by Jade Farhill
Just then, James stormed back into the room. “You can’t release her.”
Abby gasped. “What?”
“You heard me. We don’t know if she’ll still be human tomorrow.”
“Not this again. James, she could be. The virophages work extremely well against viruses.”
“Doesn’t matter. What’s more important than her freedom is your safety.”
Abby stared at him, taken aback.
“Do you really want me to be right about your own sister murdering you?”
Abby flinched.
“It’s fine, Abby,” Sharon said, smiling at her. But it was her ‘brave face’ smile. The same smile she’d had since that night at the beach.
Abby’s mouth went dry. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t have to,” Sharon replied before James could jump in. “It’s my choice. I won’t let you unchain me. Not yet.”
James nodded. “Then I’m staying here to make sure.”
Abby flexed her fingers. “I won’t let her out, James, and I’d like some private time with my sister. Please leave us alone.”
He threw up his hands in disgust. “Have it your way.”
Abby sighed as he left the room. “Is it just me or is he … acting weirdly?”
“It’s not just you,” Sharon said.
“Well, at least it’s not me.” Abby turned back to Sharon and chatted to her. Eventually, Sharon asked her to set up a movie marathon of vampire romances.
Abby groaned. “Do we have to?”
“I’m the one in chains here, therefore I get to decide the night’s entertainment.”
Abby pulled a face—she couldn’t argue with that. So she set up the laptop and the marathon began.
***
At about three in the morning, after hours of talking to Sharon, Abby dozed off.
Only to be woken by a snarl.
Abby leapt away from Sharon and hit the button for the IV. Sharon’s blood red eyes, which had been focused hungrily on Abby’s throat, rolled up into her head. Sharon calmed down, but it still felt like she’d rip Abby to pieces if she got free.
Abby’s chest grew heavy—Sharon was no longer her smiling, kind sister. Abby collapsed onto the floor and cried.
The cure had failed.
***
James showed up the next day and stopped in his tracks when he saw Sharron glaring at him. “She’s a vampire again.”
Abby jumped up. She’d wallowed in depression since three that morning, and now she needed to focus on keeping her sister alive. “I know what it looks like. I made progress, though. I interviewed her and she told me all about her experiences as a vampire. I know a lot more now than I did yesterday.”
“But she’s still a vampire,” he said flatly. “I told you: you had a month. And time’s up.”
“And I produced results! All I need to do is teach her everything she needs to know and we’ll be back to where we were before she became human!”
“That isn’t good enough. We had a deal—one month!”
“You can’t go to the hunters! I’m making real progress! What if I do actually find the cure? Won’t the hunters benefit from it as much as me?”
James took a long breath, then turned on his heel. “Let me think about it.”
Abby’s insides twisted. He hadn’t given her a proper answer. She turned to Sharon and set up a camera next to her phone, then explained everything to her.
“You’re going to starve me?” Sharon asked.
Abby huffed a laugh under her breath. “Exactly what you said the first time.”
“Well, I don’t appreciate it.” Sharon flicked her eyes to the door. “But … if it keeps him away, I’ll do it. But you should know that I don’t like it!”
“Got it.” Abby turned back to her work. What had gone wrong? The virophage should have worked. It worked in the petri dish …
She put her head in her hands. “Yeah, but we all know that things which work in controlled environments don’t always work in the field.”
“Can you stop talking?”
“You can’t tell me it’s making your hungry—you already used that one.”
“I just want silence, okay? How many times have you been Turned into a vampire?”
Abby kept quiet after that.
CHAPTER 5
James knocked on the office door. It was a spare room in the DCPC, two levels above the basement.
“Enter.”
He opened it. “We need to talk, Annette.”
Annette took her feet off the desk and stopped the movie—Peppermint, by the sounds of it—playing on her laptop. “We have a problem?” She put her hand to her thigh, where she hid a silver blade.
James tilted his head out of the office. “I’m hungry.”
She pulled out her phone and quickly texted someone. “Let’s go then.”
James followed her to a private room within a nearby restaurant. The moment he stepped into the room, he nodded to the group of grim-looking people gathered around the table.
“So,” said Annette. “The sister is back to being a vampire?”
James nodded. The people at this table were all vampire hunters, and Annette was their commanding officer. “But the scientist made a good point. She’s made incredible progress in just a month, so … she’s asked for more time.”
Annette leaned forward. “You contacted the Vampire Hunters’ Organisation because you were certain you knew of a vampire. And you told us you’d deliver the vampire to us at the end of the month. It’s the end of the month.”
The moment James had seen Sharon attack Abby, he knew he’d needed to call in reinforcements. Annette had wanted to remain close to James, to keep an eye on him and figure out where Abby and Sharon were. But so far, they hadn’t found out, and he wasn’t about to tell them.
“And I’m also saying that this scientist is really quite brilliant. How many other scientists do you know of that could make so much progress—on their own—in just a month?”
The hunters around the table all exchanged glances.
