“This isn’t going to be easy at the rate she’s healing,” he muttered, sending me further into a panicked state.
“Hang in there, Lucy,” Dara said with forced calm, sliding a dirty look in Abe’s direction as she slipped a mask over my face. “I’m putting you under, so you won’t feel a thing.” Given how hard I was breathing, it didn’t take long for the anesthetic to kick in. The pain drifted away and an artificial sense of calm came over me. Unable to keep my eyes open any longer, I succumbed willingly.
When I awoke, the first thing I noticed was that there was no pain in my ankle. In fact there was no feeling at all, which panicked me. I tried to lift my head, but found that I couldn’t move that either.
“The anesthetic is still wearing off. Don’t try to fight it.”
I rolled my eyes as far to the side as I could, surprised to hear Andre’s voice instead of one of the doctors. “Where…” I coughed. My throat was as dry as the desert. Andre poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the side table and held the straw to my lips.
“Thanks,” I rasped when I was able to speak again. “Where’s Abe?”
“He’s here, just running some tests and talking with your father,” Andre replied. “I wanted to be here when you woke up and Abe thought it might be for best if I was.”
“Why? Did something happen? Did it work? Am I healed?”
“Your ankle is fine and your enzyme levels are back to normal, at least for the moment,” he assured me. “You’ll have to wear a monitor to make sure nothing changes. But there was a slight… complication. Nothing dangerous,” he added hastily, but there was something big that he wasn’t telling me and I didn’t like it. “Your health isn’t compromised by it…”
“Just tell me what’s wrong,” I sighed.
“It’s your appearance,” he said at last.
“What about my appearance?” I asked. “Did I end up with a scar from the surgery or something?”
“No, not a scar,” he said with obvious discomfort. “Your appearance, um, well… it altered somehow. No one’s quite sure exactly what happened, but given that both Isaac and Cynda are able to change their physical appearance, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility.”
“That could be useful,” I said thoughtfully, but then paused. Andre seemed a little too uncomfortable for this to be a slight change in my hair color or skin tone similar to what my father was able to do. Cynda’s chimeric transformations, on the other hand, turned her into something barely recognizable as human. “Spill it, Andre,” I said, panicking slightly. “How bad is it?”
“It’s not bad, Lucy. It’s just…”
While Andre was stammering, I had managed to get enough feeling back into my arms to lift my hand to my face and saw for myself just how bad it was. My skin, which had always been extremely pale, was the same matte black as the ES nobility, and my fingernails were tipped with short, but sharp, silvery claws.
“What the actual fuck?”
Chapter 15
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Andre said hastily.
“Get me a mirror and let me make that determination,” I growled back.
“Fine,” he said, standing up. “But wait here and don’t try to get up until the anesthesia completely wears off.”
While I waited for Andre to return, I decided to see if my transformation netted me any cool abilities. I ran the claws of one hand over the back of the other. They felt sharp, but not razor sharp like the talons on most ES mods. Intrigued by this, I gripped the metal railing on the side of the operating table as hard as I could. Nothing happened, not even a dent. I gripped harder. All I managed to do was give myself a muscle cramp.
“What are you doing?” Andre asked, handing me a small mirror.
“Experimenting,” I said with a frustrated sigh. “Apparently my transformation was only cosmetic. I’m no stronger than I was before.” I hesitated for a moment before lifting the mirror. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to see myself like this. Finally, I raised the courage to look.
The first thing I noticed was my eyes. They were the same pale gold color, but the white part looked odd. They were still white, and a little bloodshot, but somehow dull. It was like the difference between looking at a light bulb that was on versus one that was off. I hadn’t noticed this in any of the ES mods I had met before, but when I thought about it, they must have looked the same because bright white eyes would have stood out against skin so dark it absorbed the surrounding light. That was the next thing I noticed. The matte black color of my skin was smooth and even, with no variations. My lips, that had once been a dark pink blot against my pale skin, were the same color as everything else. I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue to find that even that was the same matte black. The only bright spot was my now seemingly blinding white teeth, complete with fangs that refused to retract.
Comically, the only thing that had changed about my hair was the color. Now, instead of a dark brown mass of unruly curls, I had a drab black mess of unruly curls that still frizzed uncontrollably, leaving an unholy halo around my head. The shallow part of me, which was a bigger part than I wanted to admit, was devastated. ES mods, despite their odd, demonic appearance, were all insanely attractive. On me, the transformation just highlighted every flaw, from my out of control hair to my giant nose and small upper lip.
“Please tell me this isn’t permanent,” I groaned.
“I doubt it,” Andre reassured me. How he could even look at me was incomprehensible. “Isaac is going to see if he can teach you how he transforms.”
“I hope it works,” I sighed and closed my eyes, but instead of blotting out the world, my vision just dimmed slightly. “What the hell?”
“What is it?” Andre asked.
I grabbed the mirror and held it up to my face as I tried again. Instead of normal eyelids, a thin, dark membrane slid from the corner of my eye, completely obscuring my eyeball, yet I could still see just fine. I concentrated on actually lowering my lids and this time my eye closed correctly. “I don’t like that,” I said with a shudder.
