henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (7 page)

That was how it all started. A teary reunion between lovers, Neha and Kate hugging and crying. Neha understanding immediately what Kate was and promising to fix it.

Me, promising to help.

Me, making a huge mistake.

I’d spent a year helping, until Kate finally lost patience with herself and ended it, and then I’d kept on helping because by that point it was habit, and I thought of Neha as a friend. We were working together for a common goal.

I had grieved Kate’s loss and knew that a cure could have value for those like her, the ones who thought themselves monsters and could never thrive as an immortal. I didn’t understand the Weepers, who saw immortality as a curse and a burden, but I knew that vampirism was not for everyone.

Of course, I had never, ever wanted the Cure myself.

Altruism never leads to anything but trouble.

I sighed and went back home, where I stripped off my nylons and bra. I brushed my teeth for a solid five minutes and then rinsed with Listerine twice. Then I crawled in bed and tried to sleep.

CHAPTER 6

T
he next night, I was back at work. I hated to admit it, but I made a better waitress than a detective. It was a moderately busy night and I made decent tips. While waiting for my last table to pay, I stood at the server station behind the dining room, pulling the night’s paper menus off the fancy faux-leather placards and tossing them in the recycling bin. Tomorrow night, new menus would be slapped onto the placards as part of the opening sidework. Tara, who had exceeded expectations and actually come to work tonight, was folding napkins on the prep table next to me.

My phone buzzed in my apron. Tara heard it and glanced at my vibrating apron pocket, smirking knowingly. We’re not supposed to keep our cell phones on our person while on the clock, and usually it’s a rule I don’t have a problem with. Technology is neat. I am a fan. But I’ve lived decades without a phone in my pocket and I can definitely go hours without itching to check it. Tonight, however, in light of Ray’s murder and the possibility that Neha was in danger, and the knowledge that someone out there had vials of the Cure in their possession, I felt uneasy being stuck at work without having a way for people to contact me.

I excused myself to the employee locker room. My heart sped up when I saw Cazimir’s name as the incoming call. Cazimir was the sort of vampire who disliked modern gadgets, accepting their existence as a distasteful necessity of modern life. He had a smart phone but he didn’t use it unless it was absolutely necessary.

I hit answer and said, “Hello?”

“You must come to the Factory immediately,” Cazimir said, his voice hard. My blood immediately went cold.

“What? Why?” I asked.

“It’s an emergency,” he said, which did not answer my question.

“I’m at work,” I said, knowing this would not matter to Cazimir, who found the concept of work abhorrent. When you’ve been alive for over five hundred years and have had money invested and saved for that long, the idea of getting a job is as foreign as the idea of a vampire sunbathing.

“Now,” he hissed. The line went dead.

My stomach did a little tap dance and a few somersaults while I leaned against the metal storage rack full of rags, aprons, and boxes of shoe polish. I had no idea what might possibly constitute an emergency at Caz’s Factory, but it was definitely the sort of thing I did
not
want to be involved in. That said, Cazimir wouldn’t call me unless it was something I needed to see.

I thought about the Cure being out on the streets and wondered if someone else had been stuck with a needle and turned mortal. The thought sent the cup of soup I’d sucked down between tables sliding back up my throat, and I had to swallow it down.

Back at the server station, Tara frowned when she saw me. “Something wrong?”

“A friend is … in trouble,” I said, wishing I’d thought of a decent lie before coming out of the employee locker room. Clearly I looked spooked.

“That’s too bad,” Tara said.

You have no idea.
“Yeah,” is all I said out loud. I checked on my last table, saw they had—thankfully—put a credit card out, and I went to work getting my butt out of there as fast as humanly possible.

A
IDAN
, faithful blue-haired mortal companion boy, met me at the Factory door. He was wearing black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and thick-framed glasses. He took me in with a slightly suspicious glint in his eye, then let me inside.

“What’s going on?” I asked as Aidan closed the door behind me.

Aidan lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Not really sure. Just got home. All I know is people are freaking out. Before I could ask why, I was sent to get the door. The security guys are busy with crowd control.”

“Strange,” I said, though I doubted Aidan being shrugged off and asked to complete some menial task was unusual. Aidan grunted in reply and led me up the wooden staircase to the second floor. He used a key card to open the main entrance and then held the door for me. The hallway he’d let me into was packed with people. Mostly human, as far as I could tell, some clearly employees who’d abandoned their posts and others were the aforementioned security guards. Most were the residents, largely vampire groupies. But a few immortals were peppered throughout the crowd, looking just as concerned and uncertain as the mortals around them. They all spoke in hushed tones, the hum of gossip and speculation rumbling through the hall. Everyone who had emotion on their face wore masks of concern. That made me nervous. Vampires have a high threshold for bad news, and the mortals who live with them are used to chaos and death.

Aidan got in front of me and pushed through the crowd. A couple of the mortals pawed at Aidan, trying to get him to stop and give them answers, but he shook his head and pushed forward. I hurried after him.

There was a low, miserable moan coming from down the hall. It was like the soundtrack to a zombie movie. The hair on my arms stood at attention.

The crowd gave the open door a wide berth, save for a guards posted at either side.

Inside, the room was decorated like the living room of a modern luxurious apartment: sofas with square edges, a big-screen television, a cable box, some video game consoles, a glass coffee table that had been pushed against the TV stand. Cazimir stood in front of the blue sofa with several other vampires and a single mortal. The mortal man wore a suit jacket and loose tie and had pens in his shirt pocket. One of the vampires beside Caz was Lark, an old acquaintance of mine. We’d never been friends, but we’d always been civil. She was tall with a muscular frame, and tonight she had mascara streaking down her cheeks. Her eyes were bloodshot, which happened almost every time a vampire cried. Lark had never been one to emote in public, so that made my stomach twist into pretzels.

