The Forever Drug (29 page)

The air exploded into a million sparkling motes of light. Something had surrounded me—an amorphous spirit whose brilliant aura filled my astral vision, blinding me. I felt my paws leave the ground as I was lifted into the air, and I began to tumble nose over tail like a leaf in a whirlwind. I began to pant— and suddenly my lungs were filled with a noxious odor. It smelled like harsh chemicals, as if I'd been locked in a tiny room in which a dozen different kinds of toxic cleaning solutions had been dumped.

The smell seared through my sensitive wolf nostrils like a rush of super-heated air, burning out my sinuses, nearly exploding my lungs. At the same time I was being spun through the air so quickly my ears were ringing. I was on the verge of passing out...

"Vata, stop!"

At the sound of Jane's voice, I suddenly lurched to a stop. I hung upside down in mid-air, my ears and tail drooping. The world was still spinning around me, but I could breathe again. The horrible, noxious odor was gone.

A halogen flashlight clicked on, blinding me with blue-white light. I shut my eyes against its glare.

"It's all right, Vata," I heard Jane say. "He's not an intruder. Put him down. Gently."

I floated to the ground as the invisible spirit that had attacked me—probably an air elemental—released me from its grip. I scrambled to my feet, then shifted into human form. Jane swung the flashlight beam away from me, then widened and muted the beam so that it dimly illuminated the room. It was octagonal in shape, with a high ceiling—one of the half-arches that capped the mansion.

I stood. Jane was no more than a meter or two away. Despite my exhaustion and the buffeting I'd just taken, I smiled at her. She was just as beautiful as I remembered. Her hair was soaked from the rain and had been lashed by the wind; I could smell her damp scent coming from it. Wet strands of hair framed her high cheekbones and sensuous lips. The rain had soaked the plain gray T-shirt she wore, revealing the curves of her body. The silver locket hung between her breasts, gleaming softly. The light from the flashlight she held—dimmed to a yellow glow with the brightness of a candle—gave her body a soft, warm look.

I took a step forward ...

"Stop! Don't come any closer!"

I jerked to a halt, startled by the tone of her voice. And then I realized that this was Jane... but not Jane. Her voice had lost its hesitant, muted tones, and her body language was no longer cautious and defensive. She stood confidently, strength and purpose blazing in her eyes, even though they had dark circles under them that suggested she was nearly as tired as I was. Every nuance of her stance, every gesture, suggested that this was a woman who could take care of herself. She no longer needed me. I slumped with the realization. Had I been in wolf form, my tail would have been between my legs.

Jane pointed the flashlight beam at the floor. "You were about to step on the circle."

I looked down and saw a complicated pattern of grooves in the floor, inlaid with metal. They formed a complicated Celtic knotwork pattern—a meter-wide band that formed a circle nearly ten meters in diameter. I recognized the metal instantly by its distinctive brownish tarnish: silver. I recoiled, drawing my bare foot back.

"Thanks," I said. "Stepping on that would have caused a nasty burn."

Her perfectly arched brows drew together in a slight frown, almost as if warning me against the silver hadn't been what she'd intended. I was still dizzy from the elemental's attack, but I was together enough to figure out what the pattern on the floor was: a hermetic circle, used for spellcasting. Which raised yet another question in my weary mind ...

"What are you doing here, Jane? Did Pelig bring you?"

"Pelig?" She laughed. "He's too busy directing the storm to take anyone anywhere. I came here on my own, to use the circle."

Pelig was directing the storm? I'd guessed right: the hurricane outside
had
been stirred up by magic. Was
this
the attack on the same scale as the Great Ghost Dance that the Mi'kmaq rebels had been hinting at?

I felt a stab of worry for the Lone Star riggers who'd been sent to the island during the state of emergency. If any of them had been caught by the storm while piloting their choppers, they'd have been smashed like bugs. I thought of Hunt: how he'd pilot any vehicle anywhere—even into the teeth of a hurricane. I hoped he was safely back in Halifax.

