by Alisa Woods
“All good.” Ever smiled, trying to reassure her.
“Headaches?”
“None.”
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“How long since you hit your head?”
“About thirty-three hours.” Cognitive and memory tests were standard for diagnosing a concussion. Ever wasn’t sure she could keep everything straight but that had more to do with the frenetic events leading up to her maybe-concussion and the copious amounts of mind-blowing sex afterward. She and Zane didn’t even leave his apartment for the first twenty-four hours. Now they were on the 20th floor of the Strange Research Institute, in her sister’s lab, trying to solve the mystery of Pennies’ world-changing drugs: what they were, how they worked, and who/when/how they were made. Especially since all signs pointed to someone inside the sprawling Strange corporation—which meant Ever felt even more responsible for tracking down the person who was using her family’s empire to kill people. And, even worse, experiment on them.
Taraja crossed her arms. “I still want a CT scan and an MRI.”
“I’ll get them on the way out.”
“All right, Asher,” she said to Ever’s father. “I pronounce her fit for light duty. No physical exertion or vigorous movements. Lots of rest.”
Ever struggled to keep the smile off her face. Zane had resorted to crossing his arms over his chest and covering his mouth like he was deep in contemplation.
“I’d send you home to bed-rest right now,” Taraja continued, “if I thought there was any chance you’d actually go.”
“I do have a bit of work that needs doing.” Ever gave her a gentle smile. In truth, they potentially had a full-blown crisis, both for the family corporation and the city at large, but she knew Taraja was worried first and foremost about her patient and quasi-adopted daughter, and Ever couldn’t help but have that warm her heart. Then again, she’d been having all kinds of gushy feelings lately, mostly due to the insanely hot FBI agent she’d fallen in love with practically overnight. Despite everything else going wrong, everything about that was going very, very right.
“Asher, don’t let her work at her normal hyper pace,” Taraja scolded her father.
He just chuckled. “You know when the last time was that she listened to me.”
Taraja nodded. “When you told her to not buy that rundown place on Lake Shore Drive. The one with the mold problem and the unsavory neighbors.”
“I saved her from a future fungal lung infection.” Her dad nodded like this was a proven fact, not his wild theory. “Maybe cancer.”
“Yes, you did.” Taraja had been part of Team No Renovation.
“Best Dad Moment of my life.”
“You guys remember I’m still standing here, right?” Ever shook her head. The two could get going like an old married couple, even though Ever’s mom and Taraja’s husband had both passed years ago. Her dad was retired, but he still came into the hospital. Ever suspected that was to see Dr. Lockwood, among other friends—and also to butt into research he was supposedly no longer conducting—but Ever had said nothing directly to him. Like maybe he should stop fussing around and ask Taraja out on a date. Or just marry her.
Ever had done crazier things in the last forty-eight hours.
“Besides,” she complained to Taraja, “you should be examining my father.”
“Oh, he’s had plenty of tests.” But Taraja scowled at him anyway. “And there will be plenty more before I’m satisfied this reduction of your Talents is permanent, Asher Strange.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t using them anyway.” Which was, of course, ridiculous. Her father’s Talents were legendary, and he used them all the time. But it was true that he might never get them back due to this monstrous experiment performed on him and the others. They were all still trying to figure out what had been done—Mercy was in charge of putting the full resources of the Strange Technologies Corporation behind the investigation, plus Zane’s Magickal Crimes Division was still involved. Even though they didn’t know precisely what her father had been subjected to, his recovery was amazing. Ever was still stunned at the transformation since she’d seen him on that decrepit asylum bed. The healers and a bunch of rest had done wonders. She didn’t care about his Talents—she was just ridiculously happy to have him back and alive.
Others weren’t so lucky.
