by April White
“Where is the Sucker?” Ah yes. There it was. The motive. Not to mention the ridiculous nickname for Vampires, the Descendants of Death. Everyone seemed to conveniently forget that all Vampires had started off as Descendants of another Family before they got infected with the porphyria-like virus that put their cell-death on permanent hold. No, people spat the name “Sucker” like it was a great big glob of green snot. Not that Clocker, Seer, Shifter, or Monger were much better nicknames, but at least those names didn’t evoke images of leeches and mosquitoes.
To the rest of the Immortal Descendants, my Vampire, Archer Devereux, had been all but invisible since his presence became known after he helped me get my mom back from the clutches of Jack the Ripper. My mom had explained the edict against Death’s Descendants to me over Christmas break. It went all the way back to the original Immortals, when Time and Nature (Jera and Goran) fell in love and had a kid, despite Fate’s insistence it was a bad idea (Aislin, the Immortal Seer). That kid was apparently another Immortal, and in a fit of power-possessiveness, Death (Aeron), with War (Duncan) whispering encouragement in his ear, had the kid killed. In the end, the mixed-blood moratorium became Descendant law – I guess the original Immortals didn’t want to have to share power with someone new – and Death’s punishment for killing the innocent child was the so-called Death Edict, which allowed the destruction of all Death’s Descendants. The fact of the matter was that Descendants had always had a license to kill Vampires, but the Mongers put a bounty on it and made it their mission.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice stayed calm and conversational, and Raven’s eyes flashed murderously.
“You know exactly who I’m talking about. The Sucker who got in the way of my uncle doing his job?” She meant the job of hunting mixed-bloods. Hunting me. Raven’s voice grated like nails on a chalkboard. “The one worth ten new pair of Jimmy Choos when I bring him in?”
“Really? A life for a pair of shoes. Yeah … no. Even if I knew, it wouldn’t happen.”
“You know where the Sucker is, and you’re going to tell us.”
“Or what? You’ll tell your charming uncle?”
“There’s always your mother.”
I stared at her, then laughed. “You’ll tell my mother?”
“No, we’ll arrest her.”
I scoffed. “Okay, playtime’s over. Untie me and everyone will go their separate ways. You won’t brag about bagging me because then you’ll get busted for it, and I won’t report you because I’ll never admit you beat me in anything. And you don’t have crap on my mother, so quit with the empty threats.”
“She broke Descendant law when she whelped a mixed-blood.”
My blood ran cold, but my voice stayed calm. “Prove it.”
The Spawn actually smiled. “Okay.”
He flicked open a knife and took a step toward me. “Get me a jar or something to put her blood in.” He was talking to Raven, and she actually glanced around the gardening shed for something.
Seriously, had the guy never paid attention in Shaw’s class?
“You’d contaminate any sample you get. It’ll be no good for testing.”
He scoffed. “They can do DNA testing on a piece of bloody rag.”
“Doesn’t matter. Won’t hold up.”
Boris finally spoke, and it was like he had a mouthful of gravel. “Give me the knife. I’ll cut her just for fun.”
This was the first thing anyone said that actually scared me. I looked at the Spawn. “You going to take a chance with Were bloodlust?”
“Crap.” Clearly he hadn’t thought of that.
“Untie me, Rothchild. You know the trouble you guys will get in if someone finds us, and my friends are expecting me back. Cut the rope, and this whole thing will go away like a bad dream.”
Boris stepped up behind me. “Enough! Tell us where the Sucker is.” He yanked my arms up nearly over my head. I felt a POP, and white hot fire shot through my shoulder as it dislocated from its socket.
I screamed.
This wasn’t happening. Their little Monger game had turned into something nasty and unpredictable, and I had the horrible, sinking feeling that the Were was calling the shots now.
“What did you do to her!?” Raven’s shriek had a panicked edge to it, and the only thing that gave me comfort through the nausea and pain was the thought that she was freaking. Out. Badly.
