by Reinke, Sara
After that, it should just be a matter of smell, he figured—both Mason’s pleasant, familiar scent, and the stink of the whorehouse that had, by now, become recognizable to Julien.
“I’m positive,” he told her, catching her by the crook of the elbow. “I know you hate me, but you’re going to have to trust me. Okay? Come on.”
With that, he pushed the door open and they stepped into the foyer together. Even though Edith’s anxious heartbeat was nearly audible even over the din of conversation among the men gathered by the front door, none of them did more than spare a glance in the pair’s direction. Edith kept her gaze pinned nervously on her toes as she stumbled along with Julien, while he exchanged quick nods with the few soldiers who took notice of them as they passed.
Just beyond the lab and foyer, they came to a broad corridor leading left and right.
“It’s this way,” Edith said beneath her breath, cutting Julien a quick glance as she nodded toward the right. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t hate you.”
He blinked at her in genuine surprise as they followed the hall. “You don’t?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not anymore. I did once. But then I…I saw you with him…on the night Collette died. I saw the way he held you, the way he looked at you…the way you went straight to him in a roomful of people who were there to help you. Because you didn’t need any of us. You needed him. And Mason needed you, too.”
Julien came to a halt. He didn’t know what to say. Over a lifetime that had, to date, spanned three times that of the average human, he’d learned to react with violence or sarcasm to just about any situation. He knew few outside of Julianne and Aaron with any intimacy or affection; no one with whom he’d ever really shared any vulnerability. And yet, as he met Edith’s gaze and saw the sincerity in her eyes, heard the earnest truth in her words, he felt some of those formidable battlements around his heart crack…if only a hairline measure.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly to her. “I never meant to hurt you, Edith. Neither did Mason. He wouldn’t have, not for all the world.”
“I know.” Her mouth curled in a melancholy smile. “He loved you so much. He still does. You son of a bitch, he never stopped.” Giving his elbow a light tug, she added, “Come on now. Close your mouth before you catch flies.”
He managed a laugh as he fell in step beside her again. And that was it: mortar in place, tuck-pointing completed. His walls were sealed yet again…and he suspected hers were, as well.
“Those papers and vials,” he said. “You said they were part of Phillip’s research. You figured out what he was working on?”
“I think so.”
He waited a moment or two, and when she didn’t elaborate, he said, “And…?”
Edith shot him a glance. “It’s complicated.”
“I’ve had some book-learning,” he assured her. “Try me.”
“I think he was studying a specific kind of protein called a prion. Every protein starts off in a shape that’s called a random coil, but depending on their arrangement of amino acids, they eventually unfold to their true shape, the three-dimensional structure that ultimately determines each protein’s purpose. When prion proteins don’t unfold, at least not entirely, they can cause physiological anomalies by inducing healthy proteins in an organism to follow their malformed patterns. Those anomalies can be hereditary.”
“I said book-learning, not my Ph.D.,” Julien told her and she frowned.
“Prion protein malformation can cause disease,” she said. “Diseases that are passed on from generation to generation, from parents to their offspring.”
“Why was he studying that?” Julien asked, bewildered.
“I think because he wanted to replicate it. Or at least, Nikolić did. But not just any prion protein—a Brethren one.”
A group of guards rushed past them in the corridor, and both Julien and Edith shied back against the wall. The men all carried Zastava M84 automatic rifles in their hands.
“I don’t get it,” Julien remarked, watching the men hurry away. “My father’s been duplicating Brethren proteins for years now. That’s what the juice is—copies of enzymes present in our systems when we feel the bloodlust. What’s so different about this…bionic protein or whatever?”
“Prion protein. It’s different because I think it’s the reason why we are the way we are—what makes us Brethren. Prion proteins exist in the brains of all living things, but ours differs from that found in humans. It forms differently. It doesn’t unfold right. It’s a mutation that’s been passed genetically among the Brethren because of the closed breeding system we had for so long. It doesn’t just make us feel the bloodlust—it is the bloodlust.”
He blinked at her in surprise.
“Prion malformation causes mutations, diseases,” Edith emphasized again, stepping closer and speaking softly but urgently. “Ever hear of mad cow disease? It’s caused by misshapen prions that interrupt normal neurological function. There’s a human form of it, too—Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—transmitted by eating infected meat.” She caught Julien by the arm. “Phillip realized that the drug your father’s been making affects humans the same way eating meat infected with mad cow disease would. It gives the symptoms of the disease—the bloodlust—but it’s only temporary. For some reason, the prion protein malformations weren’t replicating in human brains to take lasting effect. That’s what he’s been working on: a way to make those changes permanent—to change the proteins in a human’s brain to be like ours, not just for one hit of a drug, but forever.”
“He’s making humans into Brethren,” Julien said.
Edith nodded. “He was trying to, anyway. I don’t think he succeeded. That’s why Nikolić needs me—I’m supposed to finish the work that Phillip started. But Phillip had gotten pretty far in his research, from what I’ve been able to figure out. He came up with a prototype. I took the rest of the samples from the lab with us—those two vials I put in my pocket. Phillip had tested the prototype on rats. I found emails between him and Nikolić where they were trying to pin down a good human subject for the next trial phase.”
