nevermore

by Nell Stark

I watched in awe as the tiny hole squeezed out one last drop of blood and closed before my eyes, Were physiology asserting itself against the unwelcome intrusion. Sebastian smeared the crimson drop onto his index finger and held it up to my lips.

  “Taste.”

  The scent of his blood was wholly unlike Alexa’s—redolent of musk, reminiscent of a pungent forest floor at the first spring thaw. My mouth watered. I couldn’t help it. But I could still control myself. I turned my head away.

  “I appreciate your generosity.” The words sounded taut, constricted, even to me. Breathing shallowly, I loosened the tourniquet and rose to my feet. “Thanks to your precedent, we’ll have a lot of samples to compare.”

  All around the room, Clavier’s staff were drawing blood from the other shifters. Once they were finished, we could run a battery of tests on every tube and try to isolate whatever factor was making Brenner’s kin immune. I labeled both vials and placed them in the insulated case at my feet, intent on moving on to my next patient. But Sebastian blocked me.

  “What can I do now?”

  I blinked in surprise. “You’re asking me?”

  “As far as I can tell, you’re the only one who has been able to make any sort of breakthrough in this whole mess.”

  I considered the options. “Malcolm and Helen seem intent on making sure that Brenner can’t stage a coup here. But whatever fortifications they come up with will be ineffectual if they don’t find the traitor.”

  “So you’re certain there is one?”

  “The virus came from a Consortium lab that was trying to create a way to temporarily block the change.” When Sebastian’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, I hurried to continue. “Only for shifters who wanted to. Or needed to, so as not to endanger their covers. But the virus proved fatal, and Clavier thought he destroyed it.”

  “And you believe him?” Sebastian sounded incredulous.

  “I think so. I’ve seen him lie plenty, and this time, he honestly looked confused. He and Helen are convinced that someone stole the virus for your father and falsified the records.”

  “In which case, that person is probably still hanging around. And you want me to try to find him?” He looked around the room. “While I’m locked up in here?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can think of. Maybe when you’re talking to your siblings you can ask around? See if they’ve heard or noticed anything unusual?”

  He seemed skeptical. “Not much to work with, but I’ll try my best. What’s your plan?”

  I hefted the cooler. “Once we finish collecting here, I need to take one set of samples to NYU. My lab at Tisch has more sophisticated equipment than the facility here.”

  “You’re going out? Doesn’t my father have a price on your head?”

  A fresh surge of anxiety buzzed beneath my skin at the reminder and I patted the gun concealed at the small of my back for reassurance. “I’m armed.”

  He stared at me for several silent seconds before resting a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do. Be careful, Val.”

  I watched him walk toward a group of his kin at the back of the room, his strides long and confident, as though he were the jailor rather than the prisoner. It bothered me that he’d been acting as though he had some kind of claim on me, when nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t like it. Shrugging off the sensation, I turned to my next patient. The sooner I ran these tests, the sooner I could make Alexa well again. The sooner everything would go back to normal.

  Normal. Right.

  Chapter Twenty

  I waited until after ten o’clock to arrive at Tisch, hoping my lab would be vacated for the night. There was no way I could justify to my boss the kinds of tests I needed to run on the shifter blood samples. They involved commandeering technologies and techniques that I had helped use but had never operated by myself, and the uncertainty was making me anxious. Distracted. Which is why I didn’t notice Olivia until she put her hand on my arm, a few feet from the front door.

  “Val? Is that you?”

  “Olivia?” She was dressed in a loose T-shirt and frayed jeans, as though she’d thrown on clothes as an afterthought. But Olivia never did anything as an afterthought, and she never jeopardized the carefully coiffed image she’d been sporting ever since landing her job in the DA’s office. Besides, why was she pacing the sidewalks outside the hospital late at night?

  “Are you here to see Abby, too?” she asked.

  “Abby?” The more she spoke, the more confused I became.

