In the Heart of Darkness

by Reinke, Sara

  Caught off guard, Mason nodded once uncertainly. “You’ve told me, yeah.”

  “Strigoi,” Nikolić said, as if Mason hadn’t even spoken. “It’s an old word, one with many tales to go with it, stories of immortal vampires draining blood from living victims. But there’s another type, another word—moroi. It means a vampire who is mortal. One possessing many traits and abilities of the strigoi, but nowhere near as powerful. That is what the juice does—it makes moroi out of men. Because its effects are only temporary. They don’t last.”

  “And you want something that does,” Mason said. “A way to make strigoi out of men.”

  He meant this sarcastically, but then his eyes widened with realization beneath the blindfold. “Holy shit,” he breathed, turning toward Nikolić, even though he couldn’t see him. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it? What Phillip was working on for you—a way to turn humans into Brethren.”

  “I told you before, you’re a perceptive man, Dr. Morin.” Nikolić’s tone of voice lent itself to a pleased sort of smile.

  “But there isn’t a way,” Mason insisted. “We’re born Brethren. Nothing made us. Our DNA is different from yours. Even breeding humans and Brethren won’t produce a pure Brethren specimen. You’d need…”

  His voice faltered. You’d need a way to reprogram human DNA to make it like ours, was what he’d been about to say. And reprogramming DNA through the use of retroviruses—which could both replicate foreign genetic codes, and then transplant them into human cells, replacing the cell’s own native code—had been one of Phillip’s primary research functions at Pharmaceaux. He thought of the vial he’d seen in the refrigerator earlier that day.

  “Is…that what happened to Piotr?” he whispered. “Is that what Phillip was working on for you? A way to change human DNA somehow, make it Brethren?”

  Nikolić didn’t answer, and Mason’s brows furrowed. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re out of your goddamn mind, do you know that? You’re playing God, just like our Elders used to, with exactly the same fucked-up results!” Twisting in his seat, he turned blindly toward Nikolić. “Listen to me. With every successive generation, inbreeding among the Brethren caused our original genetic makeup to become weak and corrupted. My father argued this for decades with the Brethren Elders. Lamar Davenant was a backward-thinking fool who never listened to science or reason. He still doesn’t! The only result you’d get from trying is the same genetic codes that have deteriorated our species, made us more susceptible to injury and disease.”

  Phillip would have needed a pure strand of the original DNA to even begin to accomplish what he was talking about. And there was no way it was possible; no way for Phillip to have derived a pure enough sample of genetic material from any of the Brethren to have pursued such an ambitious and daunting goal.

  He would’ve needed a goddamn time machine, Mason thought, because that would have been the only way to get a genetic sample that would be untainted by successive generations of selective breeding among the Brethren clans. He’d have to go back clear to the Middle Ages, the time of the Black Death and the Abomination—the creatures my father said were the first of us, our primitive ancestors.

  “That’s what’s in that vial back at the brownstone, the one with the Pharmaceaux label?” Mason asked. “You have to get rid of that shit, Nikolić, whatever it is. You have to destroy it. It’s dangerous. Andrei died because of what it did to Piotr—so did at least three other people.”

  Tell me you see how dangerous it is, he thought. God above, please tell me you’re not so fucking stupid that you can’t see the truth.

  Or so crazy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “You bastard!”

  The moment Anna laid eyes on Julien, she launched herself in attack. A pair of Nikolić’s thugs dragged him unceremoniously with elbows locked beneath his arms across the threshold and into the building after a long car ride spent crammed and cramped in the trunk of the very same Cadillac he’d shot the shit out of only days earlier. They made no move to protect him as Anna rushed toward them, and no move to stop her as she began pummeling him, her small fists plowing into his face with ruthless ferocity. And because he was still bound—this time in five-point chains to restrain his ankles and arms—he could do little more than hunch his shoulders and duck his head while the crazed bitch laid into him.

  “Oh, hey, Anna.” He grimaced as she clipped him good in the right ear. “Nice to see you again, too. How’s…ow!…that spare tire working out for you?”

  “You motherfucker!” she screeched. “My brother’s dead because of you!”

