by Tanya Huff
A minor comfort that I don’t have to worry about suffoca . . .
The stench of abomination suddenly engulfed him. He jerked back against the far side of his prison, shoulder blades pressed hard into the plastic, laboring heart pounding in his ears. The creature was right outside the box; it had to be.
Cupping his injured hand against his chest, Henry fought for calm. This might be his only chance for freedom; he couldn’t allow blind panic to take it from him.
Something dragged across the top of the box, something large and soft. Henry had a sudden vision of an old Hammer film, where Dracula brought his pair of hungry brides a child to feed on.
Oh, lord, not that.
Given an opportunity to feed, he wouldn’t be able to stop the Hunger. The child would die. He’d killed many times over the centuries; sometimes because he had to, sometimes only because he could. But never an innocent. Never a child.
The dragging stopped.
When the lid opens . . . Henry made himself as ready as he was able. But the lid remained closed and a moment later, muscles trembling, he sagged back against the padded bottom.
“If I call her in the morning, she’ll have had time to think it over and she’ll realize that I’m serious.”
Although he could still smell nothing but abomination, Henry recognized the voice. It belonged to the pale young woman with the empty eyes.
“She’s a reasonable person and I’m sure that as a scientist she’ll come to see my position.”
The young woman was crazy. Henry, who had touched her mind, had no doubt about that. But she was also on the outside of the box, capable of releasing him, and crazy or not, she was, at this moment, the only game in town. Ignoring the pain, he squirmed around until his mouth pressed up against the dented surface of the air vents and pitched his voice to carry, keeping his tone as matter-of-fact as he could.
“Excuse me? Would you mind opening the lid?”
For a very little while, he thought normalcy might have worked where an attempt at coercion or charm would’ve found no reaction. He caught a trace of her scent threaded through the stink of perverted death—not, he thanked God, enough to pull the Hunger out of his control—he heard her hands at the latch, then he heard her reply.
“Yes, I would mind actually, because I didn’t have time today to take any tissue samples.”
“If all you want are tissue samples, let me out and I’ll stay around so you can take them.” Henry swallowed, his throat working around the fear. Just let me out!
“Well, actually, I’m not very good at biopsies on living subjects. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.”
Not very good at biopsies on living subjects? What the hell was she talking about? “But I’ll still be alive!”
“Not exactly.” She sounded as though she were pointing out something so obvious that she couldn’t understand why he even brought it up.
He heard her move away. “Wait!”
“What is it now? I have a lot on my mind tonight.”
“Look, do you know what I am?” All things considered, she had to know.
“Yes. You’re a vampire.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“Yes. You have fascinating leukocytes.”
“What?” He couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“Leukocytes. White blood cells. And your hemoglobin has amazing potential as well.”
Much more of this and I’ll be as crazy as she is. “If you know what I am, you know what I can give you.” His voice reverberated inside the box; ageless, powerful. “Let me out and I can give you eternal life. You’ll never grow old. You’ll never die.”
“No, thank you. I’m working on something else at the moment.”
And he heard her move away.
“Wait!” He forced himself to lie quiet and listen, but all he could hear was the pounding of his own heart and Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry the VIII, four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire, became suddenly just Henry Fitzroy.
“DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE!”
“You know,” Catherine said, pulling the heavy steel door closed behind her. “I hadn’t realized he’d be so noisy. Good thing we put him in here.” She slid a lock through the eye of the security bar and snapped it shut. “Dr. Burke will never be able to hear him.”
Number nine stared at the door. The “Warning: High Voltage” meant nothing to him, but he remembered being locked in the box. In the same box. He hadn’t liked it.
Slowly, the two fingers on his right hand that were still working, closed around the security bar.
Already halfway across the room, Catherine turned at the noise as the lock jumped but held. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Without releasing the bar, he carefully turned to face her. He hadn’t liked being locked in the box.
“You think I should have let him out?” She came back to his side, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. If I can isolate the factors that result in his continuous cell regeneration, I can integrate them into a bacterium that will actually repair you.” Taking hold of his wrist, she very gently pulled his hand from the door and smiled up at him. “You can stay with me forever.”
He understood the smile.
He understood forever.
That was enough.
His walk had degenerated into a lurch and a shuffle as he followed her from the room.
He remembered joy.
The level in the bottle of single malt whiskey had dropped rather considerably over the last . . . Dr. Burke peered at her watch but couldn’t quite make out the time. Not that it mattered. Not really. Not any more.
“Nothing can stop me from garnering the glory.” Bracing her elbow, she poured a little more whiskey into her mug. “I said that. Nothing can stop me.” She took a long drink and sat back, cradling the mug against her stomach.
“Doc . . . tor . . .”
She couldn’t hear him. He was locked in a stainless steel box in another building.
“Doc . . . tor . . . ”
She took another drink to drown out the sound.
“Are you all right?”
Vicki slid into the outer office and started across the room. Why was he asking her now? She’d managed to regain control before they left the car. “I’m fine.”
“Would you tell me if you weren’t?”
