Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3)

by V. E. S. Pullen

  “How—?”

  “Magical unicorn juice,” I said decisively. “That’s what Mouse calls my blood. She has a theory that two things make a difference: first, my lack of platelets, and second, my age. And for the record, I agree with her. I think it makes sense.”

  “I’m not even going to speculate, because you are clearly in lecture-mode,” Tai said, hopping up to sit on the table next to Sev, opposite me. Not gonna lie, I had a momentary fantasy about being their tough-grading professor offering extra credit work in exchange for cunnilingus — because that shit felt spectacular! — and ended up having to pretend to study the whiteboard for a couple deep breaths. I’m absolutely, one hundred percent positive they had no idea what I was thinking, and those smug grins and knowing looks were about something totally different.

  “Usually the immune system uses something on the surface of the virus, like a unique protein or amino acid, to identify it as a foreign invader. And usually when you draw blood for anything other than immediate use, you have to use an anticoagulant like sodium citrate or EDTA in the collection tube. But because my platelet count is so low, proportionately, my blood doesn’t require an anticoagulant, and Mouse thinks that the presence of any anticoagulant masks whatever identifies the virus. I mainly don’t take any blood thinners because it’s dangerous with my low platelet count, but even though low-dose aspirin might not be the same as EDTA in the collection tube, why risk it? And that’s been working so far, right?”

  “Okay, I buy it,” Tai nodded slowly. “That’s a significant difference between your blood and other samples.”

  Mr. Chandler, you need at least a B in my class to keep your scholarship. If you want to raise this grade, it will take hours of work, and my time is precious. I expect your full cooperation and absolute focus on the job—

  “She’s got that look again,” Sev whispered to Tai out of the side of his mouth, both of them smirking at me. I blushed and fiddled with the cap on the marker.

  Mr. Kolek, if you interrupt my lecture one more time, I’ll have to give you detention! There’s detention in college, right? Oh, fuck it, just get your ass over here and lift me up onto the desk—

  “So what exactly happened between you and my brother?” Tai asked, biting back a smile. “I haven’t seen Spider that happy in years…”

  “So, anyway, the second difference is my age… PV is really an old person’s disease, it’s extremely rare in anyone under twenty. Since it develops slowly and I was diagnosed at eleven, it’s possible I’d had it for a long time.”

  “But cancer can happen at any age, right?” Sev glanced back and forth between me and Tai. “There’re lots of kids with cancer. As long as the right combination of factors kick in—?”

  “Yes, but although PV is frequently categorized as a cancer, it kinda isn’t.”

  Sev froze in place, staring at me in confusion. Tai hopped off the table and stepped forward, swinging his arms, completely focused on me. “Explain.”

  “I’m not fully educated on all the different types and forms of cancer, but it all has to do with malignant cells, right? Something changes or mutates in a specific type of cell in your body, so it no longer functions as it’s supposed to; and once it starts mutating, it starts dragging other cells down with it, or killing the healthy cells or whatever. Point is, something happens to change your cells, and usually that change also includes rapid reproduction of the malignant cells. The malignant cells spread, and your body can no longer function because everything is carefully balanced, and a massive disruption of one system or process causes a ripple effect throughout.”

  “Okay? And your bone marrow has mutated to produce too many cells, right? Sooo… cancer?”

  “Except my bone marrow only produces normal cells. They aren’t malignant, there’s just a lot of them. Soooo… not really cancer, but kinda. See?”

  “So no tumors?” Sev asked, so hopefully that I realized he’d been operating under the assumption that without medication, this was going to kill me eventually because, well, cancer.

  “No tumors, not from this,” I reassured him, and I swear he teared up but I couldn’t tell because he had jumped off the table and started pacing. “If I take medication like chemotherapy to suppress my bone marrow, it’s just to slow production of my red and white blood cells, but it can’t cure me. And those cells aren’t going to kill me as long as I keep them thinned out. Most everything I do to maintain my health is really for supporting my body since I do therapeutic phlebotomies instead of taking meds, and constant blood draws can be really hard on the body, but— whoa! Hey, there, tiger— everything is okay.”

  Sev was all over me, hugging me close against him and swinging around in circles, his head buried in my neck and his mouth distributing wet kisses all over my throat and chin and cheeks, sucking lightly, even scraping his teeth along my jaw. “Not cancer,” he rasped in my ear, his voice painfully thick.

  “Not cancer,” I promised him.

  “Take her for a minute,” he said to Tai, passing me over, and then stalked from the room, wiping his face as he went.

  I curled up against Tai, and he rested his cheek on the top of my head. “Magical unicorn juice,” he whispered, and I nodded.

  Chapter Nine

  Azzie

  When Sev came back, Tai and I showed him how to do my blood draw and give me fluids. He helped Tai separate the blood components in the centrifuge, and use a pipette to remove the plasma that we didn’t need, then I took over.

  I showed both of them how and when to add adjuvants and stabilizers, how to purify the vaccine, and then how to aliquot it out into the vax gun vials.

  “Not a ton of specialized equipment, but some. Not a ton of specialized additives, but the ones that are used are necessary. This technique uses .5 mL per dose. A pint of blood is 473 mLs, and approximately 55% of that is plasma, so do the math… Spoilers: it’s about 420 doses per pint drawn, give or take five doses.”