Except for the part where freaked out people do stupid things. Because apparently, Spawn and his knife were freaking out too. “She’ll tell on us Raven! Should I kill her?”
I gritted my teeth through the sheer ball of fiery agony that used to be my shoulder. A jackhammer to the head would have been preferable torture. “Don’t be a moron, Rothchild. Untie me.”
Then I heard something outside the shack, and my guts told me it was another Monger. Could the day get any worse?
But Boris heard it too with his Were ears. “We’re not alone.”
The Spawn swung his knife around toward the door just when it crashed inward and knocked him on his butt, leaving the knife stuck in the rough wood. Adam stood in the opening, grinning like the over-confident idiot he was, and then Boris launched at him. They went flying back outside, and the sounds of fierce and dangerous growling in the woods nearly wilted whatever courage I had left. But then Spawn made a go for his knife. I stuck my feet out, he went down, and I got a kick in for good measure.
Spawn and Raven bolted, and the horrendous sounds of fighting carried themselves further away. And then Tom was inside the shack with a worried look and a very big stick. “Saira! Are you okay?”
I shook my head. The sweat was starting to bead with the effort to keep from screaming. “Cut the rope.”
Tom was behind me in an instant and was working at it. The pain in my shoulder was so intense now that my wrists and hands seemed almost like a tickle in comparison. “It’s too tight, I can’t.”
“There’s a knife in the door.”
Tom wrenched the blade from the wood and used it to carefully slice through the rope. When my wrists were finally free, gravity pulled my arm down, and with no more strength to give a proper scream I could only manage a gasp. “Raven and Patrick …” I must have scared Tom because he got all busy and bossy with me – usually my job.
“Don’t worry about them. We have to get you to Shaw.”
“My shoulder’s dislocated.” All I had left was a teary whimper.
“I can see that. Come on, I’ll help you walk.”
“It’s a Were out there with Adam. We have to help him.”
Tom hesitated just a moment, then shook his head decisively. “He has Connor with him. In Wolf form. They’ll be fine.”
A sob caught in my throat as Tom eased me to my feet and threw my good arm over his shoulder. He wasn’t big or tall, but he had the strength of a distance runner, and I set my teeth and sucked it up like the tough girl I pretended to be.
I couldn’t hear the guys in the woods anymore, and I hoped with all my heart that they were fine and had scared the rabid Were away.
Tom told me in a low voice that Adam was shocked when he made it back to school before me. He tried to pull his new trick of seeing like he was in my head, but it was too dark, he said. So then Tom tried. He told me, in the same quiet voice, how easy Mongers were to See in his visions, and because I was with Mongers he was able to zero in on me in that shack. Connor came out in his Wolf form, and between his nose and Tom’s sight they were able to find me pretty quickly.
“But something’s different now, Saira. The visions with Mongers. They’re getting … stronger.”
“The visions or the Mongers?”
Tom sounded worried. “Both.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
He shook his head gravely. “I can’t … my dad … being a powerful Seer is everything to him. I can’t let anything Monger taint him.”
Personally, I thought Phillip Landers was a jerk, but he was Tom’s problem
, not mine. And the fact that Tom was even thinking about that told me he knew about the Monger that was mixed in with his Seer blood, even if he didn’t want to admit it. “Tell someone.”
He sighed. “I just did.”
In a weird way his Monger-directed sight made sense. But only a select few people who had been under the London Bridge the night the Mongers almost got me knew that Tom’s biological father was Seth Walters. He had assaulted Tom’s mother eighteen years ago, but no one on the Immortal Descendants Council, which was our governing body, had ever pursued criminal charges against him because it would have officially outed Tom’s mixed-blood status.
I think I was only about half-conscious on the trek back to school, and nearly cried out again when we slipped in through the broken Solarium window. We had been cocky enough to believe no one knew about our unsanctioned free-running classes, but obviously the Mongers were on to us. So at this point, we were busted no matter what, and I very clearly needed Mr. Shaw’s help.
