Chapter Fifteen
Stacy
Contrary to television popularity, there was nothing glamorous about being a forensic chemist. And since Stacy didn’t work for the FBI, she didn’t have robotics and computer holograms and all those neat things that made droves of college students try to make sense out of organic chemistry and eventually give up trying. As Stacy had learned the hard way, with chemistry, you either had the knack for it, or you didn’t.
And if you worked for the government with lots of money, your workplace would be a pristine, shiny lab with all the bells and whistles. Otherwise, your domain would look like hers: over-crowded equipment on every square inch of bench space, and folders and papers in organized disarray all over the space left.
“Hey,” she told Chaz with an embarrassed shrug. “I call this home.”
Usually, most of the staff worked normal hours unless there was an absolute rush on something. Besides, with budget cuts, no one wanted to pay for overtime. Hence, she figured by ten o’clock or so, everyone would be gone. She was right.
Chaz would be hard to explain.
Not that he wasn’t anyway. And if Stacy wanted to try performing the scientific process on their relationship, she’d probably go nuts. Nothing logical applied to him. Or them. So, Stacy had decided, at least for the time being, to go with what was and just accept.
Not an easy thing for her to do.
He stood off to the side, looking a tad uncomfortable. Stacy started to laugh. “You won’t catch anything, you know.”
He smiled back at her. “Wouldn’t anyway.” She watched his smile fade. “I’m not real comfortable in tight spaces.”
Really? she wondered, “Why not?”
He shrugged, but his gaze wouldn’t meet hers. He took a deep breath and walked around, running his finger down the edge of the counter. He picked up a flask, only to set it back down. “Waking up in a coffin isn’t fun.”
Stacy couldn’t imagine how that felt. The terror of not knowing if he’d be able to dig his way out. How far down under the ground was he, and— Stacy stopped her thoughts right there. She walked over to him and threw her arms around him, burying her head in his chest.
He sighed and wrapped her up in his arms. He kissed the top of her head and let go. “Thank you.”
A fierce determination filled her face. She couldn’t imagine that or the rest of his existence. What he’d endured made her want to know more.
“Do you know anything about your physical attributes besides the obvious? Hunter told me you lose about two pints of blood a day. Where does it go?”
“I have no idea.”
“Haven’t you ever been curious?”
“No. I’ve never thought of myself as a lab rat.”
Stacy nodded. “Sorry. I forgot. Blacksmith, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever been at least curious?”
“Maybe, but most of my time, I can tell you, has been spent on trying to find my next meal.” His gaze turned grim. “Don’t forget, a lion doesn’t think about what it is. It simply hunts.”
“Is that how you see yourself? As an animal?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. I used the analogy because the lion has no choice. Either it hunts, or it starves. I’m sure that some of your books or television shows have described the need for blood. Well, I can tell you, it’s far worse than anything a human can imagine. So no, I don’t think anyone has had that much time on their hands to be curious.”
Wow, Stacy thought, wondering if Chaz knew how bitter he sounded.
“I can hear your heartbeat,” she answered, “which means it pumps the blood you drink, which allows oxygen to reach your cells and gives you the energy to move. That’s important, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “It is now. To both of us. An army of rogues could destroy us all.”
Stacy shivered. “You know, it’s funny.” She cleared out a space to work near her microscope. “I always thought a nuclear bomb was the worst threat to the human race.”
The sadness in his gaze told her the truth. “Now, you know.”
She shook her head, still unable to absorb the truth. Because it was also his truth. And Stacy still hadn’t come to terms with that fact either.
“I guess I do.” She sighed. “Come on, let’s get to work.”
Stacy thought her first step would be to see what rogue blood looked like under a microscope. So she created a slide and flaked off a tiny amount from the cross. What she found surprised her.
“This is interesting. I’m not really seeing anything unusual. Except that there aren’t that many cells. I guess I was expecting something like a sickle cell or some sort of abnormality.”
“So vampires aren’t abnormal?” he joked.
Stacy didn’t reply, which answered his question.
“I need a control,” she said
“And that would be me, wouldn’t it?”
She was excited by the prospect of discovery. “You betcha. You see, when you’re trying to find out what’s right and what’s wrong in an experiment, you have to have some kind of standard to go by. Tag, you’re it.”
“You’re going to use a needle?”
Stacy laughed. Who would’ve thought that the big, bad vampire would be squeamish around needles? “Exactly. So come here, big boy, and take your pinprick like a man.”
When he saw how small the lancet was, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“You do realize this is going to hurt me way more than it will hurt you,” Chaz teased.
“I’ll kiss it and make it better.”
His face tightened, and fear filled his gaze. “No, you won’t. I have no idea what ingesting my blood will do to you.”
“All right, all right. Take it easy. I was just joking.”
He seemed to relax, and Stacy used the lancet to get his blood. Because he bled so much, just this one little stab enabled her to fill a small tube. From there, she put his blood on the slide.
Again, she found nothing unusual except that he had more cells than the rogue.
She sighed. “I’m not sure if I’m on the right track or not, but I’m going to hypothesize here for a moment.”
