by T M Linville
They ended up walking back through the park to get home. It was nearly four AM when they finally made it back to the fifty sixth floor of the Crown Building. They showered together and finally went to bed.
It was barely seven AM when Erica knocked on Lily’s front door. She was just going to ‘sleep through’ it, but the person at the door was persistent. Lily fumbled to the door and poked her head out. She was still naked and was hoping to make the visitor go away. No such luck. Erica pushed the door open and came in.
“Get dressed,” she told Lily.
“I haven’t even been asleep for an hour,” she whined.
Erica ignored her and knowing there was no arguing with Erica, Lily went to put on clothes. Lily went into the bedroom and returned wearing an oversized tee shirt and a pair of old shorts.
“So how was your venture out last night?” Erica asked as Lily sat on the couch.
The look on Lily’s face was priceless. A look of shock, embarrassment and being caught all at once.
“It was great,” she gulped. “I guess.”
“You do know that there are cameras and scanners in the garage, right?” Erica questioned.
“Of course. I was just hoping we’d be long gone before anyone noticed.”
“Well, you were noticed. And I, for one, am pissed that you left the building. Lily, what if Eric had been waiting with his band of Underground brothers? You and Shay would not have stood a chance.”
“Onyx was with us,” Lily interrupted.
“Pft! So there were three against a possible horde? Not good odds, Lily.”
“Shay wanted to go out. She’s been cooped up here since she moved in a week and a half ago,” Lily pleaded.
“I thought she was going to work?”
“Nope, she’s been here the whole time.”
“That’s still no excuse for you two to leave the building.”
“Erica, we can’t be cooped up in this building forever.”
“It’s not forever, love. It’s just until Eric is out of the picture.”
“And how long is that going to be?” Lily asked. “Weeks? Months? A year even?”
“I honestly don’t know, hon, but you know what he’s capable of. And now that Shay lives here he knows she’s important, at least to you. And you know he’ll kill her if he gets a chance.”
Lily opened her mouth to speak but Erica put up her hand before anything came out.
“And just because she’s a vampire now, doesn’t make her safe. You either. Especially outside these walls. He won’t kill you because he needs you, he knows that. But he’ll kill Shay just for spite.”
Lily knew Erica was right.
“I’m sorry,” Lily told her.
Erica stood up and so did Lily. Erica gave her a big hug and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be sure to tell Vincent that you’ve been reprimanded.”
“Thank you,” Lily replied.
“Now go back to sleep. You have twenty four hours to catch up on sleep and to be with Shay. Then McGoo gets to begin more experiments. Maybe we can synthesize both of your blood and give you and Shay some peace.”
At seven AM, almost exactly twenty four hours later, McGoo was already knocking on Lily’s door. Shay had been up for about half an hour but decided to let her sleep until Jack arrived. Shay was dressed in one of Lily’s old Stefi G tee shirts and leggings. She knew she was going to spend the day in the lab and she wanted to be comfortable. She greeted McGoo and let him into the apartment.
“I’ll go wake up Lily. We weren’t expecting you until a little later,” Shay admitted.
“That’s fine. You have coffee?” He asked.
Shay went to the kitchen and started McGoo a cup of coffee. “Coming up,” she said as she walked through the living room.
McGoo went to the kitchen to wait.
Shay woke Lily with a kiss and a stealing of the covers.
“Paybacks are hell,” Lily said as she rolled out of bed.
“I let you sleep as long I could,” Shay told her. “The Doc is waiting.”
“OK,” Lily said as she walked toward Shay.
Lily put her hands on each side of Shay’s face and kissed her.
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” she told Shay and walked into the bathroom.
McGoo’s Discovery
Lily and Shay followed Jack down to the labs. He sat them both is chairs in his blood lab. They both looked at each other and gave a weak grin. Today was going to be a long day. At least they had plenty of sleep over the past twenty four hours. Well, mostly sleep.