“She should come to HQ, if she’s that brilliant. Offer her a deal,” said Kenny, second in command.
“I doubt she’ll come without the sister,” James said.
Annette shrugged. “Then tell her that the vampire can come too. And she can continue her research in true safety.”
***
Meanwhile, Abby was desperately inspecting the virophages to see where she’d gone wrong. If she repeated the experiment in the petri dish, would that give her some answers?
Abby sighed. “I’m grasping at straws.”
“Then let me go.”
Abby stared at her sister. “You know I can’t do that.”
Sharon shrugged. “Worth a shot,” she muttered.
Abby turned back to her work. If the human cells reverted to their vampire state due to cellular memory, what would happen if the virophages were introduced before the cells were invaded by the virus?
On a whim, Abby injected herself with the virophages and took skin samples from herself and her sister. “Now I need you to bleed onto this dish?”
“What?”
“I need to test something.”
Sharon looked at Abby as if she were crazy.
“I need you to turn a skin sample of mine ‘vampiric’ so I can test a hypothesis about cell memory.”
Sharon assessed Abby for a long moment. “Fine,” she said at last.
Abby prepared to collect the blood.
“But let me make a prediction here. One day, I will do this to you for real.”
Abby straightened and focused on her sister’s restraints. The chains were wrapped around her—she was still secure. “It won’t happen.”
“Then why can’t you look me in the eye?”
Abby concentrated on getting blood from her. “I need to be fully focused on this, or I could cause an infection.”
“An infection? In a vampire? Sure,” Sharon said with sa
rcasm.
“I need to concentrate!”
Grudgingly, Sharon fell silent.
Abby got the blood and put both samples in the oven.
“Is that your dinner?”
“It’s to speed up the process,” Abby explained.
“You realise I took seven days to Turn, right?”
“You took six, actually.”
“My point still stands.”
“Go back to listening to movies,” Abby grumbled.
Sharon smirked. “One’s just started up now.”
A few minutes later, James knocked on the door. Abby let him in, her heart pounding.
“So,” she said after she’d locked the door behind him, “what have you decided?”
“I think we should alert the hunters that we have a vampir—”
Sharon released a rumble deep within her belly, her fierce gaze on him.
“Wait a minute!” Abby said, standing protectively in front of her sister. “They’ll kill her!”
“If we tell them that you two are a package deal, and that your sister will remain your test subject—”
“So I’m going from one cage to another?” Sharon shouted. “At least this cage only has two people who know about it! What happens if I’m separated from my sister? How will they treat me? Will they kill me the moment Abby fails like she did yesterday?”
Abby started. “Science requires failures—it helps us by a process of elimination.”
“I don’t care! I will not go to a place that was built for the sole purpose of hunting my kind!” Sharon’s eyes turned red.
Abby moved fast, hitting the button for the IV to pump blood into Sharon’s arm.
Sharon’s eyes rolled up in her head and she went quiet.
“I’ve done extremely well on my own so far,” Abby told James firmly.
“Abby, this is getting dangerous,” he replied, pointing to Sharon. “You need help—”
“She’s got this under control, James,” Sharon said. “Or have you not realised that I’m back to normal?”
“‘Normal’ would be human,” James snapped.
“She made progress in a month, she’ll make more progress in another month,” Sharon cried.
A muscle jumped in James’ jaw. “Abby, be sensible here.”
“Fine, I’ll be sensible,” Abby said. “It makes more sense for me to continue as I was than to interrupt and upturn my working conditions. One more month is sensible.”
“Look,” James muttered, “if you go with the hunters, you won’t have to worry about her escaping.”
Sharon roared, her eyes flashing red again and focused directly on James.
“We can speak about it in a month,” Abby told him. “Now leave, you’re upsetting her!”
“I’m upsetting her? She’s a vampire, Abby! I don’t get why you can’t see that!”
“Go!” Abby shouted at him, pointing to the door.
A vein pulsed in his neck and he stormed out.
The moment he was gone, Sharon’s red eyes turned blue. “I don’t want to go to some hunter facility and be treated like a guinea pig.”
“You’re already treated like one.”
“Yeah, by you. That’s different. You don’t want me dead.”
Abby couldn’t argue with that. “I don’t want to go either. But I need to think on how to get James off my back.”
“You could sick me on him.”
“What? No!”
Sharon smirked. “Had to try.”
***
James tried to come back every now and then, but every time he showed up, Sharon went into a blood rage and creepily growled, “We have a month, James!”
Eventually, he got the message. So, exactly four weeks later, he returned. His eyes were on Sharon the moment he walked in. “What? No blood rage to greet me?”
“No need. When you’re civil, I’m civil.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call being a vampire ‘civil,’” he muttered under his breath.
Sharon sneered at him.
Abby interrupted them by showing him the results of her latest experiment with Sharon’s blood on the skin samples. “See, because of the cell memory, most of my cells reverted back to being human.”