Unable to see, she slammed her knee into the side of a desk and bit back a curse. Obviously, her memory of the office layout was less than perfect. “Fuck off, Celluci.”
Aware she could no more see him than she could see anything else, he rolled his eyes. She certainly sounded a lot better.
Dr. Burke heard the impact of flesh against furniture even through the covering noise of the whiskey. Her heart stopped. She had latched the isolation box. It couldn’t have climbed out and followed her.
Could it?
Then she heard the voices and her heart started beating again.
“How nice.” The alcohol she’d consumed, while not yet enough to insulate her from the memory of what she’d left in the lab, was enough to make her feel removed from the rest of the world. “I’ve got company.”
Bending carefully down from her chair so as not to put more stress on an already overloaded sense of balance, she lifted Donald’s jacket from the carpet and laid it on the desk in front of her.
“Please come in, Ms. Nelson. I can’t abide a person who lurks.”
Celluci pivoted to face the door. “Sounds like we’ve found the doctor.” Through the light grip around Vicki’s biceps he felt her shudder, but her voice remained steady.
“So let’s not keep her waiting.”
Together they moved into the inner office.
The street lamp, outside the window and five stories down, provided enough illumination for Celluci to see the doctor sitting at her desk. He couldn’t make out her expression, but he could smell the booze. Twisting around, he stretched back a long arm and flicked on the overhead light.
In t
he sudden glare, no one moved, no one said anything, until Vicki stepped forward, watering eyes squinted almost shut, and said with no trace of humor, “Dr. Frankenstein, I presume.”
Dr. Burke snorted with laughter. “Good God, wit under stress. We could use a little more of that around here. Grad students are generally a boring, academically intensive bunch.” One hand closed tightly around a fold of the jacket on her desk, the other lifted the mug to her mouth. “Generally,” she repeated after a moment.
“You’re drunk,” Vicki snarled.
“A-plus for perception. C-minus for manners. As obvious as it obviously is, that’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to point out.”
Vicki charged the desk, barely stopping herself from going over it with a white-knuckled grip on the edge. “Enough bullshit! What have you done with Henry Fitzroy?”
Dr. Burke looked momentarily surprised. “Oh, good lord, is that what this is about? I should have realized he was too good to be an accident. I should have realized he was with you. You strike me as just the sort of person who’d keep company with vampires. Detective-Sergeant!” She swung her head around to face Celluci who’d come up on her right side. “Do you know that your buddy here aids and abets the bloodsucking undead?” She set the empty mug carefully on the desk and reached for the bottle. Celluci was faster. Shrugging philosophically, Dr. Burke sat back in her chair. “So, what brought you to the conclusion that your Mr. Fitzroy was with me?”
“Realizing that you killed my mother.” Behind her glasses, Vicki’s eyes blazed. Although she remained motionless, every line of her body screamed rage.
“And what makes you say that?” The question could have concerned a thesis footnote for all the emotion Dr. Burke showed.
Vicki glared at her. Her voice trembled with the effort it took to keep from shrieking accusations. “My mother’s death had to occur during the four weeks Donald was at the funeral home. Preferably near the end of those four weeks when the Hutchinsons had come to trust him.”
“Donald was very charming,” Dr. Burke agreed, her left hand continuing to work in the jacket.
“That kind of timing can’t be left to chance,” Vicki continued, a muscle jumping in her jaw. “You were with her just before she died! You killed her!”
“You forget that Mrs. Shaw was with her when she died. But, never mind.” Dr. Burke held up her hand. “Why don’t I just tell you what happened. I gave your mother vitamin shots every morning. You must have read that in Dr. Friedman’s records?”
Vicki nodded, gaze locked on the other woman’s face.
“These shots, they couldn’t actually do anything to help, but they made your mother feel like she was doing something, so she felt better, was under less stress, and the last thing she needed in her condition was stress.” She frowned and shrugged. “You’ll have to bear with me if I’m less than usually coherent. As you pointed out earlier, I’m drunk. Anyway, I had a lovely talk with Dr. Friedman about stress. That last morning your mother didn’t get a vitamin shot; she got 10ccs of pure adrenaline. Her heart slammed into action and the strain was too much for it.”
“An autopsy would find that much adrenaline,” Celluci pointed out quietly. “And there’s be little difficulty in tracing it back to you.”
Dr. Burke snorted. “Why the hell would anyone do an autopsy? Everyone was waiting for Marjory to die.” She shot a smug look at Vicki. “Well, everyone but you.”
“Shut up.”
“She kept saying she was going to tell you. I guess she never got around to it.”
“SHUT UP!”
Dr. Burke watched half the items from the top of her desk crash to the floor and turned to Celluci. “What are the chances of me getting that bottle back if I told you I needed it for medical reasons.”
Celluci smiled unpleasantly. “Shut up,” he said.
“You two have a decidedly limited vocabulary.” Dr. Burke shook her head. “Don’t you even want to know why I did it?”
“Oh, yes,” Vicki snarled. “I’d love to know why you did it. My mother thought you were her friend!”