  He had no idea what the hell she was talking about, unless she meant the crazed, bloodthirsty young man who’d attacked him in his room.

  “I can…” He ducked around another punch, catching it in the temple instead of squarely in the nose. “…definitely see the family resemblance.”

  Had Nikolić—that Serbian son of a bitch—pinned the blame on him for shooting the kid?

  “Anna, enough,” one of the guards finally said, giving her a push backwards and holding her there, being noticeably mindful of his hand placement lest he accidentally cop a feel of the boss’s girl. “Stop busting on his face. The šef wants him to look pretty tonight.”

  Anna’s cheeks were bright red with rage, her brows furrowed. She huffed out a furious breath as her hands drooped to her sides again in begrudging concession. “Alright,” she said, nodding. “Alright, then.”

  Julien gasped as she punted him squarely in the balls. He hadn’t anticipated the move, hadn’t seen it coming, and he took it full-on and forceful. He promptly doubled over, unable to breathe, feeling his crotch wrench in a tight, agonizing knot. He would have crumpled to the ground in a miserable, shuddering heap had it not been for the guards, both of whom winced visibly on his behalf.

  “I spared his face,” Anna snarled. She spat at Julien, then turned and sashayed away. “There’s a sink over there. Wash him up.”

  The guards hauled him in stumbling tow over to the large, fiberglass basin of an industrial-sized sink. While one of them cranked the water on full blast, the other shoved Julien forward. The edge of the sink caught him in the gut, and he grabbed it with both hands, leaning heavily against it.

  “Clean up, asshole,” the guard growled, stepping closer so he could push Julien again.

  Julien gritted his teeth, then rammed his elbow back into the guard’s belly, hitting with enough force to momentarily plow the breath from him and leave him staggering back in surprise. In an instant, Julien was on the move, whirling to face the other guard and ramming his elbow into the son of a bitch’s face. Here, the bones of his arm came together in a sharp, pointed joint that smashed the guard’s nose like the business end of a pick ax. He heard the juicy crunch of bone and cartilage crumpling with the impact, and the guard howled with pain. Floundering backwards, he clapped his hands to his face as blood sprayed everywhere, splattering the floor and the front of his uniform.

  He had three doors to choose from in his immediate vicinity: the front doors, through which they’d entered the building; a door across the room to his left, through which Anna had disappeared…

  No fucking thank you, he thought with a scowl.

  …and a third door to his right, no more than ten feet from the sink. Julien couldn’t run, not with the goddamn chains tethering his legs together, but he hobbled toward it as fast as he could. All he needed was to put something with a lock on it between him and Nikolić’s goons; anything to slow them down, buy him some time so he could figure out how the hell to escape.

  His hands had been chained in front of him for a change—a big mistake, but then again, Nikolić and the others were definitely rattled by what had happened with the kid, and they obviously hadn’t been thinking when they’d transferred him to the new restraints. He grabbed the door knob, hoping like all fuck that it wasn’t locked, and pushed it open. He staggered across the threshold, turning to shove the door closed beh
ind him. Of course, there wasn’t a locking mechanism on it. With a frustrated cry, he balled his hand in a fist and punched the door.

  He swept his gaze around what turned out to be some kind of storage room. There were plenty of cabinets and wheeled carts draped in plastic; he grabbed the nearest one and dragged it in front of the door, trying to at least hinder the passage of anyone coming through after him. He then stumbled around in a clumsy semi-circle, meaning to limp around in search of another point of exit.

  A woman stood behind him. She’d been there all along, quiet and startled by his abrupt entrance, and he’d been too frantic to immediately notice her. The sight of her now startled the shit out of him, and he floundered backwards with a yelp, crashing into the very cart he’d set up to trip Nikolić’s guards. His legs tangled in the short length of chain binding them, and he fell onto his ass, landing hard and knocking the back of his head into the cart.

  “Julien?” the woman said, sounding dubious at first and then nearly breathless with disbelief. “Julien Davenant?”

  He blinked at her, memories of her face swimming to the forefront of his mind. It had been a long time—more than two hundred years to be precise—but goddamn if she didn’t look exactly the same, not a day older.