  “Oh—you’re not?” Flustered, Olivia began to babble. “I’m sorry, I just thought that, well, when I mentioned her at that gala it seemed like you knew who she was so I thought that maybe…”

  Abigail Lonnquist. I remembered now. She was the daughter of the ambassador to China. At the charity gala back in January, Olivia had told Alexa and me about the savage attack that had landed Abby in the hospital. Caught up in our hunt for the Missionary, I’d never followed up on whether he had successfully turned Abby.

  “I know her,” I said, cutting Olivia off. “What happened?”

  “She’s come down with something and the doctors have no idea what it is.”

  A sick vampire? Had Brenner found a way to modify the virus to affect us, too? Or was this unrelated? “What are the symptoms?”

  “At first, it seemed like a fairly harmless upper respiratory thing,” Olivia said. “But then…” Swallowing hard, she wrapped her arms around her stomach as though to literally hold herself together. Clearly, she cared a great deal for Abby. “Early this morning she went into these convulsions, like a seizure. She fell and hit her head, and now she’s unconscious.”

  I frowned in confusion. Olivia was listing almost every known symptom of the Were virus. If Abby was a shifter, then it was likely that she was only alive because she’d knocked herself out. But then the Missionary hadn’t been the one to turn her, all those months ago. What the hell was going on?

  “I want to see her,” I said. “Will they let us in outside normal hours?”

  Olivia nodded. “My job does have a few perks.”

  I let her lead the way into the hospital and across the lobby to a bank of elevators. “How is Alexa?” she asked as we waited. And then she turned to me in alarm. “You’re not here to see her, are you?”

  “No,” I said, my insides twisting at the memory of Alexa lying in our bed, pale and frightened and trying not to show it. “I’m here to work. I’ve been interning at a microbiology lab.”

  “Oh,” Olivia said as we got into an elevator.

  I expected her to follow up on my inadequate answer—to press me on why I was working in the middle of the night—but she just stared at the panel of lights as we ascended. Where was the seasoned investigator and hard-ass attorney that had plagued the Consortium for the past month? She had gone from borderline panicked to withdrawn and distracted in a matter of seconds. Just how long had she known Abby, anyway? Were they in love? I didn’t know whether to hope so or not, because it sounded like Abby didn’t have a very strong control of her animal half. She would probably lapse right back into the seizures if she regained consciousness.

  “Here we are.” Olivia opened Abby’s door and we slipped inside. The room was dim but my eyes adjusted almost instantly. Abby lay motionless in the bed, her long blond hair draped across the pillowcase like some kind of halo. Her eyes were closed, but they flickered rapidly in REM. I wondered what she was seeing, feeling—whether her inner beast was pushing her consciousness, shoving her toward wakefulness.

  Suddenly, instead of Abby I saw Alexa as she would appear on the cusp of the full moon, less than two weeks away. Alexa lying pale and wan, locked in a deadly internal struggle with her feline half. Alexa, losing the fight.

  Swallowing down a surge of bile, I forced back my panic. “Has she been getting nosebleeds?”

  Olivia, who had taken a few steps into the room, spun to face me. “How did you know?”

  I shook my head
. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Bullshit, Val!” She was on me in seconds, fingers wound tightly in the material of my T-shirt. I could have broken her grip easily, but I let her shake me. “You know something. What do you know?”

  “Get a hold of yourself,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. “I’m not the one responsible. I’m trying to piece it all together myself.”

  “Responsible?” Olivia’s voice was shrill. I’d never seen her lose control like this. “Someone did this to her?”

  I considered my options. Maybe, just maybe, I could make this situation work to the entire Consortium’s advantage. “The investigation you’ve launched into Helen Lambros and Malcolm Blakeslee—I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I need you to call off your watchdogs. And I need to know who’s feeding you information.”

  Olivia’s mouth worked silently. “Are you telling me, are you honestly saying, that my investigation has something to do with Abby getting sick?”