“Can you see through the membrane?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, but it’s like wearing sun glasses.”
“That’s one function,” I heard my father say. I opened my eyes and saw that both he and Abe had come in. “The other is to obscure the brightness of your irises when hiding.”
“As useful as I’m sure that is to a vamp, I’m freaked out by it. Can you help me change back?”
“I think so,” he replied with a smile. “The old bastard triggered the changes in me with traumatic pain. I suspect that the pain you experienced from trying to heal your broken bone was similarly traumatic. It took some concentration, but with practice, I was able to control it. I will warn you that it took me a couple of years to control it to the point where I could choose my appearance, but that shouldn’t be an issue.”
“Your natural appearance is hardwired into your DNA,” Abe explained. “You should ‘default’ to this if you are able to force the change.”
“Okay, what do I do?” I didn’t care about choosing a different appearance. I just wanted to look like myself again. Well, that wasn’t completely honest. If I ended up having the same ability as my father, I would have no moral issue against trying to tweak my appearance just a little. I mean really, people get plastic surgery all the time, so it wouldn’t be that strange.
“First, get a good mental picture of what you look like normally,” my father instructed. “Start with your skin color. Picture the color it is now, and concentrate on it fading back to normal.”
“Seriously?”
“For now,” he amended. “It’s an automatic command that your brain sends to your body. Just like breathing, it should become second nature, but unlike breathing, it will take some concentration to learn.”
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said and closed my eyes, both lids this time. At least I had figured that one out pretty quick. I did as my father instructe
d and pictured what I normally looked like. Then, I pictured my current appearance. As I imagined my color draining, I felt an odd tug all over, which gave me hope that it was working. I opened my eyes and looked at my hands. There was no change.
“You have to concentrate for more than a few seconds,” he said. “You’ll feel a physical change.”
I closed my eyes again. This time, when I felt the tug, I kept concentrating. Suddenly, I felt a strange shock, almost like a chill, but warm instead of cold, and I heard several startled gasps. “Did it work?” I asked and opened my eyes. My fingernails were no longer silver talons and my skin was quite pale. In fact, it was too pale.
“Maybe you concentrated just a little too hard,” Abe said with a slight smile.
I picked up the mirror and surveyed the results of the experiment. Abe was right. My skin and hair were both now the same pale, colorless shade as Cynda’s. Once again though, where Cynda’s waif-like appearance and baby-fine hair worked, my features looked just as harsh and wrong as they had with dark coloring.
“Try again,” my father instructed. “This time, concentrate on your hair color. Perhaps your skin tone is too subtle a change to master right away.
I tried this and felt the strange shock almost immediately. I opened my eyes and held up the mirror. I was back to matte black. “Ugh!” I spat. “This sucks!”
“Give it time,” he said, patting my arm gently. “Colorless is actually my natural appearance, and Cynda’s as well, so it’s not terribly surprising that instead of your normal appearance, you get this one. Keep practicing and you should be able to get yourself back to normal.”
“Fine,” I said and closed my eyes, willing myself back to albino mode. “Can somebody send Tanya down for an emergency makeover? I’ve got work to do and there’s no sense in scaring the crap out of everyone.”
After a full exam from Abe, who determined that despite my appearance, the transfusion seemed to be working, Tanya was allowed in to transform me back into something resembling myself. Admittedly, she did an amazing job. After just an hour, I looked normal enough that I was comfortable roaming the halls without causing a scene. As I left the medical wing, I ran into Cynda, who waved her cast free arm at me.
“Oh hey! Abe didn’t tell me he was going to get you next. Were there any complications?”
“Nope,” she said with a silly grin. “But he told me what happened to you, so they pumped me full of laughing gas just in case. My arm healed up with no problems. You look normal though. Maybe a little orange-er than normal.”
“Yeah, that’s the spray tan,” I said with slight embarrassment. “Tanya may have overdone that just a bit, but trust me, I look much better than I did. Are you wearing a monitor?”
“Uh huh,” she nodded. “I still can’t go back to school yet, but I’m kind of okay with that.”
“Why?” I asked. Ever since she fell ill, Cynda’s biggest worry had been falling behind in school. When she broke her arm, it nearly devastated her.
“Honestly? Claire makes this crap make more sense than any of my teachers had. Even geography. If she can get authorization to home school me, I might actually graduate on time and have a shot at college.”
“That’s a good reason, but I thought you liked going to school to hang out with people your own age.”
“Actually, most of the kids are assholes,” she mumbled.
“What do you mean? Are you being bullied?” I asked. This was the first I had heard out of her other than the fact that the work was overwhelming and I was concerned.
“Not really, but there’s this one group of girls who say nasty things about me and don’t even try to hide it. And Jonah has a crush on one of them, so he’s being a dick too.”
Jonah was one of the boys we rescued from Blackthorn Plantation who was now under the care of Lona and Miles. He and Cynda were in the same year even though he was a year younger.
“Talk to Claire,” I suggested. “Maybe she can get you into the accelerated program and you can go in as a senior next year. That should shut them up.”