James frowned through the microscope. “So … what about the other cells that are still vampiric?”
“It means that I’m on the right track with the cure and—more importantly—this could be the beginnings of a vaccine!”
James stared at her. “Wait, really?”
“Yes!” Abby beamed at him. Now he really couldn’t suggest the hunters—this was proof she worked better on her own.
James inspected the skin sample again. “Mind if I take a copy of your results?”
“Sure. I tested multiple samples, and they all came back with the same result.”
“Great work. Now imagine what you could do in a laboratory run by vampire hunters.”
Sharon strained against her chains.
Abby told him her reasons for staying where she was: the lab’s state-of-the-art equipment, the risk of moving Sharon. He seemed persuaded, and left the lab with a copy of Abby’s results.
Abby danced on the spot when he was gone. “I did it! We get to stay here!”
Sharon pursed her lips. “And why do you think he’s never asked for a hard copy of your results before?”
Abby went still. “Because … well, this is a very exciting development. A potential vaccine—it’s incredible!”
Sharon gave her a sympathetic look. “Really? You don’t think he’s a little too interested in your work? What if there’s another reason? Like he wants to steal your work? Or sell us both out to the hunters?”
Abby snapped her eyes to the door. James had been pushing the hunter agenda for a while now. “I need to get back to work.”
***
“Seriously?” asked a stunned Annette. “She’s creating a vaccine?”
All of the hunters around the table were focused intensely on James. Almost like they were more interested in the vaccine than the cure …
James nodded and slid the results over to Annette. “Have a look for yourself.”
She scanned it and the hunters on either side of her, Kenny and Louise, peered over her shoulder.
“Partial vaccine,” Kenny said, pointing to a line.
“Promising results,” added Louise.
“It doesn’t say the type of virophage used,” Annette said, meeting James’ eyes.
He shrugged. “I doubt she’ll just give me that information. I mean, this is her intellectual property.”
The hunters all exchanged glances.
James started to feel uneasy. His position not only involved guarding the premises of the DCPC, but its intellectual property. “You can’t steal someone else’s research,” he said carefully.
“We’re not going to steal it,” Annette said dismissively. “We’re going to make her an offer she can’t refuse.” She wrote a number down on a piece of paper and slid it across the table to him. “Tell her that’s what we’ll pay her if she moves to the hunter laboratory.”
James gawped at the eight-figure sum. “Any chance I get a cut of this for headhunting her?”
Annette shrugged. “Why not?”
James grinned, his anxiety forgotten—now he just had to convince Abby to move.
***
Abby started turning on and off her sister’s genes.
“Can you turn my hair blue?” Sharon asked.
“Why?”
“Because I think it would be cool.”
When Sharon wasn’t raving or hungry, she almost sounded like her old self. “Maybe later, but right now I need to focus on this so I can keep James away.”
A knock came at the door.
“Speak of the devil,” Sharon muttered.
Abby opened the door.
James barged in, excitement in his eyes. “Abby, you’ve got a job offer, and before you say ‘no’, take a look at the money.”
>
He pressed a slip of paper into her hand.
Abby blanched. “What? Thi-this is way too much!”
“They’re very happy to pay it, plus your accommodation, meals, everything. Sharon’s too.”
Abby’s chest went tight.
Sharon was silent, watching them both.
“Wait, are you … is this from the vampire hunters?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “But Abby—can you imagine how much you could do with this sort of money? You won’t have to worry about squatting in this basement anymore. With this, you won’t even need to work again!”
“I would have to work, actually,” Abby said, meeting Sharon’s eyes.
Sharon was looking grim. Almost as if questioning how far Abby’s loyalty went.
Abby’s blood ran cold. “This isn’t me agreeing, but I want to know the terms. I also need to have conditions. If I agree. I want my sister within reach of me at all times. I want to be sure that she’s safe and treated well.”
James nodded. “Of course. I’ll go tell them right now.” He left the room quickly.
The silence in the room was heavy.
“So, you’re selling me out?” Sharon asked.
“I’m not. I just want to see how far the hunters are willing to go to accommodate us.”
“You really think they’ll stick to their promise once they have me? You think they won’t use me against you?”
Abby rubbed the back of her neck. It was true—she had no idea what sort of organisation she was negotiating with. They worked under the radar, in absolute secrecy. An organisation with its power unchecked like that might commit all sorts of abuses and crimes to get what it wanted.
Abby went to her computer. She’d found a tiny property for sale in the hinterlands of Sunrise Beach that, if she combined what was left of her and Sharon’s savings, they could afford. “How good are you at digging?” she asked.
“I imagine pretty good, if I know the sun’s coming up soon.”
Abby nodded. “Good. And do you know anything about cryptocurrency?”
“The person upstairs was watching a movie with them in it. It’s untraceable, if that’s what you want to know.”
“That’s exactly what I want to know. And I know you told me I could do what I want with your money, but do you think I could use your savings to help buy a property? I’ll kick in too.”