"And don't call me Jane," she added. "That was just an alias I used. Call me Mareth'riel."

I nodded. The name Jane didn't seem to fit her now. She wasn't my Jane Doe anymore.

"How did you get in?" I asked her. "The locks ... and that elemental ..." I switched briefly to astral vision and looked around the room but didn't see the spirit anywhere. It must have been patrolling elsewhere on the estate.

Mareth'riel shrugged. "I used to be an—associate— of Dunkelzahn's."

She said it as if no further explanation were necessary. I could only assume that she had been a regular visitor here, that the locks had been programmed to accept her. It seemed that even the spirits that guarded the estate knew and obeyed her, for frig's sake.

She must have traveled in some pretty exclusive circles, if she was that close a friend of a former president of the UCAS.

Thunder boomed outside, so loud that a bolt must have struck the mansion. The floor under my bare feet trembled.

Mareth'riel fixed me with a look. "You'd better leave, Romulus. The storm is about to break, and once it does people are going to come looking for me. They'll already know that I've got my memories back—that I've become a player again. I was threatening to jump ship before my arrest, and now they'll assume that's what I'll do. They'll use every weapon at their disposal to bring me back into the fold and keep me quiet about my research."

She gestured at the floor. "I'll be safe enough here, inside the circle. Once the storm has broken, I'll activate the circle's magic, and that will provide a barrier for me. But it won't protect you. They'll brush you aside like a fly, if they find you in their way."

"What people?" I asked. "Who will brush me away?"

She didn't answer. Instead she swung her flashlight beam over the circle, as if inspecting it for flaws.

"Jane." I growled my frustration. "
Mareth'riel
. I followed you around all this time, trying to help and protect you, and now ... you're just going to pat me on the head and tell me to run on home?"

She looked up with a wistful smile. "I remember what you did for me, Romulus. How could I forget? You were a true
milessaratish
to me. You did what nobody else could have. And for that, I suppose I owe you an explanation. There's no need to keep any secrets from you. Especially after we were so ... intimate ... inside the crystal. And especially not now, considering what I'm about to do."

She gestured at the floor. "This circle was created so that Dunkelzahn could keep in touch with certain ... colleagues ... who were all doing research into longevity. The dragon contacted us from time to time, and after we had shared our results with him, would offer suggestions that helped to guide our work and spur it forward. And that research must continue."

"But Dunkelzahn is dead," I said.

"Yes," Mareth'riel said. "His assassination was a true pity, for it sounded as though he was on the verge of making a great breakthrough. He'd been attempting to duplicate in other species the immunity to aging that dragons display—I'd been helping to monitor some of his test subjects before my incarceration. But the gene therapy Dunkelzahn developed was flawed. It allowed humans to look years younger than they really were, and to remain healthy and active well into their eighties and nineties, but it delayed the onset of the aging process only slightly. The individuals who were administered the treatments still grew old and will eventually die."

"Like Crazy John?" I asked. When she looked at me blankly, I prompted her: "The old guy who built the 'wizard's tower' near Short Beach. Was he one of Dunkelzahn's test subjects?"

Mareth'riel nodded. "One of the failures. It was a mistake to test the process on adults. Dunkelzahn was the one who came up with the idea of working with newborns, and disguising the gene therapy experiments as a vaccination program. He was going to initiate his own UCAS-funded 'vaccination' program last year. He thought that, if the therapy were administered early enough in life, the normal human and meta life span could be doubled, or even tripled...

"Tell me," she said eagerly. "Did the program ever get under way? I don't remember hearing anything about it, while I was in prison. I was..." She winced. "I wasn't able to watch the trids."

"Uh ... I don't follow human medicine," I said apologetically. "And I don't know much about vaccinations. The puppies I sired all got their rabies shots but ..." I stopped, annoyed at myself for blushing. What did I care, now, if Mareth'riel knew I had mated with Haley?

Mareth'riel wasn't even listening to my excuses. She wanted information.

