Sasha shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
Rory stared at them. Neither of them had argued. Neither of them had protested about being told what to do. Yet they were both strong men, leaders in their own right and easily capable of working on their own.
She cleared her throat and glanced at Nial. “I suppose we should get to work.”
“Let me know when the first batch is made,” Nial said.
“That should be in about three days,” Rory called after him as he headed for the door.
It took five days, because the process had to be set up first, then streamlined for mass production. Plus, she was teaching both men what they needed to do as she went. There were mistakes made. There were three fussy stages in the development of Pyrrhus, including the glass still and evaporation and condensation process at the very end, when pure Pyrrhus dripped down into the big glass sphere. If the base liquid was evaporated too fast, the residue left behind became unstable and overheated and would implode inside the vats. That happened twice before they were able to adjust the still to produce the right temperature at a steady rate.
On day six, Rory called Nial into the lab and handed him the tiny beaker of pink liquid. “Careful!” she warned as he held it up to the light.
“It doesn’t look the same as the stuff Marcus made,” Nial said.
“You said he had gallons of it. That is a metric quarter cups’ worth. Drop it and you’ll take out the lab. It’s the same, Nial,” Rory assured him.
“You’ve tested it?”
She rolled her eyes and glanced at Sasha and Dante. Without speaking, they turned and pulled out the big ceramic tray they had been using for testing. Dante put a house brick in the middle of it.
“Go ahead,” Rory told Nial.
He leaned over the tray and carefully poured half of the Pyrrhus onto the brick. It spread out over the rough surface, filling the divots and cracks, then seemed to soak into the brick, leaving a wet spot behind.
Nial frowned.
“Watch,” Dante said softly.
The brick crumbled. It was like watching ice melt in the sun, speeded up a hundred times. The surface of the brick grew soft and bubbly, then sunk in on itself. As the middle turned into primordial ooze, the two outer ends of the brick toppled backward, exposing the runny insides. Steam and vapor rose up above it.
Rory had seen it happen a dozen times already and still found it fascinating, in a gruesome, unsettling way.
Nial put the remainder of the beaker on the counter very carefully and stepped away. “Scary,” he breathed.
“It is,” Rory agreed. “How much, do you think?”
He pushed his hand through his hair. “Who knows?” he said heavily. “If we never use it, any amount is enough. If we have to use it, then how much will we need?”
“How long is a length of leather?” Sasha asked.
“Piece of string,” Dante amended.
“That, too.”
Rory understood Nial’s quandary exactly. “We’ll make it until something interrupts us or gives us a reason to stop.”
Nial drew in a very deep breath, his chest rising. He let it out. “Good enough.” His voice was strained.
He didn’t step back inside the lab after that. Rory reported to him every few days on the rate of production and how much of the pink liquid had been stacked on the shelves in the corner of the lab. Nial always listened with an absent expression, as though he was concentrating on other things.
It seemed he had been affected by the fatalistic doomsday predictions everyone around him was crying. She wondered how long it would take him to quote Robert Oppenheimer and mutter about how he had become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Yet Nial didn’t tell her stop, so Rory made more, because death-bringer or no, without it, humans would fall.
* * * * *
Everyone liked Koca almost from the moment he met them, which Kate found interesting, because Azarel was in many respect still an outsider. It didn’t help that the Serene One insisted on living in the pool house, while Koca stayed in the house. Elah didn’t sleep the way humans did, he explained, but they did need down time, which included walking barefoot on earth.
Winter had glanced at Kate when he said that, hiding a smile.
So Kate introduced Koca to the child, both of them sitting on the sun loungers while she played in the earth beneath the palm. Koca talked to her in their clicking, chattering tongue. She stood and came toward him, then turned around, for him to look at.
She was wearing the overalls and teeshirt that Kate had bought for her although she tended to kick off her shoes at the first opportunity. The scratches on her stomach were completely healed.
Koca blinked at her, then turned to Kate. His big eyes seemed grave. “You have done well. Lini does not sag.” He blinked. “I mean, she is well.”
“I understand,” Kate said. “Only, now you are here, maybe we could find a way to get her back to Elah who care about her? Do you have extended families? Her…” She glanced at Lini and dropped her voice. “Her parents are dead. At least, we assume they were her parents.”
“You are her mother now,” Koca said, sounding puzzled.
Kate drew back. “No. I’m not. I can’t be.”
Koca shifted his head from side to side. “You laid her against the earth. I mean, you put her to rest. At her ease. She told me you did.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m her mother.” Something squeezed her throat. “You don’t understand. I can’t take care of a child, even if she thinks I should.”
“I see.” Koca looked at her. “In our culture, that is how it goes. An adult is lost, so another will take their place. The bond is created by the laying of the child against the earth, for comfort and for surcease. To soothe them and speed the bonding. Lini knows this instinctively.”
Kate could feel the heat creeping up her throat. “You mean, because I put her in the dirt that night, I’m now actually her mother?”
“Yes. It is biological.”
“It’s not what I intended!”
Koca was looking at her steadily again. “Are you sure?” he asked simply. “Of all the adults in the house, you were the one who answered her cries.”