  “They’re related, yes. I can’t tell you more than that.” When she withdrew her hands from my shirt and took a deep breath, I realized she was going into full-on state’s prosecutor mode. I held up one hand. “I mean it. There are things I cannot and will not tell you. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  Her face darkened. “If you don’t start talking, Val, so help me God I will call a detective and—”

  I made a snap decision and cut her off. “Alexa is sick too. Like Abby. I’m here trying to find a cure.”

  The self-righteousness left her like air from a balloon. “Alexa is sick?”

  “Yes. And they will both die if I don’t get to my lab soon.” I ran my free hand through my hair. “I’m close to figuring this out. But I’m not there yet. Let me do my work. And please, I need that name. You’ve been tricked, Liv. You’ve been used as a diversion.”

  Olivia took a few steps back and collapsed into one of the chairs next to the bed. For several seconds, she stared at Abby’s expressionless face. And then she squared her shoulders.

  “I don’t have a name.”

  I set down the cooler that I’d packed full of pureblood Were samples and took the chair next to hers. “What do you have?”

  “A routine.” She hesitated but I didn’t push, not wanting to give her an excuse to clam up. “Every morning on my way to the office, I pass an Irish pub. If there’s a flag hanging in the third window, then I step into the coffee shop two doors down.”

  “And then?”

  Again, Olivia glanced at Abby, as though hoping she would wake up and render this entire conversation moot. But the only motion came from her restless, dreaming eyes.

  “Just outside the coffee shop is a bus stop. He waits there, reading a paper. When he sees me, he ducks inside the store and I follow. While we’re in line, he hands me a memory card. We never talk.”

  “What’s on the card?”

  Olivia shrugged. “It varies. Names and dates, sometimes. Copies of tax returns. Very occasionally, account numbers.” She leaned into my space. “How are you mixed up with Lambros and Blakeslee, Val? They have some really shady business practices going on. You should get out.”

  I almost laughed. My fate had been sealed when the Missionary had sunk his teeth between my ribs, almost a year ago now. There was no such thing as “getting out” for me. Ever. And as for the Consortium’s business practices, I was betting they had illegal deals dating back five centuries.

  “It’s not what you think,” was all I said. “What does he look like?”

  “I’ve never even fully seen his face. Only in profile.” Olivia closed her eyes. “Tall. Very muscular—like a body-builder. Brown hair. Wearing a black suit. Black T-shirt most of the time.”

  For a moment, it seemed as though my heart might stop. It stuttered painfully before breaking into a gallop against my rib cage, forcing me to gasp for breath. Darren. God damn it. How could Darren be the traitor? It was incomprehensible and perfectly intelligible, all at once.

  “You know him?”

  I had to stop him, to shut him down, to alert Helen. Except if I did that, then the game would be up, and Balthasar Brenner would know that we held his traitor. He would accelerate his plan. But what then? Should I let Darren continue to walk unthreatened among those whom he was betraying?

  I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward the door. I couldn’t think this through by myself, but I didn’t want to call Alexa and risk making her upset. The result could be deadly.

  I had to talk to Sebastian.

  “I have to go.”

  “But, Val—”

  “No.” I consciously channeled the Missionary, for once cowing Olivia into silence. “We’re running out of time.” I gestured toward Abby. “Call me if something changes. Until then, leave me alone. I’m trying to save her, and Alexa. You have to trust me.”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” she whispered as I crossed the threshold into the hallway. She probably didn’t think I could hear her. But I could.

  *

  As soon as I exited onto the twelfth floor, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Sebastian’s number. He picked up on the first ring.

  “It’s Darren,” I said without preamble, walking as quickly as I could toward my lab. “It’s fucking Darren.”

  “Are you sure?” Even Sebastian sounded surprised. The low buzz of voices in the background reminded me that he couldn’t speak freely right now, surrounded as he was by his own kin and the Consortium guards.

  “Oh, I’m sure.” When I twisted my key in the lock, metal protested, and I eased my grip before I broke something. “Bulky, black suit, black T-shirt. Sound familiar to you?”

  “Mm.”

  “He’s been feeding information to Olivia.”

