Lilly held up her hands in a hopeless gesture. “Anatomically, the hand could have been human if it weren’t for the scaly green skin and the claws and everything.”
Robert’s mouth drifted open, but when he didn’t say anything, she pushed on.
“Looking more closely, though, everything was… different. Off. Cellular structure, organelles, proteins. A lot were similar to our own. Others weren’t even close. I almost got the feeling I was looking at another life form’s attempt at replicating a human with slightly different building blocks. And it’s tough. Resilient to all kinds of chemical insults. Ren told me he had to use an amped-up blade he designed to even break the skin, or scales, I mean. We had to break out the power tools to even isolate samples from the thing.”
“This is what you and Jeff have been working on,” Robert muttered, expression souring. “Isn’t it?”
Lilly’s stomach fell.
The conversation had been going so well. She’d even been starting to wonder why she’d ever thought to keep this quiet in the first place, as understanding as Robert was being about what was, admittedly, an outlandish story. And she hadn’t even gotten to the worst part yet. If she’d told him everything from the start, maybe it would have been okay. But now she felt the landscape shifting beneath her feet, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “But I only brought him in on this because—”
“What? Because you couldn’t trust your stupid accountant husband to know how to help? You needed someone with more letters after their name?”
“Robert, that’s not—”
“Does Jeff know what you are?”
Lilly swallowed and shook her head, hot tears pressing at the back of her eyes. “Of course not.”
Rachel didn’t even know about Lilly’s gifts. It wasn’t something you wanted your child telling everyone who would listen, whether they’d believe it or not.
“And yet when your arcanist ninja friend shows up ranting about vampires from space, you decide to run to the nerdy know-it-all who doesn’t even have the faintest clue you can move shit with your freaking mind? You pick him instead of your own husband?”
Lilly closed her eyes, not trusting herself to talk, not even sure what she’d say if she did. The first tear spilled over and tickled its wet way down her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she finally whispered. “I’ve thought about telling you every day, but every day that passed, it just got harder. And after everything Ren told me, I didn’t know where to start. Because it gets worse.”
She didn’t need her extended senses to feel him rise from the bed and start pacing around the room, silently fuming. After a minute or so, though, he plopped to the floor and leaned against the foot of the bed, arms resting against his raised knees. “Tell me.”
“Ren did a good amount of digging before he came to me. And according to him, these things—these vampires or whatever else you want to call them—have gotten around. Ren said he identified at least a dozen in the US alone, most of them in high places.”
“How high?”
“Promise you won’t call bullshit?”
He gave the slightest of shrugs, looking wary.
“Ren was pretty sure there’s one in the White House.”
“Bullshit.” Robert shook his head. “You don’t think someone would’ve noticed a scaly lizard man walking around in the freaking capitol?”
“Well, apparently they don’t always look like that. According to Ren, at least.”
“Then how the hell would he be able to—Ah.” Understanding dawned in his eyes. “He could sense them?”
She nodded. “Ren said they’re telepaths. The strongest he’s ever felt, apparently, and not by a little bit.”
“Sounds like you’re basing a hell of a lot of this on Ren’s word.”
“Not his word,” she said quietly.
Robert turned to fix her with a wide-eyed stare. “He let you see?”
She nodded.
Robert blew out a breath and leaned back against the bed. “Jesus.”
When Ren had come to her asking for her to find some weakness, some way to stop them, she’d never intended to create the kind of weapon she had without checking things out for herself first. Ren had offered an alternative—the only alternative she could truly trust.
He’d opened his mind to her and let her see the vampires for herself.
It wasn’t something one did lightly, opening their defenses to another telepath. Because once they had you, they more or less owned you until they decided otherwise. You became their helpless puppet, surrendering control of your body as well as lifting the lid on every thought, fear, and secret you had to your name.
In short, it was tremendously dangerous. And terrifying.
When Ren had volunteered such a thing, Lilly had almost been too frightened to see what it was that had made him so desperate. But she’d gone through with it, and what she’d seen—the strength, the ferocity, those terrible glowing red eyes…
Well, it had been enough to set her on a path to spread a potentially dangerous virus across the planet.
She’d still had half a mind to do her own homework after Ren had shown her, of course. What she was doing required the utmost certainty. But then they’d killed Ren. And anything that could’ve taken Ren out… She had no business poking around to investigate something like that—not if she wanted to live long enough to do something about it.
“It’s serious,” she said quietly.
Robert didn’t argue.
“Ren didn’t know what they were up to, but I doubt they’re infiltrating their way up the world order for kicks.
When Robert turned to her, his expression was grave. “If all of this is true, what could we possibly do about it?”
Lilly swallowed, dreading what came next. It didn’t help that Robert was handling this all so well—that he was still opting to use words like “we” instead of swiping up his comm to call the nearest mental health center.