“So did Winter,” Kate muttered.
“You knew what to do. You took her to the earth.”
“It was a guess. Pure luck!”
Koca shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think you were the one to meet Lini’s needs. That makes you her mother.”
“Then, even if we found someone, an Elah, to take care of her, she wouldn’t go?” Kate asked, horror building in her.
“Most likely, Lini would be troubled and upset that you do not want her. The bond would eventually fade but she would remember that you rejected her, all her life.”
The horror spilled over. Kate stared at him. “I can’t be a mother,” she said helplessly.
“You already are.” Koca pulled his mouth into the Elah version of a smile. “May I make a suggestion?”
Kate looked at him blankly.
“Teach Lini English. It would help both of you enormously.”
That night, Kate lay in bed with Garrett between her and Roman as they worked on the very last fading weals left from the Summanus scratch. The scratch itself had healed long ago, before Roman had even got him into the car, while the toxin had blistered, leaving long, red, painful inflammations across his stomach. Calamine lotion helped and so they had slathered it on each night, while chiding him for his foolishness.
Garrett accepted the teasing, his temper not stirring at all. Yet on the first night, after they had tended him, he had held them both down, one after the other and made love to them with an unusual intensity.
Life had been good since then.
Now Kate told them about Lini and Koca’s determination that she was Lini’s mother. Her voice trembled.
“So what are ye afraid of?” Garrett asked her. “That we’ll say no? Ye think we’re that black hearted we co
uld refuse you this?”
“It’s your lives that will be impacted, too,” Kate pointed out.
“Isn’t discussing it a waste of time?” Roman asked. “You made yourself her mother. It’s a done deal. You can’t give her back, now. There’s no one else to give her too.”
“Yes, exactly!” Kate cried, sitting up. “I feel as though I cheated my way into this. I’m getting precisely what I wanted.”
“That is bad?” Garrett asked. “She’s such a pretty little thing, it’s hard to see the down side.”
“You mean…you’ll take her?”
Garrett rolled his eyes. “Why on earth wouldn’t I? She needs her mother and so do I.”
“Yep. Me, too,” Roman added.
Kate did cry, then.
The next morning, she started teaching Lini English, by walking around the house, pointing at objects and giving her their name. Lini held her hand the entire time.
Koca also came up with a way to deal with the hatchlings. Hatching season was only days away and humans reported finding caches of the immature larvae, tucked away in tunnels and drainage culverts, in all the dank, dark places humans wouldn’t go.
Trying to scrape the larvae away proved next to impossible. It took two men with jackhammers an hour to chisel away just one of the pods, for the shells were armored and impervious to almost everything, including fire.
“Pyrrhus would fix them,” Dominic had muttered, watching the news report.
Kate looked at Nial. He had proposed the same thing, not that long ago.
“Pyrrhus is not an option,” Nial said calmly.
Marcus glanced at him, but said nothing. Instead, he picked up Ilaria’s hand and she nestled into his side contentedly.
“There is a thing we used,” Koca said. He was sitting, sort of. Elah did not like sitting terribly much, although Koca would sit when everyone else did, most often on the very edge of the seat. He had knee joints, yet it took him a moment to arrange his legs the same as everyone else, as if he was not used to keeping them bent. He was sitting on the front end of the armchair cushion, his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead. It was the Elah version of frowning.
“What thing?” Marcus asked sharply.
“A thing…a recipe. Acid, salt, uhulu, cypress and sesame.”
“Does that mean anything, Marcus?” Nial asked.
Marcus frowned. “In ancient times, salting the earth was considered a curse. You only did it to those you considered mortal enemies, because the ground would not grow anything after that.”
“Perhaps the Elah’s use of it is where the curse comes from,” Nial suggested. “Ancient wisdom, handed down, with some of the bits lost, as usual.”
“It’s in the Bible,” Kate said. “I remember it from elementary school lessons. I thought it was pretty funny that salt you put on your fries was so big a deal.”
“What about the rest of the recipe, Marcus?”
“Acid, salt, uhulu, cypress and sesame,” Winter repeated. “It even sounds old. What is uhulu?”
Kate reached for her tablet and plugged the word into the search bar. The search engine suggested “uhulu” instead of “uhoola” and she accepted it and looked at the results.
“It’s Babylonian for ‘ashes’,” she told them.
Marcus sat up. “Ashes,” he repeated. “Cypress would be oil. Sesame is another oil.” He grinned. “It’s soap,” he said. “The Babylonian equivalent of it, anyway.”
“Would modern soap work?” Nial asked.
“It’s not just soap,” Marcus said. “Acid, salt and soap. The acid could be something as simple as vinegar, all the way up to hydrochloric acid, which is only a few degree away from Pyrrhus as a corrosive, so probably not that.”
“Vinegar, salt and soap. I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Patrick said. He sat up, lifting Blythe aside and held out his hand. “Could I use your tablet, Kate?”
She gave it to him and he tapped the screen. “Yes. I did remember it right. It’s weed killer.”
“Weed killer?” Blythe said with a gasp.
“Organic weed killer. All the do-it-yourself gurus suggest using it before destroying the earth with chemical weed killers. Although they talk about being careful with salt. This stuff apparently kills everything.”
