Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110809 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110809 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
“Shh.” He holds up a finger.
“I’m not leaving until you—”
He grabs me and slaps one hand over my mouth, the other going around my waist as he pulls my back to his front. “Don’t breathe,” he whispers into my ear.
Something scratches at his door.
I go still, my fight evaporating as he slowly walks backwards with me pinned against him.
“Master?” A slithering voice from the hallway.
He backs into a darkened room and releases me. “Not a fucking sound,” he breathes. Then he walks away.
I hear the door open as Valen barks, “What?”
“The girl. We’ve lost her.” The voice is more of a hiss, and it sounds as if it’s two people speaking at once.
I put my hand to my mouth and press myself against the wall by the bedroom door.
“Check the lab.”
“We looked—”
“Look again! If you can’t find her, I will make you both an example of my displeasure. It seems you have no need of your eyes, so I’ll start there.” Valen’s cold voice sends a surge of fear through me. That’s when I realize how different he is with me. Not soft. Barely cordial. But not viciously cruel like this.
“Yes, Master.”
The door slams.
Valen reappears and takes my hand, a stark look in his eyes. “You have to go. Now.” He leads me to the door, then out and up the stairs.
Once we’re back in my apartment, he walks ahead of me and swipes the medical supplies off my kitchen counter in a violent blur.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yell and rush past him.
He catches me by my neck, his touch soft despite the fire in his movements.
He opens his mouth in a snarl, his fangs long and deadly. My heart drops into my stomach, and I claw at his wrist to free myself.
He shakes me as easily as a child with a doll. “Do your job, Doctor. No more games or foolish experiments. You’re wasting our time.” He pulls me closer to him, his eyes boring into me. “If you fail us, I’ll see to it that your head is on a pike beside your sister during the next presidential address.” He shoves me back, and I plop onto the couch as he storms from my apartment.
Silence returns, and I’m alone, my entire body shaking as I fight back the terror that threatens to consume me. When the adrenaline finally fades, I’m left to wonder which one is the act—Valen’s care or his violence.
20
“When live plague virus is exposed to the sample blood, it doesn’t respond.” Gretchen flips through a legal pad of scribbles. “There’s no replication. It doesn’t even try to invade. None of the proteins interact.”
“How’s that possible?” Wyatt swipes his hair from his eyes as we go through the same facts over and over again, looking for the missing piece of the equation.
“Simple. The blood isn’t human.” I spin in my desk chair. “The virus won’t replicate in non-human cells. There’s no host receptor available in any other species.” My statement that Valen and his kind aren’t human isn’t even debatable anymore. This room full of skeptical scientists knows it’s the truth, no matter how far beyond our understanding it is.
“Except for the bonobo. It has the receptors, too. Maybe Juno’s Miracle has been a bonobo all along,” Aang chimes in. “And what the hell happened to your arm?”
“Just an accident.” I pull the sleeve of my sweater down to cover it.
He gives me an eyebrow raise. “Uh huh.”
“It’s a no on the bonobo angle. Now let’s go back to the samples themselves. How are they different from each other?” We have to find the strands of the three bloodlines. With no DNA to go on, there has to be some other method of deconstructing them. Something not contained in all the blood science humans have been conducting for centuries. Something new.
“They aren’t, save for the one with the antibodies.” Gretchen scrolls through mounds of data with a few clicks.
“Why?”
“Why what? Why antibodies?” Aang asks.
“Right.” I point at him.
He looks at me like I’m a complete idiot. “Well, generally speaking, Doctor, antibodies exist as an immune response to disease vectors.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“That this new species can get sick?” Gretchen sounds less than sure of her answer.
“Precisely.” I drum my fingers on my desk. “If they can get sick—” We can kill them. “—there has to be some other mechanism in their blood that allows it to heal humans. Some factor we’re missing.”
“There’s nothing else in the blood we’ve been given.” Evie ropes her blonde hair up into a ponytail. “The cells look the same, react the same to everything we’ve thrown at them. There’s nothing there.”
“Nothing we can see under the microscope,” I correct her. “But there is something. We have to go outside conventional methods.”
“We could …” Wyatt shrugs. “Mix them?”