Robert wasn’t a telepath like her. She couldn’t show him everything she’d seen as Ren had done for her. He simply had to trust her.
And he was choosing too.
It only twisted the knife in her gut that much harder. But she had to tell him. Had to say it out loud.
Once it was out…
Just say it, dammit.
“I developed a virus.”
He went still. “To do what?” he asked after a long pause.
“To take care of the problem.”
She was almost surprised by the ice in her voice. Almost. But she’d seen Ren’s memories. She knew what the vampires had done, how many people they’d already hurt. She’d spent weeks convincing herself that this was the only way.
But none of that dulled the pain she felt at Robert’s look, though—a look that plainly asked who the hell she was and how she could ever think to do something so vile.
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” she said quickly. “They’re monsters, Robert. They’re stronger than us. Faster. More powerful in every way. They’re walking around in plain sight out there, taking and killing as they see fit, and no one’s even noticed. Someone has to stop them.”
“And that someone’s you? You didn’t think maybe you should tell someone? The feds? The military?”
“Tell them what?” she snapped. “Even if I wouldn’t be laughed out of any room I walked into, the government can’t be trusted anymore. Not when there’s at least one of those things in the White House. No one can. It’s up to me.” She softened her tone. “To us.”
Robert ignored the appeal. “And your answer is biological warfare? You know what that sounds like, right?”
She did. The word had been bouncing around in her head with increasing frequency ever since she’d first hatched the plan with Jeff.
Terrorist.
They were terrorists now.
Or at least that would be how the world saw it if word of what they’d done ever
found its way to public ears. But, “What other choice do we have?”
“I don’t know.” Robert shook his head. “If… If all of this is true, and these vampires really have strings to pull in high places, I don’t know where we start. But we can figure it out. There’s another way, there’s always another way. One that won’t risk catching millions of people in the cross hairs with whatever you cooked up.”
“This virus is special. It won’t hurt anyone but them.”
Robert studied her face. “When you say special…”
She nodded in response to his unspoken question. “I enchanted it.”
He stiffened. “I thought we agreed you’d never do that.”
“Not for research. But this is about survival, Robert. You don’t understand how dangerous these creatures are.”
“More dangerous than accidentally causing some kind of arcane plague?”
“That’s not going to happen. We’ve run the tests. We live, they die.”
“Lil, you can’t go through with this. You don’t know it’s always going to work like that. You can’t know. I know you understand that better than—”
“It’s already done.”
Robert’s face went pale.
“I’m carrying the virus,” Lilly pressed on. “So are you by now. All of us. That’s what today was about. All the biggest traffic hubs in the world.”
Robert stared at her, mouth agape, looking like he might be ill. Part of her wanted to look away, but she couldn’t quite let herself.
It was as if the act of finally saying the words out loud had dispelled the constructs of her self-perpetuated delusions and finally allowed the full weight of what she’d done to come crashing down on her.
Because he was right. She’d done her very best to ensure that things would work out, that the wrong people wouldn’t end up getting hurt. But now that the deed was done, she needed to accept the possibility that, to save untold thousands—maybe even millions—she might have just brought worse harm down on billions.
Would she be an unsung hero? Or turn out to be an even more repulsive monster than the ones that’d killed Ren?
Only time would tell.
Robert, though, looked like he’d already come to his conclusion. And as much as she wanted to defend herself, now that it was done and beyond her control, she couldn’t help but slide toward his point of view.
So she held his shocked stare, drinking in his horror, basking in just how colossally she might have screwed up.
Finally, Robert rose unsteadily to his feet.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he whispered.
And then he was gone, and Lilly was left sitting alone on the large, empty bed, wondering the same thing.
5
Nearly two weeks after Lilly’s bizarre call, John sat in the quiet darkness of Michael’s bedroom, watching over his son, who’d fallen asleep only after John’s third retelling of the tale of Murphy the Kind-hearted Dragon, a story they’d made up together through dozens of tellings and re-tellings.
It had started about a month ago when Michael had insisted he didn’t want to hear another one of the old boring children’s stories but a new story, one that was completely original and better than all the rest. John had never thought of himself as much of a storyteller, but he’d done his fatherly best and tried, and so Morlock the Fearsome Dragon had been born. Of course, that hadn’t lasted long.
It had started exactly as one would expect a children’s story to start: the forlorn dragon who’d once been great friends with a human whose life was lost to pointless war. Morlock had been dreadfully angry with the King, who’d cost him his one and only friend. Left alone with no one who could understand him, anger turned to jealousy and resentment, and Morlock took to harrassing the kingdom, refusing to allow them the peace they’d taken from him. All until a brave knight had gone to slay him.
The knight, of course, had failed and ended up trapped in Morlock’s lair, out of the dragon’s reach, where they’d taunted and argued until it hit Morlock that he’d found a human who could once again understand him and it hit the knight that this dragon was no evil demon, but a lost, lonely creature, in need not of a cold steel spear tip, but of a friend.