“It would,” Marcus said. “The ancient were right about salting the ground. We keep finding the larvae in damp locations, so water is apparently essential to them. That’s why the salt works. Salt would dehydrate the larvae. The vinegar would speed up the process. The soap—the ashes and oils, that is—would make both the vinegar and the salt cling to the shells. This stuff basically starves them to death.”
“How long would it take?” Nial asked.
“It would depend on the strength of the solution and how high the water needs of the pods. A human dies in three days without water. Summanus larvae are a lot smaller, so it probably works quicker.”
“Adjusting the salt level higher makes it work faster still?” Kate asked.
Marcus shook his head. “There’s a point of diminishing returns and higher consequences. Salt is nasty stuff. You don’t want a lot of it in your ground water and the hatchlings are in locations vulnerable to contamination. It would take experimentation to get it right.”
“We have maybe three days,” Nial said. “You’d better get busy.”
Marcus found a working solution inside twenty-four hours. In that time, he barely moved from the kitchen, while Ilaria hovered next to his elbow, the perfect assistant. The two of them took Marcus’ range of solution strengths to the nearest known hatching ground, with Koca for guidance and tested every solution they had concocted.
They came back wearing smiles. “Here’s the full solution,” Marcus said, handing the torn out journal page to Nial. “It dissolves everything, right off the wall, as you’re watching it.”
“It was marvelous,” Ilaria added, her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were shining.
Nial handed the note to Sebastian. “Tell everyone you can think of. People can make this in their kitchens and they should. Everyone should hunt down hatching grounds and deal with them. Let’s avoid a repeat of last year.”
Kate shivered. She would never forget that terrible night, listening to the ravenous creatures beat themselves to death against the walls and windows, or the mass of dead bodies under the eaves and in the gutters, the next morning.
Lini touched her arm, looking up at her with her big eyes. “Okay?” she asked.
“More than,” Kate assured her and pulled her into her lap and held her tight. She was beginning to understand Blythe’s single-minded determination to beat up the entire world if it got between her and her kids. Just in the last day or so, Kate had begun to think of Nial’s determination to make and use Pyrrhus as a reasonable, perfectly justified response to threatening those he loved.
Only, it wouldn’t come to that. It couldn’t. She wouldn’t let it. Lini deserved to have a life.
Chapter Twenty
Rory lost track of days and nights. She didn’t need to stop to eat or drink, or sleep, so she kept working. Occasionally, she would go into the house to shower and change, when the feel of her clothes were driving her mad. Otherwise, she kept the Pyrrhus production line moving along steadily.
Sasha and Dante were always there, too. They were not always there at the same time, because they had to sleep. They would spell each other off, with several hours of overlap in between, when the work went much faster and smoother.
The three of them developed a routine that worked with the minimum of chatter. Sasha had known what he was doing, enough to grasp the process and become a genuine help more quickly than she had anticipated.
Dante was slower to learn, because he had zero experience in any sort of laboratory at all. His college major had been philosophy. Even so, he picked up the skills he needed with astonishing speed.
Rory looked up from her computer screen, realizing that some time had passed when Sasha had s
aid nothing at all. She blinked. Dante was standing on the other side of the bench, wearing a coat and working with the pipette to add the strontium chloride to the batches on the tray.
“How long have you been here?” Rory demanded, annoyed that she had not noticed.
Dante grinned. “Forty minutes. I said hello. You were concentrating. So I got to work.”
Sasha shook his head as he lifted the basket of tubes up into the distiller manifold. “Don’t be an asshole.” He looked over his shoulder. “He didn’t say hello at all.”
Rory felt a trickle of relief. “Then I wasn’t that deep into it.” She put the lid down on the laptop and got to her feet. The high stool was the most uncomfortable seat she had ever used. It made her legs ache, which was really saying something for vampires, who didn’t have a normal circulation to start with. She stretched, to see if that helped.
Dante frowned. “Something wrong?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever sat so still for so long before. It’s nothing.”
“Normal human would have keeled over by now,” Sasha said. “I don’t think she’s moved for four hours or more.”
“You’ll congeal or something,” Dante said.
“I’m going to go up to the house and take a break,” Rory said. “Will you two be okay for a while?”
Dante rolled his eyes.
“We’re fine,” Sasha said. “Go.”
She nodded and peeled off the thick white cotton lab coat. It was supposed to protect scientists against the normal spills and accidents in a lab, although no one had ever anticipated the corrosive power of Pyrrhus. She had been examining the molecule chain and tracing out some of the thought behind its invention. Marcus was a genius, she had decided. There was nothing like this anywhere in the world. Nothing that even came close.
She moved silently through the conservatory, only now aware that the main house was dim and still. It was very late by anyone’s standards. Only vampires were abroad at this hour.
And two lab assistants, she reminded herself.
She stopped at the bottom of the three deep steps that rose up to the door connecting the back of the kitchen to the conservatory and paused with her foot on the bottom step when she heard her name spoken from somewhere inside the kitchen.
Blood Ascendant (Blood Stone Book 5) Page 20