“All right,” Mercy said, waving off her father and Nia’s mother. “You two can argue about Dad’s tests all you like, but if you’re done with Ever’s exam, can we get back to the business at hand? I’ve got some preliminary data.” Her sister didn’t wait for objections, just hitched up the voluminous, black-lace skirt on her velveteen dress and headed toward her corner office—Mercy’s fascination with old-school, high-class witch fashion meant her office attire was definitely not standard-issue.
“Excellent.” Ever edged past Taraja and her father and followed Mercy. Everyone would follow along, but Nia quickly fell in step with her. Her best friend was the only one privy to exactly where Ever had spent the last thirty-three hours—they’d chatted on the phone briefly, just so Nia wouldn’t freak. And someone had to feed Salem.
“So, should I just move into your place and call it done?” Nia asked quietly as they trailed behind Mercy and ahead of the rest.
“Probably.” Ever couldn’t help the smile.
Nia’s eyes went wide. “I was kidding.” Then she scowled and glanced at Zane at the back of the group. “Okay, I wasn’t going to ask, but… how does that even work?”
“Very carefully.” Her smile grew.
Nia shook her head like this was one of Ever’s crazy escapades that, in the hindsight of having a real relationship and a sudden future, did seem like that death wish Zane had talked about. But she was done with all that now. Sleeping with an incubus was all the danger she needed or wanted in her life. At some point, she’d have to tell her sisters and her father and, well, the world. All that could wait, too.
“What’s the time schedule on this thing?” Her ex-special-forces bodyguard-friend was very keen on schedules.
Ever shrugged. “We’ll see.” But she’d already mapped it out because that was how her brain operated, too. Zane might have to keep his place if he kept doing undercover work for the MCD. And that would require shuffling around of things and routines. But she wanted him to spend nights at her place too. And at some point, he might settle down into regular field agenting, which meant he could live anywhere in the city. And then they’d go shopping for a new place together. Because that’s what people did when they planned to spend the rest of their lives loving each other. They hadn’t spoken a word of any of this, even to each other. It was too soon and too magickal, and neither of them wanted to break the spell.
But Ever had negotiated enough deals to know when one was just meant to be.
And this was it. For both of them.
The rest was merely logistics.
They’d arrived at Mercy’s office, and per usual, it was a borderline fire hazard. Not that Mercy was a slob, or even disorganized, but she had a bit of a paper fetish. There were scientific papers stacked everywhere, and those were piled on top of five-inch binders of research reports, and even those were balanced precariously on top of medical journals and books. It was like an altar to paper—an entire hectare of forest had gone into populating her sister’s office with medical knowledge. It wasn’t like Mercy didn’t use electronic journals and record-keeping—not to mention the cutting-edge AI she was constantly feeding data to—she was just a fan of holding the latest med-magick knowledge physically in her hands.
Ever loved her sisters like crazy—both, although Verity was always a little harder to reach, sometimes literally—but Mercy had a serious, undiagnosed rat-pack problem. One that Ever ignored as she side-stepped the piles, like normal. It would be hard to fit everyone into the tiny office with the expansive view of Lake Michigan.
Mercy pulled up a three-dimensional model of a complex, branch
ing molecule on her screen. “This is the chemical composition of one of the drugs we found in the crate.”
“The one Pennies smuggled into the prison.” Ever peered over Mercy’s shoulder but tried not to block everyone else’s view. Her father, Taraja, and Zane were crowding into the room with her, Nia, and Mercy.
“Right.” Mercy brought up another molecule side-by-side. “This is one of several we found in the victims.”
“They’re not the same,” Zane said from the back. Everyone turned to look at him. “What? I know a few things about drugs.”
Ever flashed a smile at him then returned to the screen. “So this is a new variant? Or the drugs aren’t stable inside the body?”
“It’s way more complicated than that.” Mercy brought up a dozen more versions on the screen.
“Wait, you said one of the drugs you found in the crate.” Ever squinted at the cocktail on the screen. “How many are there? Is there some kind of interaction?”