  “Son of a bitch!” His interjection was quiet but vehement. For one strange, disconnected moment, I wondered whether he meant the epithet in canine or human terms.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “But my gut says to keep a lid on this for a while yet.”

  “Agreed. Though it may be wise to tell Karma.”

  My racing thoughts ground to a halt on the mental image of Helen and Malcolm lying dead in their offices, killed by the traitor they never suspected. How had Darren managed to fool them for years?

  “Get Karma to stick to Malcolm. And Helen, if she can. I don’t think Darren would make a move against either of them until it’s time for whatever invasion Brenner’s planning, but…”

  “But the clock is ticking,” Sebastian finished.

  I almost dropped the cooler as an even more horrifying thought crossed my mind. Alexa wasn’t just in danger from the virus. She trusted Darren implicitly. A soft groan left my throat before I could contain it.

  “Are you all right?” Sebastian sounded even more alarmed than he had at my news of the traitor. “Val? What—”

  “Alexa,” I said, through teeth that wouldn’t unclench. “What if he—”

  Sebastian cut me off. “I’ll make sure she knows. I promise you.” He lowered his voice even further. “Focus, Val. You have to focus. There’s only one way to put an end to all of this.”

  Leaning against the door, my hand still on the knob, I took one deep breath and then another. Sebastian was right. I couldn’t afford to panic. “Yeah,” I said as soon as I had myself back under some semblance of control. “I know. With any luck, I’ll be back in a matter of hours.”

  As the call disconnected, I shut the door behind me and set the cooler onto the closest lab bench. My hands were trembling, and I braced them against the edge of the counter, forcing my thoughts away from the panic. Focus. I needed to test the blood of several of Brenner’s children against the virus in Alexa’s blood, and in order to see exactly what was going on when they interacted, I was going to have to image them using the scanning electron microscope.

  After powering up the machine and the monitors to which it was attached, I prepared my slides. I started with the blood from three different Weres, each expos
ed to the virus via Alexa’s blood. Giving them time to interact, I prepped the microscope, checking and rechecking each step. It was one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology in the lab, and I’d never used it without Sean’s supervision.

  Once I had the parameters set, I returned to my samples. I needed to spread each of them onto an electron microscopy grid, and then rapidly freeze them by immersing them in liquid ethane. The technique, called cryo-electron microscopy, was the best way to image biological processes. While the samples would freeze, no crystals would form, and I would be able to observe a snapshot of the interacting blood specimens that was virtually indistinguishable from their natural, liquid states.

  The first grid contained Sebastian’s blood mingled with Alexa’s, and I bent close to the monitor, both eager and fearful of what the scope would reveal. I had observed specimens this way before, but even so, I was unprepared for the complex and delicate beauty of the image that appeared onscreen. The virus seemed mathematically impossible, its spirals and sharp edges coalescing in a deadly geometry. But as I scanned across the field of view, hope began to fill the cold vacuum of fear in my chest. Sebastian’s blood had already produced immunoglobulins, and they had begun their work in earnest before I had frozen the sample. They were IgM antibodies, large and five-pronged, and several had bonded to the menacing virus in order to render it impotent.

  “Don’t get too excited,” I said, swapping out Sebastian’s sample for another. It would be no good to leap to any conclusions before I had multiple data points. But after examining two more grids that looked virtually identical, I allowed myself to smile. The pattern was clear: Brenner’s children all had innate immunity to the virus. Given that IgM antibodies were the first to be expressed in a fetus, it made sense that they were the ones who swarmed to the attack. In fact, those very antibodies were probably the mechanism whereby pregnant shifter women didn’t go insane during the nine months when they couldn’t transform into their animal halves.

  The scientist in me was clamoring to run an extensive battery of tests to try to prove my hypothesis. But the rest of me was driven by the ticking clock. To develop an effective treatment, I was going to need a lot of the pureblood antibodies—many more than I could get from only one sample. The question was whether a combination of samples would remain effective against the virus, or whether the different immunoglobulins would attack each other instead.