A Vampire's Purgatory (Romance In Central City Book 8)

by Jordan K. Rose

  The flare of his angst at the idea was nearly controlled, a far improvement.

  “Good evening, Jessie. I don’t suppose you remember me. We haven’t seen each other in many years,” the older man standing beside Serge said.

  His face was scarred and he moved slowly with an awkward lumber that belied a serious leg and back injury. She recalled her parents talking about what had happened to him during the fire.

  “Yes, yes, I do remember you, Mr. Pontes.” Jessie crossed the room to keep him from attempting to come to her. “It’s been so long since our last encounter, since before Dad died.” She hugged the man who’d many times been to her house with his family for dinner.

  In the very early years, before the fire, there had been many family functions at Panthera or at homes of Panthera employees. Jessie had played with the Pontes children. In fact, she still had old pictures of herself and Joshua with Joao’s children and Lawrie.

  “I’m sorry about Joshua, and your parents.” He kissed her cheek. “All of them were great losses.”

  Jessie nodded, unable to answer. Finally, she had a connection to her past, one that had positive meaning. Mr. Pontes knew them and remembered the ones she loved.

  “We have all suffered at the hands of Raymond Tyrone.” He touched her cheek. “My Aurelia is now a vampire, made so to save her life from Tyrone’s experiment.”

  “Pretty Aurelia. I saw her yesterday and couldn’t figure out how I knew her.” Jessie shook her head, now making the connection from earlier. “How could I forget?”

  “You haven’t exactly had the easiest couple nights,” Ricard said.

  “Ah, she told me. She’s happy to have a ‘blast from the past.’” He chuckled. “My daughter. Still pretty. But not human.” He shrugged. “This is the hand life has dealt us. Tyrone is the reason we must push forward to find a cure.”

  Jessie turned to find Lawrie. “What have you learned from studying Joshua’s blood?”

  “Well, very interesting. We had thought Joshua might be an experiment. You know with all the diseases they told you he had it was easy to assume they kept giving him different forms of the serum to see if they could find the right formula.” Lawrie walked to the white board where someone had circled a calculation repeatedly. “But I’m convinced they were giving him serums to stop whatever was happening.”

  Ricard entered the lab from his office, wearing his lab coat and carrying one for Jessie. “I believe they had given him the initial dose of serum in utero.”

  “Ah, but some of us think it was even before then,” Reade said and pointed to another equation.

  Lawrie narrowed an eye at him.

  “Are you shaking your head because you don’t believe your uncle would do something so heinous or because it wasn’t your idea?” Reade narrowed his eyes toward Lawrie.

  Jessie noted the pair’s eyes. They were the most dazzling blue and matched perfectly. She’d never seen anything like them and couldn’t believe she was seeing two sets of them.

  “I have no doubts of the depths Raymond went to be the most heinous human standing. However, I find it a challenge to conceive of what that means,” Lawrie said.

  Slipping her hands into the lab coat, Jessie studied the equations on the board. She considered all that she remembered of Joshua’s early years and what her mother told her of the birth.

  “He was silent when he was born, not one cry, not for several days.” Jessie approached the board with the list of symptoms for each member of her family.

  She wrote down all the things she remembered her mother telling her about when she was pregnant. The fatigue, excruciating abdominal pain, the way the baby did not move, and the intense cravings for meat.

  “I remember her snapping at Dad for cooking the meat too much.” The thought that her mother might have craved blood during her pregnancy was revolting.

  Mr. Pontes hobbled closer. “I have some information that…” He scratched his chin and sighed. “It’s sensitive and will be uncomfortable, but may be pertinent.” Patting Jessie on the back, he reached for another marker.

  In perfectly neat penmanship he wrote, insatiable libido prior to pregnancy. “Your father reported being exhausted and incapable of…”

  Jessie closed her eyes and shook her head. “Let’s not add any more detail around that. Maybe we can just know she wanted to make a baby.” She tried not to think of her parents in this concept. Some things a girl simply did not need to know.