I think they might have found one, Julien thought, thinking of the blood-crazed man who’d shambled into his room at the brownstone and attacked him. Or at least, Nikolić did.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong,” Edith said. “Because as much as I disliked Phillip and would love to say he was completely off the mark on this one, after looking through his files and notes, I have to tell you in all honesty he wasn’t. It should have worked. Maybe Michel was right all along in that selective breeding weakened the gene pool of our species, made us more prone to illness, but a prion is a protein. It doesn’t deteriorate like DNA. It should’ve remained the same—replicated exactly the same—with every successive generation, from the first occurrence of the mutation to now. The only thing I can think of is that what Phillip sampled—what he replicated—wasn’t the Brethren prion after all, but something else. Something close, but not the same malformation in the protein that we possess.”
“What the hell could be like us, but not us?” Julien asked.
She looked thoughtful. “Michel used to think that the Brethren developed as a species after humans in the Middle Ages mated with creatures they called Abominations, in the hopes it would make them immune to the Black Death. But he said there were other ways it could’ve happened, too—that humans might have hunted the Abominations, killed them and eaten them, in the hopes of gaining their immunity to the plague. If they did that, they would have been exposed to any prions infecting the creatures, just like with mad cow disease today. They would’ve become infected.”
“Just from eating the meat?”
“Or from anything that’s been in direct contact with these tissues, like cerebrospinal fluid or blood.”
Julien blinked. “Blood?” Oh, God, all at once, it was crystal clear. “I know what went wrong,” he whispered. “Phillip’s sample came from my brot
her Aaron—the same genetic source for all of the enzymes in the juice. And Aaron’s different from us. He’s had the first blood.”
Her nose wrinkled as she frowned. “First blood?”
“From the first one of us—the Abomination,” Julien said. “Every clan had some but only the Elders were supposed to know. I found out by accident. It could make you heal from anything—even things that should have killed you. It wasn’t supposed to be used without all of the Elders agreeing to it, but…” His voice faltered. “Aaron was hurt. Our father, he…” Raking his fingers through his hair, he stared at her, stricken. “Aaron was dying. I didn’t know what to do, so I gave him the first blood. I put it in his mouth.”
“And it healed him?”
“Yeah, it healed him, but it did a hell of a lot more than that. It ramped up his psionic powers, his reflexes, his speed. But more than anything, it kept healing him. Even now, he heals from almost any injury, any wound.” Again he stumbled over his words and lowered his face, ashamed. Because Christ knows, I’ve inflicted them on him over the years.
“There must be two kinds of prions in your brother,” Edith said. “The kind he was born with, just like the rest of us, and the kind he acquired when he ingested the blood from the Abomination. Phillip wouldn’t have known this, wouldn’t have realized. When he identified a prion in Aaron’s sample, he simply assumed it was the genetic one. But it wasn’t.”
“What happened to the rats Phillip tested the prototypes on, do you know?” he asked.
“I found some videos on his laptop that he’d taken during the tests,” she said. “The rats became very aggressive, bloodthirsty. If they were in cages together, they tore each other apart—ate each other alive. If they were alone, they battered themselves to death against the bars of their pens, self-mutilated, self-cannibalized…” She shuddered. “It was pretty gruesome.”
“Why wouldn’t it have affected Aaron the same way? Make him go all batshit crazy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because of the prion protein he inherited, maybe it…shielded him somehow, protected him from the neurological damage that caused the rats’ erratic behavior.”
Or maybe it was something else, Julien thought. She’d said that prion proteins existed in the brains of all living things. But Aaron had suffered catastrophic brain damage; Lamar had beaten him so severely that his skull hadn’t just cracked, it had been crushed into bits. Had that influenced how the first blood had affected him? His recovery had been slow, arduous, and uncertain—and his entire memory had been lost. He’d had no idea who he was, who Julien was, or what had happened to him; his whole life had been a blank slate.
“…I’ve never even heard of the first blood before,” Edith was saying. “I can’t even be sure that’s what he replicated in those vials. Phillip was a molecular virologist—he specialized in genetically reprogramming infectious agents. God only knows what he did with it from there. He could have manipulated the prions any number of ways. I’d have to study the samples more before I’d even hazard a guess.”
“But Nikolić knows about this?” he asked. “The videos, the results of Phillip’s tests?”
“I’d assume so. I mean, he’s the one who gave me Phillip’s records and files.” Edith inclined her head, her brows narrowing. “We can’t let him get his hands on that serum. The results are too unpredictable. It’s too dangerous.”
You can say that again, Julien thought grimly.
Immediately ahead of them and on the left, a door flew open and Anna stormed out, flanked on either side by a pair of burly young men dressed in wife-beaters and nylon athletic pants. Given the fact that she wore yoga pants and a midriff-baring tank top, they might have all looked more up for a workout than a showdown—except for the fact they were all carrying guns.
“…that son of a bitch,” Anna was snarling, but her voice withered and she skittered to a wide-eyed halt when she caught sight of Edith and Julien standing in her path. The men around her immediately fanned out, ratcheting their Zastava M84 assault rifles, leveling the muzzles with deadly inference.