“So ladies. How are you this morning? Thank you for the coffee, Shay. Today we are going to test your blood against each other’s. My hope is that Shay’s blood is as strong as yours,” he said pointing to Lily. “Since Shay has spikes my thought is that her blood is the same. If it isn’t, I can only hope that it contains the specialized white blood cells that her blood carried before. That’s why I let you change her, because I believe that your blood will be similar. Your arm please, Shay.”
Shay lifted her arm, palm up, and let McGoo draw blood. Then he reached for Lily’s arm and he drew her blood. He immediately took the vials to the microscope counter. He grabbed a dropper from a drawer and placed a drop of Shay’s blood on a slide and covered it. Then he grabbed another dropper and did same with Lily’s blood. He placed each slide on a separate microscope and adjusted the focus. He flicked a couple of switches and the two samples came up on the monitors that were suspended on arms from the ceiling. McGoo tapped some keys on the keyboard that sat between the two microscopes and both slides came up side by side on both monitors.
Lily and Shay looked at the screens for a moment then looked at McGoo.
“So?” Lily asked.
“They look the same,” Shay said.
“Yes they do. The content looks the same. So let’s get a better look.”
McGoo placed Lily’s sample into the electron microscope. Then he brought the image up onto one of the monitors. It looked like a bunch of red flattened balls with dipped centers. With the occasional large white snowball looking structure and the tiny vampire virus. Visible as a ball with dozens of spikes. In the blood, there were also clusters of stem cells, purplish balls with a visible nucleus. There weren’t as many platelets in vampire blood as there was in human blood. Next he loaded in Shay’s sample then brought it up on the other monitor. They were only slightly different. Shay’s blood still had the same occasional red dots on some of the white blood cells.
McGoo just smiled and stared at the monitors.
“Doc,” Shay called, interrupting his moment. “What are we looking at? They look exactly the same to me.”
“Almost,” McGoo beamed. “See this here? This is your specialized white blood cell. It still exists in your blood.”
“What does that mean?” Lily asked.
“It means that Shay’s blood should make a vampire in less than two days. Either with a little of her blood and the rest yours, or all of hers. Either way it should decrease the transformation duration by two to three days, versus yours, Lily. Ten to fourteen days versus Vincent.”
“Doc?” Shay said. “With everything you can do, why didn’t you just concentrate Vincent’s blood to make more vampires?”
“We did. That’s how we changed the last two vampires decades ago. The problem was that it took so much of Vincent’s blood that the samples would go bad before we had enough to make the transformation. We need almost a gallon and a half of blood to transfuse a large man. The average male human has about five point five liters of blood. That’s just shy of one and half gallons. That’s a lot of blood. And in order to concentrate it, we needed about three times that. Vincent can’t replace his entire blood volume that quickly. We tried freezing the samples, but it damaged them in the process. Freezing the samples apparently kills the virus. And we tried administering the concentrated blood in three intervals, but that didn’t work either. The humans died.”
“OK, I get it,�
� Shay laughed.
“So that means that Shay and I both can make vampires,” Lily added. “So Eric and the Underground will be after us both. The good news is, he’d be stupid to kill you now.”
“Not reassuring, love,” Shay smirked.
“Sorry, but I’m just saying.”
“Here, I want to try something, Lily. Give me your arm.”
Lily lifted her arm to McGoo and he injected her with Shay’s blood sample.
“What was that?” Lily asked.
“That, if my theory is correct, will give your blood the same specialized white blood cells that Shay has.”
“But I’ve given her my blood before, shouldn’t she already have them?” Shay questioned.
“The day you gave her your blood, she needed the specialized cells to heal her. Therefore she used them all up during the healing process,” McGoo explained. “At least that’s what I think happened. Because her blood doesn’t have the cells although she was exposed to them. It could also be that it wasn’t introduced intravenously. I’m not exactly sure why they didn’t stay in her blood.”
