“I will not let you do this to me again!” Claire’s screams shot straight through the walls and reverberated outside.
“I’m not doing this out of spite Claire; I’m trying to warn you of the dangers!” Cass’s voice was also coming through clear as a bell.
“Since when have you ever cared about the risks?”
“Things have changed!”
“You’re damn right they have! We can be human again!”
“It’s a pipe dream Claire, and you know it!”
“What the hell is this?!” Joe yelled, bursting through the front door. “I thought I’d made it clear that you two were going to stop this shit!”
The two vampire sisters were four feet away from each other and looking livid. They hadn’t actually attacked each other yet, but they were coming close to it.
“I know you two have roughly four hundred years worth of issues between you, but how about you deal with it after Black Forest is no longer a threat!” Joe continued.
The sisters didn’t say anything, but managed to turn stiffly away from each other. Cass stormed back over to the couch and collapsed down into it, still looking extremely pissed.
“Any messages while we were out?” Jerry asked tentatively.
“Not much. We spotted Devlin just outside of town, but he disappeared,” Claire said, breathing deeply and trying to calm herself.
“Who?”
“Black Forest’s heavy enforcer,” she answered quickly.
“He the head honcho then?” Goose asked.
“No, he’s not,” Claire replied, but suddenly looked a little worried as soon as she’d spoken.
“Who is?”
Claire made a poor attempt at hiding the nervousness on her face. “We don’t know.”
Jerry looked at her for a second, and knew she was lying. “Well, I don’t need Joe’s sixth sense to tell me that’s a load of crap!” he growled, getting angry. “Who’s running the show, Claire?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she locked her lips together and looked away. It took a few seconds before Jerry guessed the answer.
“You’re kidding me!” he huffed.
“We were going to tell you,” Claire pleaded.
“Tell us what?” Goose asked.
“That Black Forest has a damn pureblood at the helm!” Jerry surmised, causing Joe and Goose to look aghast.
“Is that true?!” Joe demanded.
“Her name’s Selena,” Claire sighed. The truth was out now, so she might as well come clean. “We always wondered how Black Forest managed to gain so much power so quickly. A few years ago we found out. As far as we can tell, she’s about three or so hundred years old. She’s the most recent pureblood to be born.”
Vampires treated purebloods like royalty and if one was spouting off about the inferiority of humans and becoming invincible, they wouldn’t just listen, they would support her.
“Well, Sophinia’s got, what, like eleven centuries on her then? She can take her, right?” Goose said, hoping for a silver lining.
“Yes...if we can find her. Selena is very adept at staying hidden.” Claire pursed her lips again.
“Well, this is just frickin’ great! All this training ain’t gonna mean jack against her!” Jerry was pissed.
“You won’t be fighting her, Jerry. Sophinia will kill her.”
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at that sadistic winged bitch,” Cass muttered from the couch.
“You’d be ash before you could leave a scratch, and you know it!” Claire snapped at her sister.
“See! I told you we should have taken the minigun!” Jerry moaned.
“Your dad has a minigun?!” Claire asked in amazement. “How’d he get a permit for that?”
“Err...I don’t think he did...” Goose shrugged.
“I’m Immune to disease and magic, vampires, werewolves, and freakin’ fairies exist, and now a damn human-hating pureblood too! Anyone planning on dropping anymore bombshells today?” Jerry barked.
He had no idea.
Sophinia’s Mansion
Sioux Falls – South Dakota
Matthew Parker had his eye pressed down on the sights of a microscope. He was looking very closely at a sample of Jerry’s blood. He groaned to himself in aggravation.
It was completely normal. Looking as deeply and in as much detail as possible had revealed nothing but a normal boy’s blood. There was nothing even remotely different about it compared to any average healthy teenager. He’d thought that maybe, just maybe, some trace of an anomaly would be visible to a scientific eye, but it wasn’t.
It was no wonder that no one knew Jerry’s blood was different, until by chance one of those Black Forest dicks had sucked down a sample of it. He wouldn’t have shown up on anybody’s radar otherwise.
Dr. Parker pulled the blood sample from under the microscope, walked over to the miniature MRI scanner that he had set up on his desk and put the slide inside. He programmed the machine to run a full scan of the blood sample, hoping that it might detect some kind of energy signature emanating from the blood.
Ghosts and other vengeful spirits gave off high enough electrical signal levels that they could be detected in this way, and even magic had a habit of disrupting scanners. There had to be something there to give Jerry’s blood the abilities that it possessed.
He walked over to the coffee pot and poured himself another cup. It was going to be another long night at this rate.
BOOM!
Parker was thrown backwards by a massive blast. All the equipment shorted out and sent sparks flying everywhere. The explosion was big, but not big enough to breach the room. There wasn’t enough oxygen left for the resulting fires to ignite the lab beyond what they already had done.