  “420?” Sev asked, then nodded, grinning. “Niiiiice.”

  I huffed out a laugh — not because Mouse hadn’t made that same joke repeatedly over the years, but just because Sev was cracking himself up over it.

  “140-some million people still alive in the U.S.? Doing the math… yeah. Herd immunity is vital, as is continued social isolation — only a certain number of people for a given community, those that need to interact with outsiders or those at high-risk, are going to be able to get vaccinated if we have any hope of making a difference. Like what your mom did, Tai,” I said and he nodded thoughtfully as Sev looked between us, confused.

  “What’s this?”

  “Mouse sent vaccine to Tai’s mom at the Rez—” I explained, and before Sev could get all shirty about it, I continued, “—because Tai was honest about who he was and where he came from, so she had someplace to send it. Just sayin’…”

  “Touché,” Sev muttered.

  I started piling things up on the counter: any and all supplies for the blood draws; containers of the adjuvant and stabilizer so it doesn’t need refrigeration; pipettes and glassware for mixing the ingredients; and the cryovials and syringes we had for distributing the vaccine. “On top of all this, we need a centrifuge and an autoclave, in a clean environment.”

  “Can’t we just straight-up inject your blood?” Sev asked, looking at all the stuff piled up in dismay.

  “Yessss…” I hedged. “While technically that does work, you can only get maybe two doses per blood draw. Plus the adjuvant acts kinda like an irritant, waking up your immune system and telling it to get to work dealing with the immunogens it’s attached to, and without it, you basically have to flood their system with my antibodies. It’s an immediate result but it requires so much more blood over making it into a vaccine that requires your body to do the work — my little white blood cells can only do so much on their own and need the native immune system to kick in. Though we did cure someone actively infected, and pretty far gone with the virus, with IV infusions of pint
s of my blood: by injecting whole blood, I was able to provide enough red blood cells to keep the oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange working, while my white blood cells kept the viral load down and taught the immune system what to do. It took days, and way more blood than I should have been donating, but the person survived and developed their own natural-active immunity.”

  “Wouldn’t anyone’s blood who is immunized work the same?”

  “In theory, but remember that my blood is like twice the normal amount of red and nearly that with white. And doesn’t use anticoagulants. You’d have to donate much more blood directly into the person, in order to get close to my efficacy, and that’s a lot of blood.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Why didn’t they do that for you?” Sev asked, looking angry. “When you were in the hospital, why didn’t they give you donor blood to keep your red blood cell count from dropping so low? Or increase your white blood cells even without antibodies involved?”

  “The lowest I dropped was what? 33% red blood cells? The normal range for women is around 35 to 45%. I wasn’t that far below what would be normal for a regular person, and people have survived acute anemia with hematocrits as low as like 15%, under treatment. It was a dramatic drop for me, but as long as it didn’t keep dropping, I wasn’t in danger of needing a transfusion. And that’s also why I’ve recovered from the virus so quickly: my PV hasn’t rebounded enough to drive me up to ranch-dressing levels of blood density, so I’m mostly just dealing with the aftermath of a super high fever and what you’d normally feel after recovering from the flu.”

  “The blood draws we did— Why would McNamara insist on full draws?!” Tai was pissed as hell, and I put my hand on his arm.

  “Because he’s a dick.”

  “We just did another fucking blood draw!” Sev was freaking out, eyeing me like I was seconds away from collapsing, so I tucked myself against him and forced him to hug me. It’s a win-win strategy, I was finding — it distracted them from whatever was twisting them up, and I got a hit of the affection that I was so addicted to.

  “Yeah, I probably could’ve done without the last, oh, three draws,” I said, going full-on constrictor snake around his chest, while staring at Tai and wondering what my odds are of getting another Chandler/Kolek sandwich with these brothers, and then how to get Sasha involved, and—

  “She’s got that look. Again.” Tai narrowed his eyes at me in mock outrage. “Do you even see us as people or just objects to get off on?”

  “Baby, you know I think you’re real pretty,” I cooed at him, my tone appropriately reassuring, “And smart too, of course. Whole package. Look at you, with those big brown eyes all squinty and mean-looking… careful or you’ll get wrinkles. Face like yours, that would be tragic.”

  He bit his lip, looking away and shaking his head. “Azzie, you’re the worst. The. Worst. Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? You treating us like meat—“

  “You know I respect you!”

  “—just to make a point?”

  “Not trying to make a point, Tai, just love getting you all riled up. You’re so cute when you’re angry— OUCH!” Sev pinched me on the ass! “You pinched me on the ass!”

  “Quit picking on Tai,” Sev growled, locking his arms around me as I struggled to get away so I could retaliate. “You know he’s sensitive. I imagine it was difficult growing up looking as pretty as him and Spider—“

  “Assholes. Both of you.”

  He sounded grumpy and all, but he was trying so hard not to smile. My Tai was used to being the responsible one, the one in charge, and that wasn’t always going to work for me — besides it being super hard on him all the time — so I needed to tease and pick on him, knock him down a few pegs and keep him human. It’s basically my job.