  Just like her husband.

  “Edith?” he gasped, stunned.

  From behind him, the guards tried to open the door, shoving it in and smashing into the cart. Julien scrambled into action, kicking with his feet and forcing the cart backwards again, ramming the door shut. “Edith, please, it’s me, yes—Julien!” he exclaimed, turning to look at her desperately. “Give me a hand blocking the door—hurry!”

  She made no immediate effort to come to his aid, despite the fact he clearly struggled to keep his shoulder against the cart and hold it in place as the guards pushed against it from the other side of the door. With a glance back at her, he cried out again. “You going to help me out here or what?”

  Edith blinked, seeming to snap out of her startled paralysis, and hurried to one of the taller cabinets near the door. Brows furrowed, she gave it a mighty shove and sent it toppling onto its side, landing with a resounding crash on top of the cart. It wouldn’t keep Nikolić’s men out for long, but it would do for the moment; the door wouldn’t even open an inch in full, despite their frustrated attempts to force it.

  “Come on,” Edith said, hurrying to his side. “My lab’s just through this door,” she said. As she dragged him into the adjoining room, they heard a loud crash from behind them. Edith whipped her head toward the sound, gasping sharply in fright. “Here!” She opened the doors to a stainless steel cabinet. “Get inside. Hurry!”

  The cabinet was no more than three feet high, but wide and deep. Julien squatted, ducking his head and crawling into its dark, claustrophobic interior. He winced as he rapped his head on the top, then, with his knees drawn to his chest, his chin nearly pressed down against them, he glanced at Edith.

  “Stay put and be quiet,” she told him. And with that, she closed the cupboard door, sealing him in sudden darkness.

  Like I have any fucking choice, he thought, realizing he’d just placed his life in the delicate, dainty hands of the one person in the world who probably had every right and reason to want him dead. Edith had never said anything to him in the past, had never confronted him about his relationship with Mason, but she’d known about it—and he’d always known that she knew. For the more than twenty years that it had gone on virtually beneath her nose on the Brethren farms, she’d simply accepted it. If it had hurt her or pissed her off at the time, he hadn’t known, just as he didn’t know if she bore him ill will or a grudge of the affair even now.

  I guess I’m about to find out.

  A few seconds later, he heard glass shattering—a lot of it, from the sounds of the crash. An alarm began blaring, shrill and grating, then Edith uttered a muffled cry, and there was a heavy thud from almost directly outside the cabinet.

  Edith! he thought in alarm, because he wouldn’t put it past Nikolić or one of his guards to hit her. Stay put, my ass, he thought with a scowl. Mason will kill me if anything happens to you, lady.

  Forgetting himself, his own chance at safety, he started to push the door open, but froze when he heard the thunder of heavy footsteps as Nikolić’s goons tore into the room.

  “Get her up,” he heard Anna snap, her voice brittle with fury. Then, nearly yelling to be heard over the din of the claxon: “Will somebody shut that goddamn thing off?”

  He’d left himself a slim margin of space through which he could now peer out into the lab when he’d started to open the cabinet door, and he watched, shying back warily, as one of the men leaned over in front of him. For some reason, Edith was lying on the floor outside the cabinet, and as the man caught her by the arm and tried to sit her up, she groaned. To his surprise, he saw her forehead was bloody, a long, jagged laceration along her brow line.

  “What…happened?” Edith groaned, her hand fluttering toward her face. “Some man…just came barreling through here. He had chains on his wrists…his feet.” Wincing, she drew her hand away, her eyes widening at the sight of blood. “He pushed me down. Ow!”

  “Where did he go?” Anna demanded.

  “He threw a chair through the window,” one of the men called to Anna. “He must’ve climbed out and taken off. I don’t see any sign of him!”

  “Son of a bitch,” Anna seethed, and she whirled on Edith again. “Where did he go?”

  As if for emphasis, the guard gave Edith a rough little shake that nearly rattled her teeth.

  “How the hell should I know?” Edith snapped. “I told you—he pushed me down hard. I hit my head…!” She held her blood-smeared hand up, half in illustration of her point, half in supplication.

