Amelia’s eyes were huge. “Gabriel, you need to calm down.”
“Fuck calm!” All the house systems were centralized to one control unit. A security flaw he was going to remedy as soon as he found out how in the holy hell Honoria managed to get in here to begin with. He swore when he brought the diagnostics up on screen. “We may need to relocate. It’s not safe here.”
“All right, fine. Whatever you say. But right now, I need you to sit down, okay?”
“Sonofabitch!” They’d gone around his protocols. Completely bypassed all his security measures and used the science number cruncher to confuse the system into a reboot. Which meant whatever Amelia hadn’t password protected was now Honoria’s.
“I will sedate you if you make me,” Amelia threatened.
Gabriel slammed his hand down on the keyboard so hard he crushed it.
“All right, mister. You need a time out.”
“Amelia, please tell me your work is secure on this system.” He couldn’t bring himself to check.
“My work is not on this system,” she said and relief made him sag. “All data comes from and returns back to a different location, with biometric and password security. The connection shut down when my computers went offline.”
So they wouldn’t have gotten anything.
Amelia went to the central console and placed her hand on the screen. After she input her password, all the monitors turned back on, streaming with data that hadn’t been there after the reboot. “There,” she said. “See? Now will you please sit down?”
Gabriel hung his head. “I’m sorry. For all of this.” If anything had happened to her…
“I knew what I was getting into.”
He glanced at her sideways. She couldn’t have possibly known. But the quiet confidence, the self-assurance in her made him believe her. There was a strength in Amelia which could only have been forged in fire. “I never wanted this to touch you.”
“If that were completely true, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place,” she said with a shrug. There was no censure. “Now come on. You managed to rebreak your ribs. I need to see how much damage you did.”
Gabriel returned to his chair and let her examine him. Her hands shook a little when she probed his ribs. “Does this hurt?”
“No.” He covered her hands with his, seeking her gaze. She wouldn’t look at him.
“Good. That means the serum is working. Once we start with the change agent I’ll have to monitor you to make sure this one doesn’t disintegrate.”
“Is that possible?”
“Very,” she said, consulting her e-pad, “if the compounds react to each other. I’m testing for all contingencies before starting the treatment, though.” He knew she was only talking to calm him. It only worked because though it was obvious she was trying, she didn’t sound like the emotionless scientist. There was tension in her; her movements weren’t as fluid as he was used to seeing, and she was so pale Gabriel wanted to take her in his arms and erase the last ten minutes from both their memories. Go back to this morning when all that mattered was her being there with him, completely.
“Is that why the tiger guy didn’t change for a year?” he asked, keeping the conversation going because he needed to hear her voice to steady himself. “Because of a cross-reaction?”
“No,” she said in a tone he was beginning to recognize. The woman was a trove of information, but when she talked like that, she only gave the bare minimum. Only enough to shut him up. She was hiding something. “In his case, the trigger was non-reactive. He went through a different process.”
Gabriel decided to probe for more. “Then this is a theoretical possibility?”
“It’s all trial and error. We learn by doing. Every body is different, reacts differently. There’s no such thing as standard or normal. No basis for comparison.”
Realization dawned. “In other words, it didn’t happen to the tiger guy, but it happened to someone else. There were others who went through this.”
Amelia blinked at him. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve seen them.”
In the file. The images of people who’d been killed by the changes.
“No,” he said, starting to understand the undercurrents to this whole thing. “You said the tiger guy was the first success. But the cross-reaction didn’t happen in him. Means it couldn’t have happened before, otherwise you would have altered the compounds. Which means it must have happened after him.”
For less than a second Amelia went so completely still he could practically hear her heart stop. Then it was over and she turned her back on him and went back to her desk.
Gabriel went after her. “What are you keeping from me?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” she said, all cool authority, not looking at him.
“If it has relevance on what you’re doing to me, then it damn well does concern me. You’re a good doctor, Amelia. Don’t you think a patient should have all the available facts to give an informed consent?”
“You demanded my consent without knowing any of the facts. And when I gave them to you, you didn’t care! What makes you think you get to ask for more now?”
Gabriel drew back. “So it’s personal.” Amelia wouldn’t be this up in arms if it was some faceless stranger. She’d shown him plenty of those. But with the tiger guy, she kept everything vague and never gave more than she absolutely had to. She was protecting her patient. How much closer to her had this mysterious other person been, that she refused to acknowledge his very existence? “You did this to someone close to you.”
“No, she did it to herself,” Amelia snapped. “Without my knowledge, or consent. She put her life on the line for the stupidest of reasons, much like yourself, and she died three times because of it!”