It was a bit clumsy, John was perfectly willing to admit, but he hoped his story might impart it on his son that sometimes bravery was about opening one’s mind rather than facing a mighty foe, and that no matter how evil and alien they might seem, even the monsters can be hurting inside—are probably monsters, in fact, because they are hurting inside.
Michael, in his infinite four year old wisdom, had insisted John was getting it wrong. He’d asked John to tell it again and again, this time having Morlock go to the King and explain that the war had cost him his friend and that they should stop before the same thing happened to others.
“But most of the humans couldn’t understand Morlock when he talked,” John had pointed out.
And so the story had been told again, this time with Morlock peacefully questing to find a translator and saving those in danger along the way until he’d become a hero of the people. But that wasn’t the end.
Again and again they’d gone through the story until they’d ended up with Murphy the Kind-hearted Dragon, who’d never lost his friend to begin with and instead lived in peace beside him for all of eternity, preventing all wars from ever starting simply by paying visits to the kings and reminding them that whatever their differences, there was no reason for their vassals to ever hurt one another when they could simply work together to solve their problems.
It was a horribly boring story—utterly naive. And it made John’s heart swell with pride and pity.
Because eventually—and probably quite soon—Michael would begin to encounter life’s injustices more and more, and John would have to figure out how to explain that these things happened. John wasn’t really sure how those conversations would go, but he was banking on the hope that he’d be up to navigate them without completely destroying Michael’s idea that people could, in theory, simply get along.
Maybe that made him the naive one.
Because, at the end of the day, John could tell Michael whatever he wanted, but beyond these walls, everyone else was going to do the same. Kids would pick on him. Adults would tell him to grow up and learn how the world really worked. Girls would appreciate his good nature and make use of it for comfort until they found something more exciting. Then they’d go their separate ways—live their lives, start their families—until she decided to call him a decade later to tell him that her cryptic project might have just landed her in trouble, enough so that she was worried for her family safety, and could he maybe consider just casually dropping the past decade of silence and checking in sometime to make sure everyone was safe even though they were not in danger.
Or something like that.
It was marginally possible he was letting his own experiences bleed into his hopes and fears for Michael. But that’s what people did, right? They lived, they experienced, and then—if they had an ounce of sense floating through their sad little brains—they learned. They fit those experiences into new models of the world to ensure future prosperity for themselves and their loved ones while minimizing future pain.
Yep. That was the way it worked. Which meant John was clearly not remotely as sensible as he’d always fancied himself to be.
Why else was he still stuck replaying Lilly’s call over and over in his head, wondering what she’d gotten herself into and, much more idiotically, how he could throw his body down for her to help.
Because that was what he did, wasn’t it? Played the fool for Lilly, over and over again.
He would’ve made a fine storybook character himself. John the Spineless Pushover? John the Hopeless Fool?
He’d thought he’d been past all of this. When he’d been with Linda, he was sure he had been.
He’d loved Linda every bit as fiercely as he’d ever loved Lilly. He was certain of it. And infinitely be
tter, she’d loved him back in just the same way. Right up until the day the cancer had finally smothered out the last flickering embers of her beautiful life—utterly apathetic to the emptiness it left behind.
John had done his best to fill that emptiness—to be the best father he could, to fill bright young minds with what knowledge he could and instill the thirst for more, to keep busy, keep moving forward.
After a year, his friends had suggested he might consider filling it with other things as well. Maybe just a date. Something casual. Just see how it went.
Someday, he’d replied. When he was ready.
So what if he’d neglected to mention the part where he never intended for that day to come? That he’d always love Linda and that there was no changing that.
That was still true. But with one call—one measly, cryptic little call—Lilly had blown the locks off of old, carefully sealed doors and reminded him that there was a part of him that would forever feel the same way about her too.
And damn her for doing that. But now that she had, he couldn’t drop it. After a solid week of trying to, he was sure enough about that.
The number of times he’d found himself staring at her Net ID over the past few days, fingers hovering over the call icon…
This had to stop. He needed to know what had her so rattled.
More likely than not, it was nothing, right? Some new grant with DARPA or something that just had her a little paranoid…
Except Lilly had never been paranoid.
John’s neighbor, Myers, with his ceaseless apocalypse prepping—that was paranoid.
Lilly, on the other hand, had never been more than twitchy at times, not to mention overly protective about her big secret. But that was understandable enough.
John didn’t know many people—or many intelligent people, at least—who’d be excited about the public finding out that they could read others’ thoughts and feelings or reshape reality around them with little more than some channeled energy and a force of will. As miraculous as Lilly’s arcanism was, the knowledge that such phenomena existed wasn’t something John imagined would put many people at ease.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 122