  “Ah-ha,” both Lawrie and Reade said, grabbed markers, furiously scribbling information on the board. They moved in the exact same way.

  That’s when Jessie began wondering if mates took on each other’s traits. She glanced over at Ricard.

  “There’s a reason they’re like that.” Ricard poured a cup of coffee, added a splash of cream, and half a teaspoon of sugar. “For the record I’m not reading your mind either, but I did notice the look of confusion on your face.” He handed the coffee to Jessie. “Lawrie has been bound to Reade since she was a small infant who accidentally got into her father’s supply of vampire blood. During that accidental access she consumed Reade’s blood. My theory is that because she was so young and all her formative years were ahead of her, the blood caused her to change.”

  “How do you know I’m the one who changed? The answer is you don’t,” Lawrie said, still feverishly writing.

  “We do because I’m more than a hundred years older than you,” Reade said, also writing.

  “Done.” She put down her marker seconds before Reade. “Try to keep up old man.”

  “I let you win, like I do every night.”

  “Right.” Lawrie shook her head. “What we do know is that up to this point, and even as we speak, people continue to fall pray to Panthera’s Revenant Juice. Rollins continues to infect people, but no one survives, thus he is not getting the desired outcome.”

  “A manmade vampire army,” Reade said.

  “Exactly.” Lawrie drew an arrow from the calculation marked A down to B. “However, Uncle Raymond was smarter or more devious than we thought. He had a second experiment running the entire time.”

  “This one was a long term plan.” Reade walked to the board across the room where Ricard had earlier written out several equations and a theory about gestational infections. “Ricard, we think you’re dead on with this. Tyrone infected Joshua’s mother, manipulated her hormones to increase her drive to procreate, and then set his long-term goal in motion.”

  Lawrie turned toward Serge. “What did you say last night about the sample from Joshua? You believed some component of it matched the ones taken from Aurelia the night after her transformation, right?”

  “Yes, it seems Joshua’s cells were in a state of transforming. He was experiencing the metamorphosis from human to vampire at a very slow rate.” Serge pulled a series of slides from a box near a microscope, securing one in place to be viewed. “Where we change overnight, Joshua was taking decades to mature.”

  “But how is it possible?” Jessie could not conceive of how something so complex, so hideous could have occurred to her mother and brother.

  “That’s exactly what we need to understand,” Lawrie said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ricard compared slides of Joshua’s cells with Aurelia’s and nodded. “These are nearly a perfect match. It appears his body was almost completely transformed.”

  “Right, just a little more time and he’d have made the change to vampire,” Lawrie said.

  “Or something damn close to us,” Reade said.

  Jessica shook her head. “I don’t believe it. How would it be possible for him to become a vampire? He…he…melted in my arms. My brother turned to liquid mush in the kitchen of our apartment. I’m fairly certain that doesn’t happen to vampires as part of the change.”

  It wasn’t simply confusion emanating from his mate, but deep anguish at what happened to Joshua.

  Ricard placed his hand on her back. “Love, the slides tell the tr
uth of what was happening. How it was happening is what we need to determine.”

  “Your mother had cancer, according to everything she and your father were told, right?” Lawrie asked.

  “Yes. That’s what we believed.” Jessica nodded. “It was some aggressive cancer that Tyrone treated.” She cradled the hot cup in both hands, and Ricard pulled a chair up behind her.

  “An aggressive cancer or experimental side effects,” Lawrie said.

  “My dad studied the slides. He worked to try to find a cure in the cancer research lab.”

  “Did he say anything, share anything about his findings? Do you have any idea where Matt left his notes?” Reade asked.

  “Yes, the notes. Matt would have taken meticulous notes, especially relating to his wife.” Joao came near Jessica. “Those notes may hold the key for understanding how Raymond made this work.”