Dr. Parker’s dazed vision finally steadied, but the ringing in his ears hadn’t stopped. He slowly got up from the floor, causing wood and glass debris to fall off of his chest as he rose. He looked around in stunned horror at the remains of the lab, before locking onto the source.
“Oh, my God!”
Joe’s House
St. Cloud - Minnesota
Claire’s phone started buzzing around in her pocket. She pulled it out and answered it.
“Matt?”
“It combusts!” he yelled down the line.
“What? What does?”
“His blood! If it gets a current through it, it’ll explode!” Parker’s voice warned.
Claire looked at Jerry, terror falling over her eyes.
“What?” Jerry asked, looking nervous.
Claire clicked a button on her phone and laid it down on the table.
“Parker, you’re on speaker. Jerry’s listening,” she said, not taking her eyes off him.
“Jerry, your blood...it’s way more volatile than we thought. It reacts violently to electrical interference. I was running a scan on it; the electro-magnetic energy caused it to combust!”
“Wha...you trying to tell me that I’m a walking piece of C4?!”
“Well, a little sample of your blood just destroyed my entire lab!” Parker’s voice sounded tinny on the speaker-phone.
“That’s impossible!” Joe yelled. “Jerry’s been working around electricity since he’s been living with me. He’s had dozens of electric shocks!”
That was true. He’d been working on circuit boards and with car batteries with Joe for the last five years.
“Yeah! I had five hundred volts go through me when I was fixing a fuse box last year,” he said, remembering the nasty jolt.
The line went silent for a few moments. “Wait...what if...what if your body somehow works as an insulator? Your blood could be perfectly stable while it’s inside you, but once it leaves it’s vulnerable to outside effects.”
“He’s right,” Cass said, walking over. “When I killed that fang who drank from you, he ignited in the same way as any other vamp would, but it looked more like a grenade had gone off inside him. It blasted me twenty feet away.�
��
“And when were you planning on mentioning this?!” Jerry scowled.
“I thought it was just a side-effect of him being juiced up on your blood! How was I supposed to know that it’s like that all the time?!”
“Good thing you didn’t have a smoke after you drank from him,” Goose said, with raised eyebrows.
“Yeah! Wonderful! Now that I have freakin’ Semtex in my veins as well, everything’s peachy!” Jerry yelled descending into a frenzy.
“Jerry, didn’t you hear him? You aren’t a walking time bomb! As long as your blood is in your body, there’s no problem,” Claire said, trying to calm him.
“Really? And how exactly are we supposed to figure out how my blood works if it’s going to explode every time you take a look at it?”
“We’ll figure something else out,” Parker’s voice emanated from the speaker-phone again,” maybe we can analyze it while it’s inside you, I don’t know,”
“If you so much as think about probing me, I swear I will shoot you in the face!” Jerry threatened.
“Now, now, Jerry, mind your blood pressure,” Cass couldn’t help herself.
“Mind your tone, unless you want me to slap it out of your damn mouth!”
That made Cassandra’s eyebrows go up.
This whole escapade was going off the deep end faster than they had ever imagined possible, and it looked like the sheer momentum of events was taking Jerry with it. Just last week he had been a normal teenager. Now he was surrounded by the supernatural, had blood which could make a vampire virtually invincible, unless they drank too much, in which case it would prove deadly. He could never get sick. Magic didn’t work on him, and now his blood was acting like nitroglycerine, should it leave his body! What other crazy crap was the red stuff capable of?
And more importantly, why didn’t he have any superpowers?! Couldn’t he get super-strength, or instant healing, or something out of this mess that might at least even the playing field a bit?
It looked like guns and a ‘give em hell’ attitude were all he had going for him at this moment. That, and his family. Goose, Steve and Sarah, they were in this together and he loved them all. That made them family. And this insanity had caused Joe to break out of his iron shell and show just how much he cared about his nephew.
The truth was, if Jerry didn’t have them, he would have already disintegrated into little pieces.
Cass, Claire, Sophinia, Parker, even Roach; they were still strangers to him, but that was changing fast. Being shoved into the same dark deep hole together had had some unexpected side-effects.
Jerry rubbed his face and remembered Cass’s words. It’s only going to get worse...
That was the truth and he couldn’t let it beat him.
“It’s going to be okay, Jerry,” Claire said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“No, it’s not,” he sighed and went straight for the newly bought bottle of scotch in Joe’s cupboard. “But you know what...screw it! As long as I’m not going to explode at some point, we can just file this under the ‘weird shit my blood does’ list.”
“Really?” Claire asked. Jerry hadn’t taken the last surprise about his blood very well, but now it seemed like he’d already gotten over the shock of this latest one.