For a split second, their ruse worked, but Anna recognized him even in the guard’s clothes. She held a remote control device in her hand and thrust it out at him, her face twisting with sudden, murderous rage. “You!” she cried, spittle flying from her lips.
Julien swung his gun arm up, narrowing his line of sight down the pistol’s black steel barrel. At the same time, he reached out, hooking Edith with his free arm and pushing her back as he positioned himself protectively in front of her. He squeezed the trigger and the controller exploded in Anna’s hand, a spray of smoke, sparks, and broken bits of plastic. With a shriek, she staggered backwards, her face riddled with cuts and scrapes from the flying shrapnel.
The stupid fucks had lined themselves up like ducks in a row; he couldn’t pass up what was little more than target practice. The guy farthest from Anna on the right went flailing backwards, a bullet in his head as Julien swung his arm smoothly, his finger already folding in against the trigger again. He felt the bucking recoil of the pistol against his palm, the force shuddering clear to his shoulder, and another round took down the second goon before the first had even struck the floor.
The two on Anna’s left, caught by surprise at first, rebounded on the attack, opening fire with a steady stream of automatic rounds. The roar of the M84s drowned out Edith’s frightened scream, and Julien kicked his foot backwards, hooking her around the ankle and throwing her off-balance. She tripped and fell sideways, and he dove alongside of her, already adjusting his aim and squeezing off a round at the guards. He grunted as he hit the floor hard, and felt her fingers hook into his shirt as she scrabbled behind him, screeching as bullets punched into the smooth tile floor inches away from her.
His last shot had missed, but it had been more to provide them some cover than anything. His brows furrowed as he drew a bead on one of the last two standing; his next round punched through the man’s right eye and into his skull, sending his brain splattering out of the back of his head and across the wall. Julien’s next shot left the last guard’s knee little more than bloody pulp, and as he crashed to the ground, wailing, Julien plugged a shot in his head, cutting his shrill cries abruptly short.
He heard footsteps behind them, coming in fast; the automatic gunfire had nearly hidden the sound. Anna had darted back through the doorway to escape the exchange, and he fired a couple of random shots into the doorframe to keep her from poking her head out. He’d lost count in his mind of how many shots that made, but knew the .32 couldn’t have more than a 12-round clip in it. Not enough to take on the guards coming their way, even if they’d painted bulls-eye targets on their foreheads.
“Get up!” He scrambled to his feet, then grabbed Edith under the arm. With a yank, he hauled her upright. He crammed his hand into the hip pocket of his fatigue pants and found the car keys. She blinked at him stupidly as he shoved them into her hand. “Get out of here! Go!”
“What about you?” she cried, but then the guards opened fire on them, and she screamed, dancing back in startled fright as bullets smashed into the walls and floor again.
“I’ve got this—just go!” he yelled, hunching down and returning fire, finding momentary satisfaction in seeing the bastards scrambling to get out of his line of sight. “Run like hell and don’t stop until you’re out the door! Go! Go!”
He lobbed off three more shots, all of them going wild, before he heard nothing except for the dull clicking of the empty chamber. Even then, Edith still had enough cover to flee. Smoke choked the narrow confines of the corridor, a dim and acrid haze, giving everything a ghost-like quality. Julien doubled over, coughing and patting down his pockets, hoping vainly that he’d find a fresh clip tucked away somewhere. When a figure emerged from the smoke, approaching him, he held up his hands in surrender, letting the gun tumble to the floor as he bit back a groan.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said to Anna—who’d caught Edith in a chokehold and no
w held a gun mashed to her temple. Anna had clearly done more than duck for cover earlier; her pupils were wide, her cheeks and lips brightly flushed, and he felt that strange tingling sensation that came whenever he encountered a human hyped up on the juice.
He didn’t know whether or not she’d hit the same shit Edith had taken out of the lab earlier—the same shit, he suspected, that Nikolić had given to her brother. But whatever she’d used, she’d dropped enough to be fast enough and strong enough to overpower Edith, and when Anna regarded him now, her candy-apple red lips curled up in a victorious sort of smile.
“It’s not her you need to be worried about,” she purred.
He caught a hint of movement from out of his peripheral vision, then one of the guards drove the butt of his assault rifle into the back of his head, knocking him witless and sending him crashing to the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Hey!” Mason balled his fist and drove it with enough force into the door to leave a slight dent. “Let me out of here, goddamn it! Hey!”
It had been over an hour since Nikolić had first led him to the small room and then, without warning or explanation, locked him inside. During their ride in the SUV, Nikolić had received a call on his cell phone. Even though Nikolić had spoken to his caller only in Russian, from the deepening furrow between his brows, he was obviously upset. Mason had been able to hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line—presumably Anna’s—and she’d been speaking shrilly and loudly enough to clearly impart that she was upset, too. Whatever she’d said, Nikolić had been in a shitty mood ever since; he’d spent the rest of their impromptu road trip with his shoulders hunched, his thick arms crossed, his face set in a surly scowl.