"The newborn vaccination program would have started after October 31," she continued. "The date was critical—the mana levels had to be just right. Magic played a critical part in the activation of the enzyme. The ambient mana would have been high enough, after that date."

"Oh." Something clicked. The date had jogged a memory. "I remember hearing something about a free vaccination when Dunkelzahn's will was broadcast," I said. "Some sort of immunization that was supposed to be administered by the World Health Organization. A vaccine for kids born after October 31, 2060. I remember it because October 31 is my birthday—or at least, it's the birthday my first set of foster parents gave me. When I heard the tridcast, I wondered how the doctors would know when a shifter baby was born. Our parents don't exactly fill out birth certificates for us."

I shrugged. "In any case, the formula for the vaccine never made it to the World Health Organization offices. The Draco Foundation office where it was being held until its release was destroyed in a Humanis Policlub attack. The triggers who did it said they didn't want their children being tainted by 'dragon blood' and turned into mutants."

Mareth'riel's eyes widened. "That's not possible," she said. "There's no way the policlub could have known the vaccine was based on compounds found in dragon blood. Dunkelzahn didn't even tell me that—I found it out on my own, after I became suspicious that the drug might create a new form of metatype."

"Maybe the policlub made a lucky guess?" I suggested.

"No." She said it with utter conviction. "The destruction of Dunkelzahn's 'vaccine' formula had to have been orchestrated by someone other than Humanis Policlub. Someone with a vested interest in suppressing all longevity research, other than their own. Someone who wouldn't have approved of me sharing with Dunkelzahn the research they had funded."

"The people you talked about earlier?" I guessed. "The ones who are coming for you? Who are they?"

Mareth'riel looked at me for a long, silent moment before answering. "The Illuminates of the New Dawn."

"New Dawn?" I was confused. "Isn't that the corporation you worked for?"

She blinked, as if surprised that I knew. "The New Dawn Corporation is just one of their holdings. It was set up in the 2030s, just after Tír Taimgire formed, as a toehold in that nation. The group behind it—the Illuminates—is a hermetic order of extremely powerful mages, based in the UCAS. They were the ones who provided the funding for Rozilyn Hernandez's run at the presidency in 2057.

"They also provided the funding for my research, and helped set up the drug trials in the UCAS. There was just one condition: that if the enzyme I was developing really did produce immortality, they would be the only ones to receive it."

She paused to let that sink in. I'd heard of Hernandez—after the last presidential election, who hadn't? She was a hermetic mage who'd run under the banner of the New Century Party, a slightly left-of-center party that had campaigned under a promise to use magic and technology to turn the UCAS into a utopia. Their campaign platform had included full rights for all metas, including shifters. The irony had been that none of us had SIN numbers, so we couldn't vote for them. Hernandez had a lot of popular support among metas and other magically active people until Dunkelzahn entered the race and stole her thunder. After he came into the picture her numbers dropped drastically.

I wondered what a presidential candidate would do with immortality. I supposed she'd keep building her power base, running in election after election, until she was eventually victorious. And then ... maybe change the rules so that the president governed for life?

Which showed how much I knew about politics.

"You pissed the Illuminates off somehow?" I prompted.

Mareth'riel nodded. "Like Dunkelzahn, I wanted immortality to be available to everybody." Her eyes blazed. "Free of charge."

"This drug—this enzyme you created," I said slowly. "Does it work? Can it really grant someone immortality?"

I tried to think how my life would change if I could live forever—barring accidental death or a fatal disease, of course. I already had an inkling of what it would be like: my regenerative powers gave me a limited form of immortality. But even though I could heal from most wounds and injuries, I'd eventually grow old and die.

I tried to imagine a world in which no one would ever grow old. I supposed that it just might produce the utopia the New Century Party had promised. I'd already seen that the older people got, the less they cared about the environment, about the way the world was going. They knew they only had thirty years, twenty years, ten years left. Why bother trying to make the world a better place if they wouldn't be there to enjoy it? But if they were going to be around for centuries to come, they'd have to deal with the long-term messes their short-term indulgences were creating.