by Chloe Garner
“No. He isn’t going to. Like I said, I don’t even know if I’m going to…” She paused as Hunter closed his teeth on her ear lobe, her eyes falling closed, then she shrugged him back again. “I don’t even know if I’m going to tell him what the objective is.”
“He isn’t going to like it,” Tell said.
“You don’t even know him,” Tina answered, and he grinned suddenly.
“Neither do you, point of fact. But anyone who’s feeding vampires and going to medical school is into mysteries and excitement. He’s not going to like being your medical reference library for anonymous problems.”
She shrugged.
He was right about that.
“There’s a lot that I’m going to know that he isn’t,” she said. “I don’t intend to let him get anywhere near that close to the actual answer.”
Hunter’s mouth was under her jaw and she twisted her head up and away to talk to him again, but he followed, tipping her over onto the couch. His mouth found hers and her fingers were in his hair before she finally came back to herself.
She pulled him up by the hair, and he did a pushup over her to look down at her.
“No,” she said, like scolding a puppy. “You guys might think that this is okay, but I do not.”
“Which part?” he asked, smiling and weaving his head to the side like a serpent looking for an angle. She tightened her grip on his hair. He let his head tip back slightly
“I live here now,” she said. “Women walking around naked at all hours shall be kept to a minimum and there will be no sex in public spaces.”
“Are those the ground rules?” Tell muttered from the other side of the couch. “I’d been wondering.”
“Is that it?” Hunter said, shaking his hair loose of her fingers and dropping his knees over onto the floor. He put his arm under her knees and lifted her, and she arched her back.
“Wait,” she said. “That’s not what I was saying.”
He grinned, shifting her in closer against his chest.
“I have work to get done,” she said. “And not a lot of time.”
He buried his face in underneath her chin, his mouth wide and sucking on her throat.
“Hunter,” she said. It was more of a moan than she would have liked. He was already halfway up the stairs.
“If you’re going to run off and get yourself killed,” he said, “I don’t want to get stuck at the Beaver Cleaver handholding stuff the whole time. He pushed his forehead against her cheek bone, rolling her head out and kissing her shoulder. “Screw being rational.”
“I like rational,” Tina said, unconvincing even to her own ears.
“Do not,” Hunter growled. “Irrational is the only time you ever get out of your own way.”
She swallowed.
He was right.
“I’m not going to let them kill me,” she said, curling around him now.
He laughed darkly.
“Still a fine excuse,” he said. He turned left at the bedrooms and Tina lifted her head, completely unsurprised to find the black bed standing in the middle of the room.
He went still and she turned her face to look at him, eyes to eyes, nose to nose. His attention flicked to her mouth, once, again, but he was watching her. She closed her eyes, breathing him, then looked him in the face again and nodded.
He met the bed with his knee, collapsing onto her as she pulled his mouth down to hers.
His fingers were greedy, pulling at her clothes, her neck, her face.
She stopped thinking about anything else.
“It is kind of a mess,” she said some time later, laying on his chest.
“If that part is new to you, you’ve been doing it wrong,” Hunter answered, and she laughed.
“No. Something Tell said.”
“Please, let’s not talk about Tell right now,” Hunter said, running his fingers across her shoulder and down her arm.
“No, that I’m a predator now. And that humans are prey. And that I need to get used to the idea.”
“True enough,” Hunter said.
“Predator and prey, this is different… It’s… It’s easier, isn’t it?”
Hunter twisted to look down at her and she rotated to be able to read his face.
“Yeah,” he said. She nodded and they both settled again.
“It’s not that it’s all politics,” she went on. “That was you lying to me.”
He snorted.
“It’s not lying if it’s true,” he said. “It’s just more complicated than that.”
She shook her head.
“It’s just different.”
“You wouldn’t have understood,” he said. “The guy you took tonight, he wanted to be here. Bad.”
“That doesn’t bother you?” Tina asked, and he shifted, putting his arm behind his head.
“No, because I’m here and not him,” he said.
“That’s weird,” Tina said, playing her fingers along the muscle cuts on his stomach.
“No,” he said. “That’s normal. For us. You’re weird.”
“What if I’d brought him home?” she asked. “He wanted to.”
“Of course he did,” Hunter answered. “What possible reason would he have for not wanting to be here, right now?”
“That he needed to study?” Tina asked. “That it would have been completely meaningless? That he’s just selling blood, not sex?”
Hunter blew air through his lips.
“You don’t understand men,” he said. “Believe me on this.”
Tina rolled her eyes and shifted.
“If you’d brought him and were down for it, my only hesitation would have been that I didn’t believe you,” he said. “I went for a couple of decades that it would have been strange not to have a handful of fountains in my bed.”
She frowned, then nodded.
“I don’t want to be like that.”
“Then don’t,” he said simply. “No one is dictating to you what should bother you and what shouldn’t. Thought that I’d finally met your demands convincingly enough.”