“These little discoveries about my blood are coming in as hard and fast as a racehorse kicking me in the nuts, and I’m really starting to get sick of it. I got messed up blood, whoopdedoo! Why don’t you dump some in a fuel tank and see if it’ll run a car, or maybe give it to a power company and see if they can make a new type of energy from it, I don’t give a crap! It’s in me, it ain’t going anywhere, and neither are the vamps who wanna chug it. Basically, I’m screwed.” Pouring himself a drink, he walked over to the kitchen table and picked up Claire’s phone. “See ya at school Professor,” He hung up.
He threw her phone to her and downed the entire glass of scotch in one. He had well and truly had enough, but that didn’t mean that the revelations and challenges were going to stop coming anytime soon. Cass had been absolutely right.
“The human atom bomb is going to bed. I’ll deal with this extra layer of crazy in the morning,” he waved goodbye to everyone and stomped off to his bedroom, leaving the room in a stunned silence.
They watched him leave and stood soundlessly together for a moment. Then Cass spoke.
“If only it were that simple,” she said quietly.
CHAPTER 15 – OLD WOUNDS
Joe’s House – St. Cloud.
ZZ Top – Sharply Dressed Man turned out to be the heavy noise which broke Goose out of his sleep. Jerry was already dressed and just putting his boots on.
“Rise and shine Loosey Goosey,” he said happily.
“Dude, it’s too early for ZZ Top,” he groaned.
“What? Sorry, I can’t hear you. The music’s too loud,” he said, turning up the volume and lip syncing the lyrics.
“Well, someone’s very chipper today,” Goose said, looking a little confused.
“I feel good!” Jerry grinned.
“That’s unexpected, considering how many nervous breakdowns you’ve been having lately,” Goose shouted over the music.
“Screw it. I’ve already got a supernatural bull’s eye painted on my ass, right? Moping ain’t gonna save me. Gotta start living for the moment, and if I’m going down, I’m going down swinging!”
“Okay...” Goose said, looking quite shocked at Jerry’s sudden change in attitude.
“Who are you and where is the real Jerry?” Claire asked him as soon as he left the bedroom a few minutes later. Her long dark hair was still wet from the shower she’d just taken.
“I don’t know. He just woke up like this,” Goose shrugged.
“I’ve had time to adjust,” Jerry said.
“It’s sickening,” Cass snorted and winced.
“Why don’t you use one of your fangs to scratch my ass,” he smiled.
“How about I scratch your carotid artery instead,” she threatened.
“Ahh, if you wanted something to suck on honey, all you had to do is ask,” he winked. In addition to his new happy mood, he had arrived at the realization that he and Cassandra wouldn’t ever get together and so he was free to joke about it.
“I like my men with a little more experience,” she shot back.
“Practice makes perfect,” he chanted.
“Careful, Jerry. She’s slept with guys younger than you before,” Claire said.
“He lied about his age, it wasn’t my fault!” Cass whined.
“I’m almost eighteen,” Jerry reminded her.
“You couldn’t handle me,” Cass said smugly.
“Sounds like a challenge. I love a challenge.”
“I screw like a jackhammer, Jerry, you probably wouldn’t survive it,” the vampire shamelessly warned him.
That made his eyebrows shoot up. He had a feeling that she wasn’t lying, but that just made him a little friskier.
“Get your rocks off someplace else, sport,” Cass said.
“Happy slut dot come,” Goose recommended, before realizing what he’d just said and going red in the face.
“Okay, well, we gotta go get educated. House rules still apply, no killing each other and there’s fresh water in the toilet,” he said, grinning at Cass. She threw a pillow at his head.
After grabbing his bag and gun and downing some OJ, he and Goose left the house and drove to the school. When they saw Mr. Parker, he was showing signs of his little accident with Jerry’s blood. His face had some small scratches and bruises covering it and he looked tired. Apart from his explosive discovery, he hadn’t made any headway in figuring out Jerry’s blood.
His surprise was evident as soon as he saw Jerry’s happy attitude. And he wasn’t the only one. Steve and Sarah were more than a little spooked by his chirpiness and no one could figure out why he was suddenly acting this way, especially when he actually started flirting with Marlene Higgins. She wasn’t exactly the bes
t looking girl in school, but the rumor was that she was easy. Then later he threatened a jock who bumped into him in the corridor; Jerry had looked ready to fight to the death. Luckily, his game face was enough to make said jock stand down, but his attitude was starting to scare his friends.
Jerry seemed to be displaying the same behavior as a person might who was trying to live out their bucket list. It was quite worrying. Unfortunately, every time someone asked why he was in such a good mood he would just brush it off like nothing was wrong with his life.
Blood Heavy (Blood Heavy Series) Page 18