“It’s a good thing I’m not a melancholy drunk, or you’d have me in tears. Your mother was dying, no way out. I saw to it she died for a reason. No, don’t bother.” Again Dr. Burke raised her hand. “I know what you’re going to ask. If she was dying anyway, why not wait and have her leave you her body in her will or something. Well, it doesn’t work that way. We had tissue cultures, brain wave patterns, everything to go to the next experimental step and this was our only way to get the body.”
“So she was just a body to you?”
Dr. Burke leaned forward. “Well, she was after she died, yes.”
“She didn’t die. You killed her.”
“I expedited the inevitable. You’re just angry because you seem to be the only person she didn’t confide in.”
“Vicki! No!” Celluci threw himself forward and managed to prevent Vicki’s hands from going around the doctor’s throat. He pushed her back and held her until blind rage faded enough for reason to return, then released her. When he was certain she had herself under control, he turned to Dr. Burke and said with quiet passion. “The next time you make a crack like that, I won’t stop her and you’ll get exactly what you deserve.”
“What I deserve?” The smile was humorless, the tone bitter. “Detective-Sergeant, you have no idea.”
Celluci frowned. His gaze dropped down to the jacket, then slowly lifted back to Dr. Burke’s face. “You said, Donald was charming. Why was? Why past tense? What’s happened to Donald?”
Dr. Burke picked up the bottle from where Celluci had dropped it in order to restrain Vicki’s charge and refilled her mug. “I expect that Catherine killed him.”
“Catherine’s your second graduate student? . . .”
“Go to the head of the glass.” She took a long swallow and sighed in relief; the world had been threatening to return. “Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.”
“No.” Vicki slapped both palms down on the desk. “First, we get Henry back.”
Dr. Burke met Vicki’s gaze and sighed again. “You need to save him because you couldn’t save your mother.” Her voice held so much sympathy that Vicki lost her reaction in it. “I think you’d better know about Catherine.”
Celluci swiveled his attention from one woman to the other but held his tongue. It was Vicki’s call.
“All right,” she said at last, straightening. “Tell us what’s going on.”
Dr. Burke took another drink, then visibly slipped into lecture mode. “I am a good scientist but not a great one. I just don’t possess the ability to devise original concepts that greatness requires. I am a great administrator. Probably the best in the world. Which means diddley squat. I make a reasonable amount of money, but do you have any idea what a couple of biological patents with military applications could net you? Or something that the pharmaceutical companies could really sink their teeth into? Of course you don’t. This is where Catherine comes in.
“She’s a genius. Did I mention that? Well, she is. As an undergraduate she’d patented the prototype of a bacterium that should, with further development, be able to rebuild damaged cells. When I became her adviser, it soon became obvious that she was, like many geniuses, extremely unstable. About to suggest that she seek professional help, I realized that this was my chance. Her research was the only thing that she related to and I was her only touchstone with reality. The whole situation begged to be exploited.
“Pretty soon I realized we weren’t just heading toward monetary rewards but that there was a distinct possibility of a Nobel prize. Once we actually managed to defeat death, of course. Sounds insane, doesn’t it?” She took another drink. “Let’s not rule it out; it might be a valid defense. Anyway, Catherine came up with some pretty amazing possibilities and we began working out experimental parameters.”
“Don’t you guys usually work with rats,” Celluci growled.
“Usually,” D
r. Burke agreed. “Are you familiar with the theory of synchronicity? Just as Catherine finished working out the theory, someone in Brazil published a paper involving roughly the same ideas. There was only one way to guarantee we’d win the race. We went directly to experimentation on human cadavers. I set up a lab and rerouted the freshest bodies from the medical morgue—you’ll excuse me if I don’t go into the tedious bureaucratic details of how that was accomplished with no one the wiser, but if you’ll remember I did say I was a great administrator. . . . ” Confused, she stared down into the mug. “Where was I?”
“Human cadavers,” Vicki snarled.
“Oh, yes. That was when I realized we needed someone else. Donald had gotten himself in a little trouble at medical school and I’d smoothed things over for him. Mostly because I liked him. Also a genius, he was charming and pretty much completely unethical.” With exaggerated care, she smoothed out the wrinkles she’d folded into the jacket. “After a while, we began to have some success. We’d been using nonspecific bacteria and brain wave patterns, but if we wanted to move on we had to get our hands on a body we’d been able to type before death. That turned out to be Marjory Nelson. When I was certain she was going to die anyway, under the cover of tests on her condition, we took tissue samples and recorded her brain wave patterns.”
“Then you brought her back to life.”
Gray eyes opened with a flash of recognition. “More or less. We brought back the mechanics of life, that was all.” That was all. “Organic robots, if you like. Trouble was, the bacteria are very short-lived and we had a problem with rot. Which, in case you were wondering, was why I wanted your mother partially embalmed.” She finished the whiskey remaining in the mug, then lifted it to Vicki in a mocking salute. “If you’d just left that casket closed, no one would have been the wiser.”
“You seem to be forgetting that you murdered my mother!”
Dr. Burke shrugged, refusing to argue the point any further. “So now you know the whole story, or at least the edited for television version. There’ll be a test in the morning. Any questions?”
