Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (2 page)

He could have ordered all of them to take poison, and they would have swallowed it as willingly as Dr. Sanderson had. Though he might swear to use his sway over them only when necessary and only for good, they were still owned by him—though, even more frighteningly, not as completely as I was.

As soon as he dosed a staff member, the guards would follow behind and unbind that person, and Dorian would permit him to open his eyes and leave. But it wasn’t long before Dorian got to a lab tech who didn’t open her mouth to obediently receive the pill. Instead, as soon as her blood was drawn, she began to fight like a demon, and it took three guards to subdue her and pry open her mouth despite her small size and bound hands.

Dispassionately, Dorian popped the pill into her mouth, and she went limp in the guards’ arms. Then, after a moment, she looked up at Dorian with huge, liquid eyes.

“I’ve failed you,” she said. “Oh, sir, I am so sorry.”

“Sit,” Dorian ordered, nodding at the chairs that had been pushed to the wall on the opposite side of the table.

Silently, she circled the table, her gaze glued to the ground. She passed so close to me that I could have touched her, but I recoiled from her instinctively, instead. As the small lab tech sat alone against the wall, Dorian finished clearing the rest of the staff and dismissed them, including the ones who had been brought in after the others already bound, roused from their homes for the proofing by the guards.

Then there was no one left in the room but Dorian, the guards, the woman, and me. Dorian circled the table, offering me his hand as he passed in a silent request for me to come with him. I took it and came, squeezing perhaps a little too hard—whether to reassure him or me, I didn’t know.

A knock on the door announced Will. He was a vampire’s cognate, like I was, and now, after the death of Hattie, he was in charge Dorian’s lab. He’d organized the roundup of the human staff members from their homes.

“I heard about Dr. Sanderson,” he said as he stepped inside. “We lost another one as we were going house-to-house.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Dorian said, his mouth a flat line.

“Yes,” Will agreed somberly. “It was Dr. Orrin.”

Dorian compressed his lips together briefly and nodded. “Well, we saved one. Iris Cho.”

“I see,” Will said, his gaze flickering over to the woman who sat head-down and trembling.

“I’ll update you on what we discover.” It was a clear dismissal.

Will nodded. “I’m late going home. Elizabeth will worry.”

“Later,” Dorian said.

Will gave a crisp nod and left.

Dorian pulled two chairs around to face Iris, one for each of us. I sat down next to him and examined the woman. Just a few minutes before, she would have died for her secret master. Now, however, she was a shaking wreck because she had betrayed Dorian.

I tried very hard not to see myself in her. Not to wonder how much I was like her.

Instead, I let myself say the question that had been in my mind since the start of all this. “Was it Cosimo? Was he the one who got to you?”

“I don’t know, sir, madam,” Iris said in a tiny voice. “I don’t know who it was. It must have been two provings ago. My pill must have been switched with another, one with a different vampire’s blood on it, and that night, someone in a robe and a hood and a veil visited with instructions. I wouldn’t recognize the voice again. It sounded fake, like it was being changed.”

“Was it a man or a woman?” Dorian asked.

Iris shook her head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. The person said I was to take some of the cell cultures and make up and contaminate some others, and so I did.”

“Was Dr. Sanderson in charge then? Did he switch the pills so that you took one with the wrong blood?” Dorian pressed.

Iris shrugged helplessly. “He must have. Usually, Hattie—Dr. Buchanan was in charge of the provings, and she ran them with Dr. Sanderson together. But the week that she was killed, Dr. Sanderson ran them alone.”

Dorian looked at me. “That was why Jean had to die. So that Hattie would be dead or incapacitated. She was a cognate and so immune, and killing her directly would be the grossest violation of agnatic customs. But killing Jean was just as good for their purposes. With her out of the way and the rest of the cognates in hiding, Dr. Sanderson could be enthralled, and he could arrange for the blood in Iris’ pill to be switched out.”

Everything fell into place then in perfect, sickening order. Jean’s death was neither arbitrary nor isolated. It was the first step in a scheme that ended with a theft—which had gone undetected for over a week, until Will had returned and discovered the discrepancies. Time enough for the thieves to go anywhere in the world and cover their tracks behind them.