Outside McGoo’s lab, Brian stood just out of sight. He had heard everything that the good doctor said. He tossed his hood over his head, looked at the floor and walked to the elevator. He left through the garage and went straight to the Underground fight club. Eric was in the ring sparring with Matt. Matt was huge, with bulging arms and thighs. He had a chest that was nearly twice as wide and twice as thick as Eric’s. Eric was faster but Matt was stronger.
Eric ducked and turned in the time it took Matt to throw a punch. Eric took a swing at his face but Matt caught his hand and squeezed. Eric went down to his knees as Matt bent his wrist back and down toward the floor.
“OK!” Eric yelled.
Matt just laughed and let go. “I win again,” he sneered.
“We’re just playing around.”
“Sore loser.”
“Fuck you, Matt.”
“Eric,” Brian called from the floor.
“What do you want, Brian?” Eric spat.
“I have some news that you certainly want to hear,” Brian told him.
“Then tell me.” Eric leaned on the ropes and bent over toward Brian.
“Not here,” Brian said.
Eric let out an irritated sigh and climbed through the ropes. He and Brian walked outside the fight house and sat at one the empty tables.
“So what’s this big news?” Eric asked, rolling his eyes.
“I was eavesdropping on the good doctor when he brought Lily and LaShay down to his lab. I figured he wanted to do testing of some kind so I snuck over and waited behind the door. He took blood from Shay then from Lily…”
“Get to the point, feeder boy,” Eric interrupted.
“Shay’s blood is just as strong as Lily’s. But Shay’s blood is special. It makes the change in like two days. Lily’s, without the addition of Shay’s, takes five days.”
“So I can get either one and be able to change vampires,” Eric concluded. “Great. Have you recruited the security guards yet? The ones on Lily and Shay’s floor?”
“Yes, but what about the wolves and Onyx? There’s no way the wolves would betray Lily. Vincent would put them down in a heartbeat and they know that. So what do we do about the wolves?”
“We drug them,” Eric said. “I have a good supply of horse tranquilizer. That should put them out for a while. Long enough to grab the girls, anyway.”
What Brian didn’t know, and failed to tell Eric, was that Shay was now a vampire.
“What do you want me to do?” Brian asked.
“Nothing,” Eric told him.
“Nothing? Why?”
“You may be a feeder and able to heal faster than a human, but you’re still mostly human. One swipe from a vampire or one bite from a wolf and you’re dead, buddy.”
After all I’ve done for this ass hole and now I’m just pushed to the side, Brian thought.
Brian was disappointed that Eric didn’t want his help. Now that Brian really thought about it, Eric has never appreciated anything I’ve done for him. Maybe I should just go tell Vincent what Eric is planning. Maybe I’ll tell Lily and Shay, too.
Brian had already bribed the security officers on the fifty sixth floor and two more in the lobby. But Eric didn’t know how Brian bribed the guards. He had promised them that Eric would turn them into vampires after they had Lily.
Eric made some phone calls and within ten minutes, vampires from the Underground began showing up in front of the fight club. After about thirty minutes, Eric began telling them his plan.
“Last time, Vincent was able to get security to Lily’s floor faster than I had anticipated. We should’ve been gone by the time they arrived. But Erica knew too fast. Shay must have called as soon as Lily passed out. We’re not going to get away with drugging Lily again either. So our plan is to get as many vampires to Lily’s floor as possible. You will wait in the stairwell until I give the signal. Once I give the signal, you will meet me at the elevators. The plan is to sneak in and fight our way out. In the early morning hours, most of the vampires are in their apartments getting ready for the day. Either going to bed or doing something inside. The security is light until seven AM. And the doorman and Guardian wolf at the front door aren’t there until seven AM as well. So if we show up at six, there will be less chance of being seen.