“Not you,” she said. “My nature. I don’t know what my nature is, right now.”
“Yeah you do,” Hunter said dismissively. “It is what it is. Stop psyching yourself out.”
She laughed.
“I should go take another sample off of Tell,” she said.
“You didn’t hear it?” Hunter asked. “He did it, himself, ten minutes ago. He’s pretty much human, at this point.”
She frowned.
She should have been able to hear that, even with her lesser hearing than his.
“Guess I was distracted,” she said. He shifted and she sat up, looking around for a moment.
The bed was a stroke of genius in this room.
“I’m going to go get some stuff done,” she said. “Not enough hours until the sun comes up again.”
“Tell is going to go partially day-walker,” Hunter said. “So he can get stuff done during business hours and keep up with stuff after you go to bed in the morning.”
She nodded.
“It won’t be entirely better, but it ought to help.”
She went and found her clothes, taking a quick shower and putting her hair up, then going downstairs, where she found Tell on his computer.
“I may be human, but I’m not incapacitated,” he said. “Kyle has been apparently making a living as a day-trader for about six years, now. Figures that boy would figure out how to feed himself off of a gambling addiction, but he wins more than he loses, and it bought him a nice car. Any rate, he doesn’t have any coworkers, and he doesn’t have any major hobbies I can find, other than a gaming group that he meets with once a week.”
“That’s promising,” Tina said. He nodded.
“They arrange everything over e-mail, so it just took hacking onto one of the accounts to find all of their important conversations. He started going less and less and being quote-unquote weird around six months ago, but he sto
pped entirely a month and a half ago. If I read between the lines right, he was bragging to them about a real version of the games they’d been playing, and how he was so much beyond them, now.”
“I could hear how that might be insulting, to the wrong crowd,” Tina said.
“Try any crowd,” Tell answered. “Anyway, one of the guys, his sister went to high school with Colette, and I hacked into her e-mail account, and there are about five-hundred unsent e-mail drafts on it.”
“Therapy?” Tina asked. “Journaling? Just can’t find the right words?”
“She’s been e-mailing back and forth with Colette basically since I hid her away,” Tell said. “Just not sending the e-mails. Colette logs onto Janna’s account and leaves a draft, and then Janna leaves one in response. They have gaps that are years-long, but they’ve been talking to each other like that since… Well, I don’t remember the dates specifically, I’d have to check my old notes, but it might have even started while she was still here in the city.”
“Smart,” Tina said.
“I never caught it,” Tell agreed. “But Janna is the one who told her about Kyle. I haven’t read through everything yet, obviously, but I don’t think that Janna knows where Colette is, and I don’t think that Janna’s brother knows that she’s in contact with Colette. He thinks Colette is dead, in point of fact. So I think that we’re sealed, on that end. Colette is safe. Well.”
He paused.
“Well?” Tina asked.
“The last e-mail on here is from yesterday, and Colette is desperate for an update on Kyle. She’s afraid that they’ve killed him already. If she doesn’t get some kind of reassurance, soon, she might just get on a plane. It’s been a long time, but that’s what old Colette would have done. Jumped on a plane and gone right into the middle of everything to drag Kyle out by his ear.”
Tina smiled.
“So tell her,” she said. He frowned, then frowned deeper.
“Obviously,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because it took two highschool friends who didn’t want to lose touch to come up with it in the first place,” Tina answered. “Can you track her IP from when she logs into the account?”
“If she never sends anything? No. I mean, if I wanted to go hack into Google, maybe I could get it, but I don’t immediately have a way of getting it.”
She shrugged.
“So? Post that you are watching over him and that she and the other woman should stay put.”
He nodded, clicking a few buttons and beginning to type. Tina walked around the back of the couch to watch over his shoulder.
Colette, Janna,
Shame on you. I got your message. I’m on it.
Tell
“Don’t send,” Tina said as the reflex hit him. He laughed.
“No one to send it to, anyway,” he said, closing the draft. “How strange.”
Tina came back around to sit across from him.
“If they find that, they can send her threats,” Tina said, and he nodded.
“After this is done, I’m probably going to find a way to nuke the account, as much as I hate to.”
Tina shook her head.
“No, after this is done, she can come home if she wants to, because there’s going to be nothing left of the Order.”
Tell raised an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged.
“I’m not going to stop dreaming until it isn’t possible anymore.”
“All right,” he said. “I did the sample you missed. You should have Vince get the pair of cell phones you need. More stuff comes in and out of this building than you’d believe. Cell phones will just get lost in all of it.”
“All right,” Tina agreed. “What are you going to do about Sophie?”
“I haven’t had any ideas yet, actually,” Tell told her. “I’m kind of resigned to working on it after we deal with the Order. Don’t like the assassins all being out there like that, the whole time, because one of them is going to do something unexpected and we aren’t going to be watching them carefully enough. I just don’t see another way forward.”
Tina leaned back against the couch, folding her arms.
“Okay, tell me what you’ve eliminated.”