“The drugs aren’t the important part. They’re just a delivery device—a mask.” Mercy pivoted her chair to face her small audience. The dead-serious look on her face was even more chilling giving the black lipstick and spider-web-and-kohl face-painting she had today. “He’s messing with gene drives.”
Ever’s eyes went wide. “Gene therapy. To shut down magick.” Her mind zoomed off into the possibilities, but it suddenly all made sense. The IVs hooked up to the victims in their beds—gene therapy usually involved injectable or IV delivery. Pennies had said the pill was a new formulation—she’d just assumed it was a drug. But gene therapy targeting magickal expression… in the hands of a people who’d already experimented on unwilling victims… that was bad. Very, very bad.
“We’re still pulling together the data,” Mercy said. “But inside those red-and-yellow capsules? There are the drugs—a cocktail of euphorics and sedatives—but there’s also a second time-release capsule. Magick-stabilized, containing live gene-editing proteins.”
“Holy shit.” Ever believed her, it was just… she was still wrapping her mind around this.
“Yeah,” Mercy said grimly. “I’m gathering a lot of data right now—sequencing the genomes of every victim, as well as analyzing their microbiomes and any other strange protein or metabolite levels, biomarkers of any kind, anything that can give us a clue as to what’s been done to them. It’s a ton of data, and there are so many possibilities, I’m going to have to design up some new AI protocols to analyze it.” Mercy took a breath and scowled. “But just looking at the gene-editing proteins in the pill—and there are several, not just one—whoever designed this is on to something. Something big.”
“Shutting down every adept’s magickal abilities sounds pretty big.” Nia was peering over Ever’s shoulder at the screen, frowning.
Mercy shook her head. “It’s not just the potential to turn magickal abilities off—it’s the idea that we know where the switch might be.”
“Pennies did say he was going to create adepts,” Zane said from the back.
Taraja and her father both turned to him with concerned looks. Nia’s expression grew even darker. And Ever felt the same dread trickling through her.
Mercy crossed her arms. “We’re just beginning to pull this apart—I need time and resources to really understand this. But we’ve got a mountain-sized ethical dilemma before I go any further.”
Taraja was nodding. “These experiments were conducted illegally. On human patients.”
“So?” Nia objected. “We didn’t do the experiments, the bad guys did. Why can’t we use the data to find them? That makes no sense.”
“I’m with Nia on this,” Zane said. “Pennies is dead, but he was just the delivery boy. Someone else is pulling the strings, and we need to find them before they come up with a new way to carry out whatever their plan is with this.”
Ever frowned. “Their plan is to upend the hierarchy of the magickal world. At least, that’s what Pennies intended. You heard him.”
“All the more reason to stop whoever this is,” Zane argued.
“Of course,” her father said, stroking his chin. His gaze was still glued to Mercy’s data on the screen. “There’s no question we’ll do whatever we can to assist the FBI in finding the persons responsible for all this, not least because they might be working from inside my family’s corporation.” Then he turned his gaze to Zane, and it was kind, the way Ever’s father always looked when he was delivering bad news. “But the ethical dilemma Mercy is talking about is much larger than that.” He flicked a look to Taraja, who just shook her head.
“Because you have the drugs.” Zane’s eyes widened a little. “A whole crateful of them.”
“We don’t know if they work.” Taraja scowled.
Ever’s father lifted his eyebrows. “Would you like to conduct some more tests into just how extensively my Talents have been destroyed?”
Taraja’s scowl deepened. But she said nothing.
No one did for a moment.