“Maybe,” she said halfheartedly. “Anyway, I got to get back to my studying either way.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “But seriously, Cynda, talk to me. I want to know about things like that.”
As she walked away, I made a mental note to talk to Miles about Jonah’s behavior and to check with Andre to make sure Ben wasn’t running into any similar issues. But first, I went back to the security office to start on the files I had abandoned earlier.
“Good evening,” I said and waved at Holly and Mike, who were both in the office.
“What’s so good about it?” Holly replied in a grumpy voice.
“Um,” I was taken aback by her out of character surliness. “I’m sort of back to normal and I’m still alive, so I guess that’s pretty good. Did I miss something? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing bad happened. I’m sorry. I’m just a little crabby. I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said with a weak smile. “I’m just running my last report and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“No worries,” I said and sat down at an empty terminal. As I pulled up the files and opened the archive, Holly shut down her station and stood up abruptly.
“See you in the morning,” she said to Mike and left.
“Okay, what was that all about?” I asked after she left.
“She’ll be fine,” Mike said with a small chuckle. “She’s just down because Lisette had to cancel her trip out here.”
“Lisette? Oh…” I said as Mike’s unspoken implications hit me. “Is she Holly’s mystery friend?”
“You heard nothing from me,” he replied with a wink. “Actually, she still hasn’t said anything to me, but Fausto’s taken it upon himself to play the concerned parent and has been grilling me about Holly for some time now. I can’t say I was too surprised. Lisette’s a firecracker, just like Holly. But it’s probably for the best if you don’t let on that you know anything.”
“Well that explains why she’s been acting so girly lately,” I said with a laugh. Mike was right, of everyone in the Paris division, I should have expected that Lisette was the one Holly had an interest in. They really were cut from the same cloth. Of course, Mike was just as over protective of Holly as Fausto was of Lisette, which was kind of adorable. “Your secret is safe with me,” I promised. “But why was the trip cancelled? I thought they were arriving in two days?”
“They discovered another functioning lab,” he explained. “Given all of the false information and dead end leads we’ve had lately, Evan decided that it would be in our best interest to secure it rather than destroy it outright.”
“He’s probably right, but isn’t that dangerous?” I asked.
“It’s an active lab, so yes, very dangerous,” he said with a nod. “That is why Lisette wanted to be on hand to oversee the transfer of data to our own labs.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “I hope they find something worth the risk.”
“Me too, Lucy. Me too.”
I spent the next several hours reading through the correspondences of this ‘L. Laurie’ to various people including corrupt government agents and vampires alike. Nearly everything was the same. Laurie would offer to destroy a lab for a competitor and negotiate a price. After that, an email would be sent to someone from Eclipse with instructions on where to find the lab. Once the money was collected, she would offer to have the lab she had just negotiated with destroyed for a sum of money from yet another lab.
Finally, after what felt like thousands of the same email, I found something interesting. Laurie sent an email back in July to a company called Clover Genetics in Alexandria, asking if they could produce a drug that would neutralize the toxins in the hunter’s enzyme. The reply, which came from a Dr. Wendella Mielieu, claimed that her lab had been unsuccessful in creating an effective vaccine, but that they were close to creating a substance that could suppress the enzyme. Another email was sent, negotiating the te
rms of their deal. Oddly enough, L. Laurie’s initial offer was the destruction of Blackthorn Plantation.
Reading this, I went back further and sure enough, there was an email to Adam Thorn, aka Bluebeard, several weeks prior, asking for genetic material in exchange for destroying a competing lab. The date of the arranged transfer was the same day Ingrid, Holly, Miles and I went out there under the pretense of being Daughters of Darkness. Not only did this explain why the government was able to assemble an army and attack the plantation on an apparent moment’s notice, but it also might have explained why the ES were at Blackthorn that day. I sent an email off to Evan and showed Mike what I found.
“We saw that,” Mike said. “But considering that Blackthorn was already destroyed, we didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“But what about this part?” I pointed out the correspondence with Clover Genetics. “Something messed me and Cynda up pretty badly and this sounds fishy. What do you want to bet this mumbo jumbo here is some sort of code for my DNA,” I said, pointing to the request for genetic material that listed a bunch of seemingly meaningless numbers and letters.
“You may be onto something,” Mike said thoughtfully. “Evan’s on his way back.”
“Where was he?”
“Out with your father and Andre. They wanted to get an early start. I suspect that they’re searching for your new vampire friend, Damien.”
“Are you serious?” I was more than a little miffed than neither Andre nor my father informed me of this plan when I saw them just a few hours ago. “They’re not going to find him without me, I guarantee that.”
“Well they haven’t yet, so I suspect you may be right.”
“What do you mean by they haven’t yet? Is that where they’ve been going?” It was bad enough that I was laid up for nearly a week and unable to do anything more than research the information at headquarters, but knowing that Evan, Andre, and my father were out looking for Damien without so much as telling me what they were up to was upsetting.
“That, among other things,” Evan said as he entered the office followed by Ingrid. “We’ve been looking for ES in general, but so far it’s been a bust.”
The Eyes of the Sun: The Complete Trilogy Page 77