He grinned, closing his laptop and laying down.
“The fluid from my lungs,” he said. “It’s kind of been busy.”
She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Don’t try to pull that with me,” she said. “I know just as well as you do that you have a long list of things that aren’t possible that you could rattle off, off the top of your head, even with your lungs full of fluid.”
“Your faith is refreshing,” he said. “But… Okay, fine. Paying her off. This is about dignity and control, not about money. Paying them off. There are too many, and if you offered to hand out even a million dollars to every idiot with his hand out who showed up at the door, we’d both go broke. Fighting them. One, once you know what you’re dealing with, most of the pros are capable of beating all three of us put together. Two, there are always more. Too much money involved. Apologizing. Sophie has been publicly humiliated, and a private apology isn’t going to do a thing. And it isn’t like there’s vampire TV where he could go apologize publicly. The damage is done and there’s no undoing it. Changing identities. It would work, but it’s the weapon of last resort, because it would be a form of suicide. Can’t take his accomplishments with him, and I’d have to consider whether being me was worth losing him, because we couldn’t have contact once he changed over.”
“What about plastic surgery?” Tina asked.
“No way to make it permanent,” Tell said without derision. “Hiding out forever. Only slightly better than identity change. There’s an ongoing risk of it failing, and there’s almost no life to it. Being up here is… It’s better than being dead by a long shot for a few weeks or a couple months, but as a long-term solution it’s only just barely better than being dead. Especially for him.”
Tina twisted her mouth to the side and nodded.
“That does seem to cover everything,” she said. He held up his hands.
“I need to do research and digging and interviews and maybe even some fighting, but I don’t have the time to think about it, with the Order going after Kyle and you taking my last drops of blood.”
“Am not,” Tina said, and he gave her a quick smile.
“Do you know how to set this stuff up? We started, but you ought to come take a look.”
“Isn’t there a manual or something?” Tina asked.
“Oh, aren’t you sweet?” he asked, walking with her toward the one-time exercise room. “You’re talking hugely-expensive equipment that we bought used. They didn’t come with manuals.”
Tina took out her phone, going to pull the model number off of the MRI and turned her phone to show it to him.
“Fourth result,” she said. “You want to pull that up on your computer and print it?”
His jaw dropped.
“They really just put that online?” he asked.
“What’s the harm?” she answered. “You can’t reverse-engineer the technology from it, and it isn’t like having the manual makes you any more likely to be able to get the machine through back channels.”
“Huh,” he said. “Yeah. I’ll go print it.”
Tina walked a lap around the machine, astonished that it was sitting here in her very own residence. Oh, the things she would image with it, when she got the time. She had so many curiosities.
She went to the ultrasound next, finding it mostly ready to go. She used it on her hand and her wrist, having no idea what she was looking at, but having a great time anyway. Xray, ECG… the only thing on her wish list that she hadn’t been able to get was the CAT scan.
Some of them weren’t here yet, but they were coming, and that was remarkable to her.
These were her toys.
The world was raining presents.
Sure, it was also raining assassins, but that was
life for you.
She went out to sit next to Tell, watching as he pulled up the manuals for the rest of the machines and printed those as well. She didn’t have time to read all of them, which disturbed her. The idea of using such a piece of equipment without knowing for sure how it worked?
“I’m wondering if this is a mistake,” Tina said after a moment watching the stack of pages the printer was creating. “I don’t know if I can be good enough at this to do it.”
He glanced up.
“Backing out?” he asked. “Because I wish I’d known that yesterday or the day before.”
She shook her head.
“They just have experts who do this for a living. Tony said it. He isn’t a lab tech. There are technicians who are professionals who just create usable images.”
Tell nodded.
“I see your point. Let me do some calling, after the sun comes up, okay? Maybe there are hospital-employed paranormals who wouldn’t have to worry about smallpox who could come and do the work for us.”
“We’re going to have to be careful about timing,” Tina said. “We don’t want them to know about the cure, if I find one.”
He nodded.
“It’s hardly common knowledge that I was dying of smallpox. We’ll tell them that the ailment that was killing me has been bothering me some, as a vampire, and that we’re trying to diagnose and cure it as a human to see if that clears up my symptoms.”
Tina nodded.
“I’m going to have to read up on smallpox so that we don’t accidentally diagnose it on the first try. I want to be able to get all of my images and all of my samples before someone tells us what it is.”
“And that there’s no cure,” Tell said, without the moroseness that he might have had.
“How are you feeling?” Tina asked.
“You mean do I feel like a walking plague with a limited lifespan? No. I feel okay. For now.”
“I’m sorry, Tell,” she said. “This is so hard on you.”
“There’s no cure for smallpox, and I’m the type as a human that it was always going to kill,” he said. “But there’s always been this potential, and I’m glad that… I’m glad someone is going to finally take a swing at using it.”
“You’re smart,” Tina said. “You could have done this, if you’d wanted to.”
He laughed at this.