Finally, Mercy broke the silence. “The patient data is key to this. Especially yours, Dad—we’re fortunate enough to have your genome sequence from before whatever gene editing these bastards subjected you to.” She turned back to her screen and flipped through files and images, finally bringing up a genome viewer that she’d shown Ever before—one of her custom 3D interfaces for displaying the masses of data from her research in a dozen different ways. Mercy rotated it around, displaying the DNA sequence track and annotations, but it was the filename at the top that made Ever’s heart stutter. AsherStrangeSeq11.12_SRH_GenMag. SRH was the Strange Research Hospital. GenMag was their father’s Genetics and Magick Lab. Mercy zoomed into a short sequence then turned back to face them. “We’ve been trying to find the key genetic expression for magickal Talents—any one of them or the full lot—for decades. Ever since the technology for sequencing the human genome was developed. And our research has been moving at hyper speed since gene editing came on the scene. The Strange Research Institute isn’t alone in that—literally every genetic research group, public or private, has been seeking this. It’s the holy grail of genetic research. And we have a potential working model sitting in a crate? One that we could reverse engineer and study and set up true clinical trials for?”
“Except that it was developed using illegal human experimentation.” Taraja’s vote was clear—and Ever knew the woman. Her ethics were as pure as they came.
“So, what?” Nia objected again, giving her mother a scowl. “We just let the bad guys have it?”
“No,” Ever said, as firmly as she could. “Every resource of the corporation will be put toward finding who’s behind this. And stopping them. Not to mention the FBI is fully involved, they’ve got their own scientists, and I’m sure they understand the stakes. But when that’s done…” She pursed her lips. Even she wasn’t sure what was the right thing to do.
“Everyone wants to a chance to enhance their magick,” Mercy said. “The desire for that goes way back, long before gene tech and magitek, and involves all kinds of folk remedies people still use today. It’s not just the illegal drug market that revolves around “enhancers.” If we don’t do this, it’s almost certain to leak… and someone else will.” She bit her lip then spoke directly to Zane. “I don’t know if the FBI is fully aware of the potential badness this entails.”
“People have already died from these experiments,” Zane said. “I don’t need much imagination to see how it could get worse at a larger scale.”
Mercy nodded. “The scale of it but also the fact that this is mass produced. Gene editing needs to be tailored to an individual’s genome. There’s no way this won’t go horribly wrong in a hundred ways if something like this crate of supposed “painkillers” were to get out into the public.”
“So we need to find the lab where these were made,” he replied.
“And the scientists with the knowledge behind it.” She scowled. “And there’s one more thing.” She turned to her screen again and t
apped it, bringing up an image of an ornate, miniature frame only it didn’t have a photograph in the middle of its golden scrolls and red velvet border—instead, suspended in resin, was a jagged piece of... bone?
“That’s your father’s artifact!” Nia burst out.
Her father frowned at her. “It is. But how did you…?”
Nia blushed a little. Which was an astonishing thing to see on an ex-special-forces witch. “I was going through your things, sir. When you were missing.”
Her father smiled. “You were trying to find me.”
The momentary embarrassment seemed to flee. “I was trying to keep Ever from doing anything reckless.”
“Well, that’s a noble thought,” he said with a laugh. “Pointless, though.”
“MmHmm.” Nia did a fine impression of her mother, crossing her arms and huffing in Ever’s direction. Then, somehow, Ever was suddenly the object of everyone’s unspoken agreement about her apparent recklessness.
Everyone except Zane who seemed highly amused by the whole thing.
“Anyway…” Ever gave them a glare. “So you found the artifact,” she said to Mercy, pointedly turning her back on everyone else. “Where was it?”
Her sister was the only one without a hint of humor on her face. “The crate. Along with the drugs.”
Ever’s eyebrows shot up. “So Pennies was after the artifact. He didn’t just randomly slip drugs to Dad.”
“I think this artifact was key to everything.” Mercy’s voice had turned grave. “I won’t know until—if—we analyze all this data, but I’m sure they wanted it for the same reason we did.” She flicked a look to their father.
Ever frowned. “To donate to a museum?” But her heart thudded as she said it. Because obviously it wasn’t that innocent. Not by the look on her father’s face. And Mercy’s. And her own common sense finally clicking in. “Hang on,” she said sharply. “Exactly what do I not know about this?”