s room number, three doors down. He tried to force himself not to lean against the wall, but without a hand to guide him, his dizzy, off-balance brain kept sending him off course. The buzzing in his head wasn’t helping either.
Finally, he reached the door. Flynn lay in bed, her leg swathed in bandages, an IV snaking out of her arm. Beside her, working on a tablet, Devon Price sat in one of the two visitor’s chairs.
At the sight of Price sitting there, unharmed, not even a damn wrinkle in his damn designer suit, rage flashed over Ryder. His head thundered in time with his heartbeat as he bounded across the room. Price looked up, just in time for Ryder’s fist to land squarely on his jaw, knocking him sideways, out of his chair.
Ryder stood there, panting, the room swimming around him, head still pounding. Price scrambled to his feet, hands up, ready to defend himself. Ryder heaved in a breath and stepped back until his legs hit the edge of the other visitor’s chair, then he sank into it before he fell down and made a real fool of himself.
“You son of a bitch,” he snarled as Price straightened his jacket and regained his seat. “I saw you. You gave her to them. You gave Rossi up. To those, those bastards—”
Price rubbed his jaw as he considered his answer. “I did it to save her. And she did it to save you.”
Flynn watched from the bed, her expression half amused and half disdain—in other words, typical Flynn.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Ryder demanded, hands fisting with the urge to hit him again. His bruised knuckles protested the movement, and he flexed his fingers to make sure he hadn’t broken anything. “For all we know, those animals are dissecting her, experimenting on her...”
He trailed off, unable to put into words the horror he felt. Even Flynn seemed aghast at the idea of Rossi in the hands of the Lazarettos. She shifted her weight to sit up straighter and said, “No. They need her alive. Isn’t that what Louise said?”
Price nodded. “While you were napping the past two days,” he told Ryder, “Louise went through Tommaso’s research that I recovered.” He said the last in a tone of aggrievement as if Ryder hadn’t given credit where credit was due. What the hell did Price think that sock in the jaw was about? “She says Tommaso was on to something. Angela has a unique mutation. One that not only allowed him to create an artificial prion disease he injected into the children, but one that he thought would also provide a potential cure if he had more of Angela’s stem cells to work with.”
“See? They’re cutting her up, and for what? To make more sick kids? While they keep the cure for themselves. We have to stop them. Which,” he knifed a glare at Price, “would have been a helluva lot easier if someone hadn’t betrayed her and sa
crificed her to start with.”
“It was her decision.” Price met his glare effortlessly. “She was going to jump, Ryder. Splash herself all over the steps of the cathedral. That’s how desperate she was. But I made a deal.”
“Oh, great. Like father, like son. Another Kingston wheeling and dealing. How many innocent lives is it going to cost this time?”
“Rossi and Tommaso’s research in exchange for the cure for the children.”
“You know that will never happen. They’ll figure it out without Tommaso’s research, and then they still have Rossi. Or they give us a so-called cure that ends up making the kids better one day and killing them the next. These people cannot be trusted.”
Flynn smiled at that. Her toothy, predator smile that was usually a prelude to bullets flying and blood flowing. “That’s why Devon is planning to go get her. He tracked her as far as Venice.”
“Italy?” It made sense. “I’ve no jurisdiction there, and no way can we get the Feds on board, not in the time frame we have. The State Department will never allow it, and you can bet the Italian authorities will be hopelessly compromised.”
Price rose to his feet. “Guess that’s one of the perks of being a private citizen. I don’t have to worry about rules and regulations.”
Despite his throbbing head and blurry vision, not to mention the weird buzzing rattling through his brain, Ryder pushed himself upright. “No way in hell am I letting you go alone.”
“What about your rules, your chain of command, Detective?”
“Hell with that. Even cops get to take a vacation every once in a while.”
“I’ll take care of the children and their families. You two take care of Angie. And yourselves,” Flynn said from the bed, regret that she couldn’t join them clear in her tone. “Bring her home.”
“We will,” Ryder promised. Price nodded his agreement. Together, they left, for once moving in perfect accord.