“What did you do with the cell cultures you took?” Dorian asked, turning back to Iris again. “Whom did you give them to?”

She shook her head. “I left them there, in the incubator to the side. Someone else must have taken them.”

“This Dr. Orrin?” I suggested.

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

I glanced at Dorian. “Did you know that Dr. Sanderson was also...compromised?” I tried instead.

“No,” she said, her voice even softer as tears rolled down her face. “I don’t know anything more. All I know is what I was told to do.”

“It is not your fault,” Dorian said, his voice dry and mechanical, as if he were reading a script. “You did nothing wrong. You shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

She lifted her head and nodded vigorously, her eyes instantly dry. “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

“I always am,” Dorian said, and the sarcasm in his voice appeared to be entirely lost on her. “Go home. Get a good night’s sleep. And come in refreshed. No one will blame you, and you must not blame yourself.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said almost brightly. She stood and nodded to both of us before hurrying out of the room.

I
hugged myself hard as Dorian dismissed the shifter guards. I couldn’t help the instinctive revulsion I felt whenever Dorian used his powers on someone. It was impossible not to become all too aware of the bond that was between us—and how it meant that my mind, also, would never be free.

“You should hire yourself out as the world’s most effective therapist,” I said, making a weak joke to cover my uneasiness.

He turned toward me, and in his eyes, I felt like I could see every year of his age. “I am so tired of fighting, Cora. So. Damned. Tired.”

I reached out and caught one of his hands between both of mine. “I know. Even though I can’t really imagine, I know.” I could feel it in him, through the bond that joined us.

He closed his eyes, and for just a moment, the completely perfect skin of his forehead creased. “I wonder why I fight at all sometimes. It seems like everything we do only makes matters worse.”

I lifted a shoulder. “You’re the one trying to convince me of the importance of your cause. The future of humanity and all that. And I may not be entirely human anymore, but I actually do still care whether all humans are turned into nothing more than vampire cattle.”

He opened his eyes and took a deep breath, and his face went perfectly, impossibly smooth. “We could not have won without this research. You realize that, right?”

I nodded. “Since the Adelphoi don’t feed whenever they feel like it, only when they must, they wouldn’t be able to find cognates often enough to keep from dying out. The test narrows the chance of finding a cognate with a feeding from one in thousands to one in ten or so. Yeah. I got it. It’s been just about drilled into my head.”

“But developing this research also has its risks. Imagine, for a moment, that any agnate had the ability to pluck ten people out of a crowd of thousands, feed from those ten, and find a cognate. And that he might not be content to do it once but two, three, perhaps a dozen times.”

“Oh,” I said, and his hand in mine suddenly felt colder.

“Yes, ‘oh,’” he agreed. “I was hoping we’d have time to at least convince agnates that multiple cognates is an infraction deserving of death rather than simply being in bad taste. We’ll deplete the genetic supply of those able to become cognates too quickly otherwise, never mind the other consequences.” He gave me a kind of lopsided, humorless smile. “Perhaps introduce to our people the idea of birth control, once they begin to adjust to the idea that there is no scarcity any longer.”

The other consequences. I could imagine all too well what they would be. Once the vampiric agnates could find mates quickly, they multiply quickly, becoming not ten per a million as they were now but perhaps one hundred per million, one thousand per million, even. Each demanding more blood, more cognates to fulfill their need and in turn giving birth to even more....

The fight between the Adelphoi and the Kyrioi had been a battle waged largely through the breeding of armies. And if it continued, it would mean the end of everything—not now, maybe not even in ten years, but in my very long lifetime, human society as I knew it would be destroyed.

Unless we kept the research from being used by the Kyrioi.

“How can we stop them?” I asked. “How can we get the cultures back?”

He shook his head. “It’s not just the cell cultures themselves. Those will merely make it faster for the Kyrioi to develop a test of their own. It’s information. Data. And that, once leaked.... ” He trailed off.