I didn’t recognize the other two vampires.

The moaning was coming from the sofa.

As I got closer, the smell hit me like a freight train: rot and something even more foul and noxious, like human waste. Then I saw what they were all staring at and my nausea hit new levels: a red and blotchy thing was writhing on the couch. I stepped around the couch and stood next to Cazimir, whose expression was pained as he watched the miserable creature.

“What the fuck?” Aidan exclaimed when he saw it. I couldn’t fault him. I was thinking the same thing. His face twisted in disgust.

Caz’s head shot up at his mortal pet’s words. “Aidan!” Warning tone. “Go stand in the corner and be quiet!” Aidan looked uneasily at the thing on the sofa, then back at his lover, and finally did as he was told. Good boy.

I steeled myself, swallowing bile, and looked at it more closely. It wasn’t a thing, of course. It was a vampire. It—
he
—was a mess of angry red boils bubbling up from his pale white skin, oozing blood and dark mustard-colored pus. It was hard to recognize him with the oozing pustules on his face. They made his cheeks red and bloated. Then I finally realized who it was: Thomas. Thomas had been turned a few years ago by Lark, who had sworn never to damn another to this life, but had fallen so hopelessly in love with the man that on his fiftieth birthday, she’d given in and made him a vampire. Thomas had always looked dignified and impressive as a vampire. Now his lips were chapped and parted, and pinkish foam came out of his mouth every time he moaned. The boils covered every exposed inch of his skin.

Lark sobbed once. She reached out, hand so fast it was like a shot. She grabbed a fistful of the fabric at the back of my work shirt and yanked me to her. “What the fuck is happening, Henri?” she demanded, brown eyes hard and cold, her jaw tight and set.

My human heart slammed into my ribs. “I don’t know. How would I know?” I demanded. I looked at Caz. “What’s going on?”

“Lark.” Caz’s voice was soft but with an edge of warning. Lark let go of the fabric, but I could tell she wanted to tear my head off of my neck. I stepped closer to Cazimir, wondering how he had become my ally so quickly.

Thomas’s eyes were wide and bloodshot, too. His gaze found Lark, who met it steadily. “Can’t you do something?” she asked.

I started to say no, but then I realized she was talking to the mortal in the necktie. He shook his head. “Neither the antihistamines nor the steroids have had any effect,” he said, voice grim. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do without knowing the cause.”

I’d seen vampires go into the sunlight or pyres of flame: their skin might turn an angry red, but it burnt to ash pretty fast. Vampires who suffered minor sun exposure—up to ninety seconds—might get red rashes or even boils similar to these, but I’d never seen anything quite like this. The boils were oozing up continuously and popping all over his body, like he was being burned up from the inside while suffering some kind of plague. His shirt had been cut away, discarded on the floor. Blood was soaking through the denim of his jeans. One of the boils on his chest grew to the size of a golf ball and then popped, spraying blood and pus on his already-marred flesh. The noxious stench once against assaulted my nostrils and clawed down my throat. I coughed, trying not to gag.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Someone gave him your serum,” Lark said. My blood went cold.

“We don’t know that,” Cazimir said to her before turning to me. “That’s why you’re here. Is this”—he gestured to Thomas, who opened his mouth and expelled more pink froth—“part of the process?” He sounded hopeful but looked dubious. It should have been obvious to anyone that there was no coming back from whatever this was. But Lark watched me with eyes that begged me to say yes, this was simply the hell one had to endure to turn mortal again. I really, really wished that was the case for Thomas’s sake.

“You mean, to become human again? With the Cure?” Cazimir nodded. “No. Not at all. It was painful, and I threw up a lot.” I’d expelled a lot of things from my body, but I wasn’t going to go into detail. Dying is disgusting. Apparently, so is being brought back to life. But it wasn’t
this
vile. “But there were no boils.”

The pustules seemed to be gaining speed, and pink foam dribbled down Thomas’s chin in a steady stream.

“Then what the hell is this?” Lark demanded, watching her fledgling’s body imploding on itself in a writhing mess of poison-filled pustules.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “What happened?”

“We were at a concert at the Showbox when he felt something like a mosquito bite,” Lark said. “We were laughing about it—the irony of a mosquito trying to bite a vampire. And then he realized someone had jammed a needle in his shoulder. We thought it was one of those assholes who drug people, or maybe some kind of accident. But then he started breaking out in hives.” She shuddered at the memory, though no doubt the picture in front of us was a hundred times worse. “I thought it might have been one of those idiotic vampire hunters. You know how they are. Always trying to find ways to poison immortals. So I brought him here. But then it got … worse.”

Understatement of the year. The boils started to slow their inflation and popping. That probably wasn’t good.

“Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been the Cure,” I said. I might have been bedridden and fevered for hours, strapped to a gurney in Neha’s lab, but I hadn’t gotten so much as pimple from the process.

Cazimir nodded to the mortal doctor, who pulled out a plastic bag with a syringe inside it and passed it to me. Cazimir actually ducked out of the way, as if even mild contact with the baggie might turn him into the mess of pus and blood that had been Thomas. I glanced through the plastic. A tiny bit of red liquid remained in the syringe, and the plastic was stained red. It looked like blood. “It might be blood tainted with something,” I said, knowing how idiotic it sounded.

Vampires can metabolize pretty much anything. Disease, poison, alcohol. Vampires can’t even get drunk because their bodies burn the alcohol out of their blood so damn fast. Giving a vampire blood contaminated with plague, for example, wouldn’t cause them much harm at all. Maybe a headache. That’s part of why I always thought Neha’s quest for a Cure was doomed to fail. It was a nice idea, but it didn’t seem possible. Vampire blood was good at filtering anything that might do the host harm.