The Bear was still in his office when we stumbled inside. He’d been working with my dad’s old microscope, and I think we actually managed to surprise him. He took one look at my face and was across the room with the speed I’ve only heard about with bears in the wild. He eased me down into a chair and started prodding my shoulder with firm, gentle fingers. I whimpered quietly and concentrated on the many colors of red, orange, gold and brown in his unruly hair.
“Tom, I need you to hold Saira’s other arm and shoulder down.” His voice made me jump, I’d been concentrating so hard on not vomiting or passing out. “Get behind her and pin her to the chair if you need to, but I need her held steady.”
Tom kneeled down and wrapped his arms around my waist from behind the chair. He spoke softly into my ear as he basically pinned me in place. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
Mr. Shaw picked up my arm and rotated it slightly. My shoulder screamed in agony, and tears sprang to my eyes. “Look at me, Saira.” His voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and I had no choice. I met his eyes, and he locked our gazes together. “You’re going to want to scream, but you’ll pass out instead.”
There was a massive pop as he jerked my arm, and my world exploded into bright white fiery light. And then I was out.
Shaw
I snapped back to consciousness when Adam’s voice intruded on my blissful blackout. “I don’t know if it was a bite or just a scratch. But the bastard was a Were.”
“Who’s hurt?” I struggled to sit up, but my shoulder was bound up in ace bandages and had a big ice pack attached to it. Adam looked rough, Tom looked worried, but it was Connor the Wolf who raised his hand with a weak smile. Mr. Shaw, a Shifter who turned into a Bear on occasion, was examining Connor’s other arm carefully and finally sat back with a grim expression.
“It’s a bite, I think.”
“Crap.”
“Quite.”
“Is a Were bite infectious?” My limited education about Immortal Descendants hadn’t extended to Weres. I just knew them as Romanian badassery for some particularly mean Mongers.
I could see from their looks of surprise that Connor, Adam, and Tom didn’t know the answer to that question, but Mr. Shaw assumed his teacher voice as he cleaned the wound on Connor’s arm.
“Weres are not Shifters like Connor and I are. They’re the product of a different neuregulin one-type promoter combination interacting with an outside contaminant.”
Adam glared at Mr. Shaw. He was clearly worried about Connor. “In English, please?”
The Bear was equally worried and didn’t take offense at Adam’s tone. “Okay, simple terms? Think of Weres as mutts - a crude combo of the MAO-A gene Mongers have, with a lysaavirus mutation, otherwise known as a form of rabies.”
A rabid Monger. Awesome.
“They’re mixed?” Tom’s voice broke on the question.
Mr. Shaw shook his head. “Not mixed. It’s a true genetic anomaly that’s promoted by a different neuregulin one promoter than all of us have, but it gets activated by the lyssavirus contaminant in Were saliva. It’s much like the way Vampires are infected by the porphyria-like contaminant in blood-to-blood contact. Except Vampires have to be Descendants first, with our neuregulin 1 promoter, to modify the porphyria into something that won’t kill them. Were’s can’t be.”
“What does that mean for me?” Connor sounded strong and brave, but I was suddenly reminded he was only fourteen years old and way too young to be getting into fights with full-grown Weres. Or full-grown anythings for that matter.
“It used to mean a massive, sometimes debilitating fever as a Descendant’s immune response went into overtime to fight off the Were contaminant.”
“Debilitating?” Connor’s voice was starting to betray his concern, and Mr. Shaw didn’t pull punches.
“Loss of consciousness, sometimes coma, often taking weeks from which to recover.”
“So a Descendant can’t become a Were?” Trust Adam to get right to the heart of the issue.
“No. We don’t have the right genetic anomaly, and neuregulin one, type six is a dominant gene promoter, so the contaminant makes us sick, but doesn’t make us change.