  “You three—get your asses outside and start looking!” Anna snapped to some of the goons. To another, she said, “You search the lab then the rest of this floor. I’ll take the lower level. And you…” She shoved an emphatic forefinger at the remaining guard: “You stay in here with Dr. Averay.”

  “What do we do if we find him?” one of the men asked as she spun on her heel and marched away.

  “When you find him,” she corrected sharply, “You’re going to call me immediately to let me know. And then you’re going to stand the hell back while I blow his motherfucking head off.”

  “But the Draka…” the guard began, looking uncertain. “The šef said—”

  “I don’t care what Nikolić said,” Anna snarled. “Davenant killed my brother. His ass is mine.” Then, yelling again: “I said shut that goddamn alarm off!”

  The door slammed loudly behind her. Within moments, the claxon cut off, and then there was nothing but the shuffling of footsteps as the guards moved about. While some left the room, he could hear another rustling around, searching the lab. When a sudden shadow blocked his view—the guard leaning over to open the cabinet door—Julien shrank back in panic.

  “For God’s sake, he’s not in there!” Sounding exasperated, Edith stepped forward, slapping the guard’s hand away from the cabinet door. “He’s not hiding under a table or inside one of the drawers. I’ve already told you—he’s not here. Now kindly get the hell out of my way so I can get back to work.”

  As the guard retreated, she turned and marched over to another industrial-type sink. He heard the door close as the goon left the lab, which meant there was only one left remaining. Julien could see him now, standing between him and Edith with his back toward Julien.

  Edith touched the cut on her forehead gingerly. “I’m getting really sick of this shit,” she complained, pivoting to face the sink. “It’s not bad enough that I’m stuck in this ridiculous excuse for a research laboratory, but you people expect me to work under these conditions—armed guards, handcuffed lunatics knocking me around, and that psychotic bitch?”

  Julien heard the creak of a sink faucet turning, then the rushing sound of water and she turned, pressing a damp paper towel to her brow.
“Why don’t you just go ahead and blow my collar up right now?” she snapped. “Use that little remote control thing in your pocket, why don’t you, and put me out of my misery?”

  Julien reached up to touch his own collar, curious, and winced as his chains jangled noisily. What the hell is she talking about?

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the guard told her in a polite but terse sort of voice that suggested he thought Edith might be as psychotic as Anna—if not more so. “I don’t have the controller. Brian does.” He nodded toward the door, indicating the man who’d just left the room. “Those things are…uh…expensive, ma’am. They don’t just…uh…give one to everyone.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Edith rolled her eyes. For a brief second, her gaze cut to meet Julien’s through the crack in the cupboard door, then she looked away again. “Shoot me then. They let you have a gun, don’t they?”

  Julien hooked his fingers around the edge of the door and eased it open slowly, silently.

  “Uh, yes, ma’am.” Now the poor sap sounded completely flustered, like a kid getting an unexpected ass-chewing from his school principal. “They do. But I…I couldn’t…I mean, the chief would…”

  As he continued stammering and babbling, Julien slipped carefully out of the cabinet. He’d gathered his chains in one hand and drew them as taut as he could to minimize any sounds they might make. Edith helped by keeping the water on in the sink behind her, gushing out of the spigot at full blast. He crawled out on his hands and knees, then slowly stood, letting the chain loose from his grasp link by link, soundlessly. However, the guard caught sight of his reflection in a stainless steel paper towel dispenser, and in alarm, he started to turn.

  Too late.

  Julien hooked the short measure of chain binding his wrists over the guard’s head and jerked it back against the man’s throat. In an instant, as Julien pulled with all of his might, the man began to strangle. He uttered a choked, cawing sound and thrashed momentarily, his hands scrabbling and slapping vainly for purchase against the chain. His eyes bulged, his face turning first bright red, then succumbing to darker, duskier shades within moments. His tongue lolled out and his struggles waned; he went limp and crumpled back, deadweight against Julien. Edith sprang forward, grabbing his legs and helping Julien lower him to the floor.