“We can never be sure that it’s not out there, can we? And if they’re smart, it probably already is.” I searched his face for some indication that I was mistaken. I saw none. “What have we started? And what are we going to do?”

“We’ll do whatever we can,” he said simply. “It’s what we’ve always done. And in the meantime, you’ll finish your school and we’ll have our wedding.”

“But it doesn’t even mean anything anymore,” I protested.

He shifted his hand in my grasp so that he was holding on to mine more firmly. “But it does. It does to you, and that’s enough for me in itself. But it still does to all of us, too.”

His brow lowered as he continued, “Before the research of which you were the first success, the Adelphoi were losing. We had to lose. Historically, it has only been the fights between the various Kyrioi factions, the difficulties of long-distance communication, and our aggressive recruitment of new members that has allowed us to survive at all. Now, perhaps our great advantage has been lost, but we are at least on an equal footing with the Kyrioi for the first time ever. You mustn’t ever underestimate how important that is, Cora. How important you are because that’s what you represent to all of us, my beautiful, brave love.”

I nodded even though I was neither of those things.

He continued, “And if we Adelphoi cooperate with humankind, perhaps we gain an advantage that way. It’s that cooperation that has brought us this far, after all. Our basic beliefs have been confirmed—that humans, largely left to their own devices, create far better life for us all than they do when they are enslaved because they have the creative urge that we so utterly lack.”

“Is that the only reason you aren’t a Kyrioi?” I asked, indulging in my momentary bitterness.

“No, Cora,” he said softly, catching my elbow with his free hand.

He pulled me from my chair and into his, gathering me into his lap. The tension ran out of my muscles in the circle of his arms. His touch didn’t make anything better, but I was tired of fighting, too. First I’d fought cancer, then Dorian, and now the Kyrioi and myself. It felt so good to give up, to give in, if only for a moment, and I rested my head against his shoulder, closing my eyes.

“You know that’s not why I’m with the Adelphoi,” he said, his voice so close to my ear that I shivered.

“I do. I’m sorry.” I breathed in the smell of him, the sandalwood and musk of his cologne and the heady smell of his cool skin underneath. Would I ever be able to get enough of him? Even the blankets where he’d slept, the pillow where his head had lain could drive me half out of my mind. “But everything’s changed now. How can I act like it hasn’t?”

“Everything’s changed, but you still deserve your dreams.” Dorian’s voice rumbled against my ear.

“You don’t think they matter.” I raised my head and looked accusingly into his eyes. “You’ve made that perfectly clear, you know. You don’t think my friends, my college—any of those things—you don’t think they matter. So why are you telling me to go back to a school you don’t care about when everything’s falling down around our ears?”

He lifted a finger and pressed it to my lips, cutting me off. “Because you care. And right now, of all times, what matters to you must matter to me.”

Because of his oath not to change me. Because of his damned ethical code that was both my salvation and my curse. Right now, I could see in his eyes how much he wanted to tell me that my petty life with its petty concerns should no longer force him to divide his attention and his resources, not when there were more important things at stake.

And there were. That was one of the reasons that I’d hesitated to give myself over to Dorian and his world—because I knew that however much he cared for me, I could never fully matter, especially not the parts of me tied to my old world and my old life. How important were a degree and my friendship with Lisette when compared to the fate of the world?

In the long run, how important was Dorian, even, other than for what he did to save or damn it?

He dropped his hand, and I blew out a puff of air and shook my head. What did I even want anymore? So many of my values had been changed in the past few weeks. How much more would they change in another month? In two?

“Okay,” I said, still not sure of anything. “We’ll just keep going. Or I’ll just keep going...and you’ll do whatever it is that you do when I’m not here.”

He caught the back of my neck and pulled my mouth down to his, and in his kiss were my surety and my future.

I kissed him back, long and hungrily, begging him to take my mouth with his own, wanting the certainty of his possession even if the security that it promised was no more than a delusion.

And he did as I pleaded, entering my mouth, ravishing it. The reaction he called from me went straight down through me until my body hurt with my need for him and I throbbed, swollen, between my legs.