“Hypo—what?” he teased again. “Scientists.”
Stacy grinned. “Blacksmiths. Sheesh.” She rolled her eyes and continued. “First, you bleed too much and too easily. That means you probably have no coagulants in your blood.
Maybe no platelets either. A pinprick or a tiny cut should be deadly. You shouldn’t stop bleeding, but then you heal almost instantaneously. I’m not sure how you do that. but it is logical. And you slow rogues down by causing a bleed out.”
Chaz turned serious. “Bleeding can be very dangerous. Even when we’re not trying. In the ‘old’ days, swords. Knives. An ax nearly severed my arm once. I didn’t think I’d make it.”
“I get the picture,” she grimaced. “Humans have blood types that react with each other when mixed,” she continued. Stacy took out another slide and mixed both the rogue and Chaz’s blood on it. After a few moments, she looked at it under the microscope. Nothing. No clumps.
Made sense. “When two different blood types react with each other, the cells clump together—they conjugate,” she told him. “Antigens and antibodies. And that can be deadly. Obviously, you have no coagulants in your blood because you can’t have them.”
“That makes sense,” Chaz said.
And the antigens and antibodies? Neutralized somehow? Stacy frowned and wondered. Logic. Follow the logic. “Now I know I’m trying to use human attributes and apply them to vampires, and that may be totally incorrect, but think about this: you used to be human. Somewhere along the way, that has to be the starting point.”
“Starting point?” Chaz asked. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Stacy chuckled, sure of herself in at least one respect. “Yes. In spite of being abnormal, you follow logic. Your morphology makes sense. You can’t possibly accept all kinds of blo
od without keeping it moving in your system, so your blood hardly coagulates.”
“A stake through the heart does create a total bleed out,” Chaz told her, his tone thoughtful. “But that doesn’t completely kill us. Eventually, our skin knits together. Even around the stake.”
Wow. A little too much information there.
“Okay. So you live with a chronic condition I would term normocytic anemia. It means you have functioning red blood cells, just not enough of them. The fix for that is a transfusion. Which you do fairly often.”
“Okay. I’m following so far.”
“So, for a rogue, the blood cells can’t be replenished fast enough, but whatever it is that makes you heal so fast, won’t let a rogue die. Talk about a lousy Catch-22.”
He stilled. In a soft voice, he said, “Now you know why we have to kill ourselves.”
“Yeah,” Stacy murmured. “You know, that makes me wonder. What about this rosary pea extract of yours?”
“What about it?”
“How does it function?”
“I don’t know exactly. All I know is that the extract is the only thing that can slow a rogue down long enough for me to kill it.”
Stacy flipped open her laptop. “Abrus precatorius. The seeds contain a poison called Abrin.” She pulled up the chemical information on the poison. “It’s pretty damned toxic. And you say you make an extract out of it?”
“Yeah.”
“It causes bleeding of the internal organs when ingested.” Stacy followed some more information. “Says here that it’s also a protein synthesis inhibitor.”
“What does that mean?”
Hmmm. Now that wouldn’t work. Or would it? Wait a minute. Don’t they? Stacy felt her heart start to speed up. “Chaz. Do you have any extract on you? I only need a drop.”
He handed her his last vial. She took out a tiny droplet and put it on the slide with first his blood, then the rogue’s blood. The rogue’s slide turned clear almost immediately. His slide took longer but did the same.
“Fascinating,” she murmured. “Of course,” she breathed. “How else would you survive without a functioning liver? Or kidneys?”
“You lost me.”
“What? Oh. Sorry. Okay, here’s what I’m thinking. You have a mechanism inside of you. I’m guessing a protein, and I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. When a red blood cell finishes its task inside your body, where does it go? You don’t have a liver. You don’t have kidneys. Well, you might, but they don’t function. So what happens to the dead cells?”
“I don’t know.”
“Actually, I’m thinking a few things at this point. The phagocytes you ingest with whatever blood you take in aren’t enough to take care of all the dead cells you create, so you use up everything you can get your hands on.”
He shrugged. “Obviously. “
“And I’m thinking this protein, might be specific, might be more than one, and they help the rest of your cells heal really quickly. I’m not sure of the mechanism, but it allows your internal and external organs to stop you from bleeding. You always need to feed after you’re wounded, and you need more than usual, yes?”
“Yes.”
Stacy watched him start to pace then glance at his watch, then at her. With a concerned frown, he said, “We’ve been here an awfully long time. I’m not sure I like being this exposed, this open to attack.”
Stacy looked around at her cramped, overcrowded lab, and smiled. “Open to attack?” she asked.
He threw her a look. “You know exactly what I mean. Think you can hurry this up a bit?”
Stacy shook her head. “I tried to warn you, Chaz. This may take a lot longer than you expected.”
“The rogue has your scent, and more of those damned young vamps might try to find us,” he protested.
“But I’m just getting started,” Stacy complained. “Now, to continue. The rogue. He barely has any red cells in his blood. I’m not sure what could possibly do this, but his cells are being destroyed right after they get inside. Hence the need to gorge.”