  “I’ve sent Hunter and Alice with Oswald, Brandt, and Garrison to retrieve the notes from within the abandoned infirmary on Harlequin Avenue,” Serge said. It was clear from the size of the contingency he didn’t entirely believe the building to be empty.

  “I don’t recall anything more than I’ve already offered. I was young and didn’t think that later in life I’d need to remember what he said in order to understand why or how my brother died. There must be more. Dad was constantly raving about the experiments. I’m sure I don’t remember because of the SMR.” She looked to Ricard. “You may not like it, but we need Rafe. What if there is more information available to us? We might find the answer to everything.”

  To say he might not like the idea understated how he felt, but she was right. The answers to many of the questions may be within reach. Who was he to deny his mate the closure she needed?

  Calling up as much reserve as he could, Ricard glanced toward Rafe. The other vampire made a slight bow of his head, then came to stand before Jessica.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Sitting up straight on the chair Ricard had placed behind her, she squared her shoulders and stared straight into Rafe’s eyes. Not a single hint of worry could be detected in her.

  That fact amazed and, strangely, comforted Ricard. The idea that she was not worried had once irritated him to the point of believing Rafe had abused his vampire prowess. But something in Jessica’s assured willingness caused him to understand she was doing this for a purpose and so was Rafe.

  There was not one bit of malice of intent. The entire event was a mission for good.

  Ricard watched the glazed expression blanket Jessica’s face as she slipped into a peaceful trance. Rafe brought her back several years to a moment when Matt experimented in his kitchen.

  “He called the slides irrefutable proof. We didn’t understand. There were dozens of slides from Mom and Josh. Dad said both Mom and Josh had the same cells, the carcinosanguine cells, or something like that. He was frantic, pacing the floor, shouting, then mumbling. His paranoia took over. He thought there were people watching the house and that Mom might even be with them, though she had already died. ‘She might be out there, not resting where we put her, but walking among them.’”

  Lost in a memory Jessica’s head moved from side to side as though she was watching Matt move about the room. A pained expression of worry and fear played across her pretty features.

  “Carcinosanguine. He said that word over and over. ‘Vampire. Joshua is a vampire,’ he said. I couldn’t make him stop ranting. He was upset for hours on end, even forcing Joshua to stand in the window in the sunlight to see if it was too late for him.”

  She reached her arms forward. “Josh, no!” Her head shook. “The sun always burned his skin so badly. Little red bumps, thousands and millions of them covered his body. Dad swore that was a sign. Proof that his poor son had been turned into something he couldn’t fix.”

  Tears streaked her cheeks. “My poor father. Poor Joshie.” She sighed a ragged little sob. “Dad said, ‘he’s been unnaturally turned into something that not even a vampire can explain or welcome. He’s a second-generation carcinosanguine mutant. May God have mercy on him.’”

  “Carcinosanguine.” Joao nodded and softly said, “That is the term Matt used to describe the vampire reproductive cells. They run through the blood, attacking the red and white cells, converting them all to killer cells. A war breaks out in the body, overtaking nearly every human aspect, erasing all trace, then replacing the weaker human cells with a supremely stronger, hungrier cell. The carcinosanguine cell multiples at a rate of a thousand times faster than the human cells.”

  Jessica turned very suddenly as though she heard something in the distance. “The treatments? What treatments?” She stepped off the stool and walked a few steps. Ricard silently followed.

  “Fertility? What are you talking about?” Jessica wandered the lab as though she was following some invisible person. “Mom? For Josh?” She appeared more confused with every statement.

  Ricard glanced toward Joao, whose face paled.

  “Rafe, let’s get her out of this memory. Find out if Matt knew how long Patricia received the treatments,” Serge asked.

  Rafe asked the question, directing Jessica to tell him the number of treatments and how often they’d occurred, and if Matt knew of any other illness Patricia might have had prior to Joshua’s birth.