“You said it used to mean fever.” I’d watched Connor grit his teeth in discomfort at Mr. Shaw’s final alcohol swab, and I wanted something positive to take his mind off the pain.
Mr. Shaw looked up at me. “I’ve been working on a kind of genetic chemo for exactly this.”
“You have?” I knew Mr. Shaw was a medical doctor, and the best science teacher I’d ever seen, but I’d never really connected the dots to realize he was a researcher too.
He got up and unlocked a cabinet on the wall. Inside was a kind of mini-bar full of glass jars with handwritten labels. Mr. Shaw selected one and brought it back to his work table. He put a cotton pad in a petri dish and poured the contents of the bottle over the pad. “Because Connor’s wound is still open, this will work much the same way as a poultice does, drawing out the contaminant and killing it onsite.”
He picked up the pad with tweezers and placed it over the wound on Connor’s arm. Connor winced slightly. Mr. Shaw nodded. “It bites a little, I know. That’s the chemo-type reaction burning the contaminant out.”
“Like a chemical burn?”
“More or less. Except not chemical. It’s more like an immune-system takeover. It’s an amped-up version of the green antibacterial ointment I make.” Mr. Shaw’s green medicine was legendary at school for cuts, scrapes, bites, and rashes, and I’d been trying to copy it for months in botany class. We watched as he wrapped the pad into place with a long piece of gauze bandage. “It’ll leave you vulnerable to other infections for a few days, young Master Edwards, so I suggest you take yourself off to bed and stay there as much as possible.”
Connor seemed surprised he was done, and he got up to go before Mr. Shaw could change his mind and do more uncomfortable stuff to him. “Thank you, Uncle Bob.”
Mr. Shaw’s detached, professional demeanor slipped, and he looked at Connor with genuine concern. “Get some rest, young man.”
“Yes, sir.” Connor slipped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
The softness in Mr. Shaw’s expression hardened the instant he turned back to the rest of us. “A dislocated shoulder, a Were bite, and off school grounds if the state of your clothing is any indication. Explain.”
The three of us looked at each other with the guilt and confusion of conspirators with no time to get their story straight. Tom opened his mouth, but then shut it at a look from Adam. I knew none of us stood a chance against the sheer power of our teacher’s determination to get the truth, and ultimately, we were way past “in trouble” anyway. So I spilled.
To their credit, Adam and Tom looked relieved, so I got a little more confident as the story went on. No one was surprised that the Mongers wanted to know where Archer was. Even Mr. Shaw had asked me about Archer’s daytime lair more than once. But they were all surpr
ised at the threat to my mother, and I could see Mr. Shaw’s spine stiffen and his eyes narrow dangerously.
The guys both weighed in on my rescue and the fight in the woods with the Were. Connor may be only fourteen, but his Shifter Wolf had proved a formidable opponent to the mangy Werewolf. So after getting his teeth on Connor in the tussle, Boris disappeared into the woods.
Mr. Shaw finally sat back, sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “You’ve made rather a mess for me, you realize.” He looked at me, but included Tom in his gaze. “You are only safe so long as you are under the protection of the staff of this school.”
“Not all the staff.” It was clear I meant the Rothbitch, Ms. Rothchild, who was Raven and the Spawn’s mother, and the oldest daughter of the head Monger, Markham Rothchild. Mr. Shaw’s expression hardened.
“She can’t stand against Miss Simpson, and she knows it.”
“Meanwhile, her kid pulls a knife and threatens to bleed other students.”
“Students who are off grounds, putting themselves directly in harm’s way. No, I don’t think I’ll be making that public.” Mr. Shaw sounded grim, and Adam was incensed.
“So that’s it? Raven and Patrick get away with kidnapping Saira, torturing her, and threatening her mother?”
“It’s likely. As you will get away with your off-campus free running classes if you agree to certain provisions.”
It was so much more generous than I’d hoped, and I could tell Adam and Tom felt the same. We waited silently for him to continue.