  First job: vax the planet; second job: keep Tai from stress-imploding.

  “It’s true, but you love it when I objectify you,” I detached from Sev and threw myself at Tai, who caught me just like I knew he would. I looked up at him and waggled my brows. “You can punish me for it later.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered, lifting me up so he could bury his face in my neck.

  “Not that I’m complaining, like at all,” I mumbled into the top of his head — rubbing my cheek on the velvet of his newly cut hair, “but why are you guys always picking me up? I’m like five-foot-seven, I’m not that short.”

  “You’re seven inches shorter than the Chandlers and ten inches shorter than us,” Sev called out from somewhere behind me. “And you weigh almost nothing. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that and pick you up, carry you around like our favorite toy?”

  “Now who’s objectifying!” I snapped. I really wasn’t upset, it was all a ruse.

  “Fine, we carry you around because you’re a pretty, pretty princess whose precious feet should never touch the ground. Better?”

  I nodded, mumbling “Much” into Tai’s head.

  “I’m feeling completely neglected,” Sev groused, yanking me away from Tai by my hips — there was a bit of a struggle, and not gonna lie, I was totally happy being their tug-toy. “And I’m still a little concerned about us doing another blood draw on you, so can we get back to the life and death stuff and do the cuddling later?”

  Tai let me go and Sev held on until I was steady on my feet, then both of them stepped back and I was not thrilled to be left to just stand, on my own. What kind of bullshit was this?

  “Azzie!” Tai barked and I jerked back from my severe lean into Sev, who stuck his tongue out and moved a few more steps away. Fucking traitor.

  “What we took just now wasn’t much at all,” I growled, petulantly. They cut me off! “It was just enough to show you how to make the vaccine. And the first day I was back from the hospital, Tai, you only did a partial draw and gave me extra fluids, so that wasn’t too bad. Now, if I was still at home and going in every day for blood draws to feed McNamara’s demands, it would take me a lot longer to feel close to better. Instead, we’ll be cutting back, maybe just giving me fluids alone for a few days, and it’ll be fine.”

  “So, what does this bullshit with Rachel mean then?” Sev had the thunderous look he’d gotten every time the subject had come up since the moment she talked to me, and I was glad that he didn’t do something, uh, bad, when he was dealing with her.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. It might take time to work all the excess iron out of my system before I start dropping to what should be my normal, if I’m even able to get back to that. Or I could bounce back immediately and my levels drop, or they could also drop much lower than expected as a sort of backlash, and then slowly inch back up. She was artificially elevating my red blood cell production for almost two years, even though it was somewhat gradual — I just don’t know what that’s done long-term. ”

  “I guess that solves the problem with what to do with the blood while we’re out getting to wherever we’re going,” Tai said, with a rare injection of optimism. “If we don’t do any draws and just give fluids, then we don’t have to worry about wasting the blood.”

  “Riiiiiiight,” Sev said, nodding slowly. “Where we’re going… we should probably talk about that.”

  “Yup,” I agreed, “but not here. Not when there’s any chance of Rachel or Greg overhearing our plans, because I don’t trust either of them anymore. And I don’t trust the Viper Twins either. Spider put together gear and supplies as if we’ll be walking for at least a week before reaching anywhere, and I think you put together enough food for that same span of time? So even if you know of someplace we can reach in a day, we’re going to act like it’s a week or more, and then we’ll figure it out once we’re away from here.”

  They looked at each other, wary, but nodded.

  “Cool, cool, cool. Needless to say, my first choice is going to be someplace with an autoclave and centrifuge. For reasons. So keep that in mind. Now help me pack all this shit up.”

  Along with all the supplies I’d pulled
out, we added disinfecting solutions and any first aid supplies Mouse had stashed around the lab, which ended up being quite a bit: three large duffels full of supplies, with the glassware wrapped in several layers and packed inside a dish tub taking up a chunk of one of them. With most of the stuff, it was debatable whether it would even survive the trip, but as long as we could carry it, it made sense to bring it in case it was the one item keeping us from being able to produce the vaccine. The aluminum salts adjuvant and the sucrose-based stabilizer seemed like the things we’d have the hardest time replacing, so we split them up over multiple containers and multiple bags, including both Tai and I taking smaller bottles for our own go-bags.

  The funniest part of our little lab adventure was when Sev discovered another vax gun shoved in the back of a cupboard behind gallon jugs of cleaner… as if it wasn’t a near-priceless piece of equipment that was irreplaceable or anything. I thought we only had one of them, and I’ll admit, I’d been a little annoyed when I heard Mouse sent it to Tai’s mom — it made sense, but I was still annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to administer registered vaccines — and then we found one in the box in the storage closet back at the hospital, and now a third one. Mouse must have known she had extras somewhere, just couldn’t remember where they ended up.

  Then came the not-so-funny part.

  “Hey guys?”

  Maybe it was the tone of my voice or something, but both of them stopped what they were doing and turned to me. Very attentively. Like Professor Azzie told them this next part was going to be on the exam and it was half their— FOCUS. “Uh, remember what I said about Mouse breaking into McNamara’s office?”