  After determining she had begun and sustained monthly fertility treatments two years after Jessica was born, through her pregnancy with Joshua in order to maintain the pregnancy up to delivery, it was evident Tyrone had figured out how to suspend the advancement of the carcinosanguine cells.

  Joao moved closer to Jessica. “Raffaele, ask her what Matt believed to be the answer to controlling this cell.”

  “Jessica, did Matt know how to stop the carcinosanguine cell’s advancement?” Rafe’s voice remained the low seductive tone every vampire used to influence humans.

  She shook her head. “There is no need to stop it. The cells change themselves. Once the transformation occurs, the reproduction rate slows to a near standstill. That’s why vampires live so long. The cell’s lifetime could be thousands of years.”

  Joao nodded. “Yes, that is what Matt and Patricia had determined. The vampire cell, once mature does not easily die. Its lifetime cannot be determined as the carcinosanguine attacks only human cells. Where none exist, it lies dormant.”

  He walked back to the board and began working one of the calculations. “This explains the vampire’s insatiable thirst upon change. The carcinosanguine cells are still programmed to kill more human cells.” He circled one calculation, the one that clearly defended the change from human to vampire.

  “That’s not necessarily a mystery to us. How did my uncle manage to infect Patricia, but not turn or kill her?” Lawrie worked her own calculation. “And, if Patricia was carrying a potential baby vampire in her womb, how did that baby not kill her?”

  “Rafe.” Ricard scooped Jessica into his arms, wanting to ensure his mate was no longer under anyone’s influence.

  “Jessie, come back from your memories and into the lab.” Rafe gave the command in a direct, though gentle way.

  With a deep breath Jessica relaxed against Ricard. “Did you learn anything useful?”

  “Yes, darling. You were quite helpful.” Ricard kissed her head.

  Beginning another calculation, Joao made a giant X in the middle and circled it in red. “Here is our duty. We owe this to everyone ever hurt by Panthera and most wholly to the Stevens family.”

  The carcinosanguine information was new, though not completely foreign to anyone in the room. Like everyone else Ricard stared at Joao’s second calculation trying to understand how the carcinosanguine cells living in both Patricia and Joshua had not killed every human cell.

  How had Panthera managed to keep vampire cells alive in a human body without turning or killing the human?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Three nights later, in a room packed with more vampires than Jessie could have imagined, she sat
between Ricard and Alice, waiting for the nightly briefing.

  There was an excitement in the air she’d never felt, and having never been in this situation she couldn’t tell if it was simply the combined effects of being with so many vampires in such close quarters or if there was something getting them all riled up.

  She noted the attire of most everyone in the room. They appeared suited for battle, wearing either black leather or black and gray fatigues, and carrying weaponry Jessie had never seen.

  There were silver-bladed knives, long swords, automatic handguns and rifles, and belts of ammunition all strapped, slung or otherwise stashed with each warrior.

  “What’s happening?” Jessie whispered to Ricard.

  “After Serge explains what we’ve learned from your memories, Matt’s notes, and our experiments, most of The Guard will deploy into Central City with the intent to destroy every revenant they encounter. There will be no prisoners and no survivors from the Panthera experiments when the night is over.”

  “Let’s get started,” Serge said, bringing the rowdy group to order and causing a near perfect silence to fall. “For those of you who have not met the newest member to our group, I’m pleased to introduce Jessica Stevens, Matt and Patricia’s daughter. It has been with Jessica’s generous sharing of her memories and her parents’ notes that we have been able to uncover the information to be shared this evening.”

  Jessie felt several sets of eyes focus on her, which was so unnerving, she shivered, glancing up at Ricard.

  “Apologies, love. But you will become accustomed to being with so many of us.” He squeezed her hand.

  “Yeah. You totally get used to it and then you don’t even notice them,” Alice agreed, but added in a much louder voice, “Of course, if they were gentlemen, and a lady, they’d tone it down.”