“Okay. That makes sense.”
“And Abrin causes internal bleeding. So if the poison is creating an internal bleed out and the mechanism is out of control, well, now you know why it hurts a rogue.”
“Stacy. Please. I think we should go now.”
“Hush. Don’t talk to me. I’m thinking.”
He paced, and Stacy ignored him. She started researching proteins, but there were too many of them. After another couple of hours, she pinched the bridge of her nose and looked up. Chaz didn’t look happy.
“Can we go now? Please?” he begged. “We’ve been here way too long. Staying in one place like this is simply too dangerous. I didn’t think we would spend the entire night here.”
“But—” she protested.
He shook his head. “No, Stacy. Long enough. We need to be smart about this.”
“How? I’m the bait, whether I want to be bait or not. The rogue is going to find me whether we want it to or not.”
He winced. “I know. So my job is to keep you safe until you can figure out what’s going on.”
“Is…is that all?” she asked, her stomach hollowing. “Is that all you need me for?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Stacy, listen to me, this is the situation we’re in whether you want us there or not. Now I’m using the word ‘us,’ here, got that?”
She nodded, feeling a little better.
“Good,” he said. “Now we tried things your way, and that didn’t work out too well, did it?”
“No.”
“So let’s try this my way. It’s time to ask Hunter for his help. I think it’s time for us to stay at the mansion for a while.”
Stacy bit out a tight laugh. “I highly doubt that will be a welcome request.”
“He’ll have to deal.”
Would he? Stacy wasn’t sure she liked that at all. Since they were speaking of lions, going to Hunter’s was like having one guard for the entire zoo. Not a situation that gave you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. But as much as she didn’t like it, Chaz was right. There was only one way to continue what she’d started. She needed time to complete her studies.
“What if Hunter decides it’s too dangerous?”
Chaz shrugged. “Then it’s too dangerous. We go to plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“How? By keeping me somewhere I don’t want to be?”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“No, I want your promise. I want you to promise that you’ll let me come back for a time every night and continue what I’ve started. I have to. It’s the only way to find out what’s going on. Otherwise, I’ll come without you during the day.”
“And get yourself killed? He’ll pick up your scent here soon enough. Trust me on that one. I can’t stay awake. You know that. Damn it, be reasonable!”
A secret warmth stole through her veins. Maybe, despite his protests, he really cared. “I am.”
Suddenly, his face brightened. “What if I can get Hunter to set up a temporary lab at the mansion? This way, you can live and work there. It would keep the rogue off your trail for a while.”
Stacy’s jaw dropped. “Now you’re really asking for the moon.” Then the prospect of continuing her work made her heart beat faster. Hope seared through her. “Think he’ll go for it?”
Chaz grinned, obviously liking the idea more and more. “I have my ways. And I have allies. If I can’t, Sam will convince him.”
“Knowing Hunter,” Stacy said, “Even she might have trouble.”
“Trust me. Arrangements can be made. Arrangements can always be made.”
Chapter Sixteen
Chaz
Chaz had learned to ignore the stares a long time ago. Ignorance and prejudice were universal concepts for humans and vampires alike. Most vampires hated him on principle, and some were even jealous. They never let him forget exactly what he
was. Hunter might respect him, but only Sam truly accepted him for himself.
However, what they were doing to Stacy was unforgivable.
Damn if the woman wasn’t a marvel. As they walked down a long corridor on one of the lower floors of the mansion, she held herself erect and faced down every stare with a strength he didn’t know she had. She didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. She was trying to help a race that thought of her as a piece of meat.
He tightened his hand on her shoulder and glared at one young soldier who had the audacity to allow his gaze to linger on her. He would have complained, but the next thing he knew, Hunter was standing in front of the soldier, nose to nose. The soldier didn’t move a muscle, but Chaz could smell his fear.
His point made, Hunter stopped in the middle of the corridor and made his wishes clear. “The lady is my guest.” Hunter didn’t need to say more.
Chaz watched the tension drain out of her body as they walked past numerous doorways. Each soldier in the house had a small room where they lived, the higher the rank, the larger the room. The upper floors had more amenities and were reserved for the highest in rank. Then they came to the end of the corridor and stopped in front of a set of elevator doors.
Stacy stared up at him in surprise. “We’re going down?”
Chaz nodded. Hunter explained. “The upper floors look like a human house. The main floor is made up of offices, complete with a cafeteria of sorts for the people who work here. Downstairs? I suppose I’ll just have to show you.”
“But I don’t understand. Downstairs? We’re on top of the Palisades. Even I know a rock when I sit on top of one.”
Hunter smirked. “We can also be quite industrious when we put our minds to things. Although I’ve modernized much of the equipment such as the elevators, we spent years digging out the shafts ourselves by using modified mining techniques.”
“Mining techniques? By yourselves?” she echoed.
Chaz smiled. “You’ll see.”
The elevator went down to what Chaz would have called the second basement. Two soldiers snapped to attention when they saw Hunter step out. The corridor widened into a gigantic room filled with banks of refrigerators lining the outside walls.
Blood Rogue, #1 Page 13