“There is a guard in the lobby that will let us in the front door. Once we get past the lobby, it should be smooth sailing. The only person we need to take out is Author, the guest elevator attendant. He’ll be there at six AM just like he has been for the past seventy years. Aaron has a silencer for him. No flashing your guns, claws and teeth around either. The wolves will take the staircase and make sure that security can’t get upstairs. We’ll be nice and quiet and we’ll be fine.
“Any questions?” Eric asked the group.
“Who’s going to be with you to get the girl?” Matt asked.
“Girls, plural. That would be you and Aaron,” Eric answered.
“Wait, you want both of them now?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” Eric said flatly. “The plan is to get them both.”
“When are we doing this?” asked someone from the back of the crowd.
“Tomorrow morning,” Eric answered.
The girls were in McGoo’s lab all day. He would take a fresh blood sample every hour from them both. Finally at the end of the day, he had concluded that the specialized white blood cells were now present in Lily’s blood. Meaning that both Lily and Shay could create a vampire in less than three days. When Jack gave Vincent the news he was ecstatic. The vampire numbers would come back.
McGoo finally let the girls leave about six o’clock.
The girls hadn’t been home ten minutes when someone knocked on Shay’s door. She went to answer it thinking that McGoo wanted something else and just swung open the door.
“Doc, we…,” Shay began but stopped. “Dad? What are you doing here?”
“You haven’t been at work and you’re not returning my calls.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve just been really busy, Dad,” she admitted.” Come in.”
Lily poked her head out of Shay’s bedroom as Martin and Shay were walking into the living room.
“Would you like a drink?” Lily asked as she walked into the room.
“Yes, thank you,” Martin answered.
Martin stared at Shay for few seconds with a strange look on his face.
“You look incredible, hon. What have you been doing?” he asked Shay.
“Uh… Nothing in particular,” she stammered.
“Wow,” her dad said. “You look almost ten years younger. I guess the Crown Building is really working out for you.”
“Maybe it’s Lily. So, Dad, what are you doing here?” Shay asked, changing the subject.
“I was hoping to talk to Vincent.”
Lily nearly dropped the three glasses of scotch as she was putting them on the
table.
“Vincent?” Lily asked. “What do you want with my granddad?”
“Well, I was doing a little research and learned that this building is owned by the Crown Corporation. Do you know what that is, Lily?”
Lily looked at Shay and wondered where this conversation was going.
“Well, this Crown Corporation,” Martin continued, “owns every prestigious address in every major city and at least one subdivision in every secondary city. The corporation is worth billions. And you said your grandfather owns the Crown Building. Why does this corporation own only one property in every city? That makes no sense.”
Lily did not want to have this conversation. She reached in her pocket, pulled out her phone and called Vincent. Luckily he was available and said he’d be there in a few minutes. Vincent had been afraid that Martin was going to look into the ownership of the covens. He was hoping that he wouldn’t have to have this conversation with Martin. But since he was here, Vince had to come up with a good story to cover the covens, but he was coming up empty. Technically Vincent did own the covens. The Elders owned Crown Corp, but it wasn’t like his name was on any of the documents that proved ownership. It was just understood that if the Elders were to die, Crown Corp would go to the Guardians. There would always be Guardians. Maybe not the same ones, but they would always exist as long as there were vampires.
Vincent knocked on Shay’s door and Lily answered.
Martin stood to shake Vincent’s hand when he entered the living room.
“So I hear you’re looking into the Crown Corporation,” Vincent said before he even sat down.
“Sit, please,” Martin said. “I was just curious as to why you said you owned the building.”
“I do. I’m the silent CEO of Crown Corp. The corporation’s funds are distributed over several hundred properties. Each property is independently operated but abide by the rules and regulations of the Corporation.”
“Silent CEO?” Martin questioned. “What is that exactly?”
“It means the corporation is self-sufficient. It’s been in operation…,”
“Forever, it seems,” Martin interrupted. “There is no ‘founded’ date for the corporation. It’s like it’s been in existence forever.”