“She?”
Amelia slammed her e-pad down and shoved to her feet. “I’m not discussing this with you.” Then she marched out of the lab, dropping her coat on the floor along the way.
“Honoria will be back,” he called after her. “We still need to leave!”
She shouted back something extremely unflattering before she disappeared upstairs and out of sight.
Gabriel blew out a frustrated breath and dropped into her abandoned chair. He let the momentum spin him around a couple of times. Great. Just great.
When the computer screen came into his view, he dropped his feet to the floor and stared.
In her haste to escape him, she’d forgotten to log out. Scruples made him hesitate for all of five seconds before he brought up the search window. He’d never been able to access these files before; hadn’t even found them. Because they hadn’t been able to find the connecting uplink. Now that the connection was open, all of Amelia’s work was right there for his inspection.
Within moments, he was scanning her files, organized chronologically. He skimmed through the early trial, not interested in the failures. The first success was labeled THNA. Gabriel didn’t know what that stood for, but the description was almost identical to what that nut from New Alaska had told him. NA … New Alaska? Then what was the TH?
He let that go for now, focusing on the results. The guy had almost died moments after the virus had been administered. Amelia had suspended the experiment and following treatments had been aimed to stabilize his condition. A year of treatments.
Cause of transformation: Unknown.
Trigger: Unidentified.
He’d changed spontaneously?
The information cut out, seemingly mid-sentence. Except there weren’t sentences, only random notes.
The next entry was labeled HSCT. The acronym was a link to another file.
Gabriel checked behind him to make sure Amelia hadn’t come back, and selected the link.
The screen went black, and then a low resolution video popped up, the picture adjusting automatically to fit the screen. It was a little out of focus, but Gabriel could easily make out a woman. Her face looked deathly tired. Her skin was sallow, and she slumped in her s
eat, though her voice was strong as she spoke into the microphone. “Statistically, a sister virus strain, a mutated version of the virus originally used would have the best chance of being successful. Similar enough to perform the same function, and just different enough to avoid an attack by the subject’s immune system. Apparently, the subject has developed a defense against the original virus, so I had to improvise. And hey, it only took me fifteen hours to come up with a workable serum.” There was a wry, amused sort of way-to-go-me pride in her voice, but the strain on her face revealed more emotion that she probably wanted it to.
She was dying, and she knew it.
Gabriel fast forwarded to a part where the woman was looking directly into the recorder. “This is a risky procedure. At best, the subject will become infected with the regenerative agent, and some of the virus’ indicators. At worst… at worst the solution contains a cell or two of the full, live virus, in which case, introduction into the blood stream will mean immediate infection.”
She went on to describe the progression of the disease, and the increasing risk, given the number of injections she was going to be administering to the subject. The longer she spoke, the more unsettled and weary she became. Even her off-hand comment about a date didn’t seem to brighten her spirits.
Then she took a syringe and injected herself. She was the subject. HSMT. T, for Torrey, the place where this was recorded. And the rest of it: Hailey S. Chase.
Gabriel turned off the video and logged out of Amelia’s uplink. He felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of his freaking soul.
Her sister.
Amelia was protecting her sister.
*
Amelia shook so much she tripped going up the stairs. By the time she made it to her green room, she was hyperventilating. The thermostat was turned up almost as high here as it was in the lab, but the humidity was much higher. She couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t go outside to breathe.
Amelia dropped to her knees and hung her head, burying her hands in soft dark soil, seeking familiarity and comfort. Plants, the earth, had always been a soothing presence in her life. Today, both failed to calm her. She fisted her hands in the soil, feeling miniscule granules bury so far beneath her fingernails it hurt.
Hailey is safe, she told herself. Her younger sister was off somewhere on an exotic honeymoon with a man who could read minds. She was nowhere near danger, and if it found her, Hailey and Jeremy could damn well take care of themselves.
Amelia knew this.
So why was she still having a panic attack?
She wanted to cry.
She wanted to scream until she passed out.
She wanted to break things.
Most of all, she wanted to get the hell out of her life. To escape the mess she’d made and go somewhere far from it, where no one knew who or what she was. Where she could start over with a clean slate.
It wouldn’t clear my conscience.
And that was the crux of it.
Amelia could run, she had the means. But she could never run far enough to escape her memories. She wished she could accept her past as easily as Gabriel accepted his. But he had only killed people. Amelia, for all intents and purposes, had tortured them to death. She’d made their own bodies turn against them. She’d made them suffer, sometimes knowing they would, and recorded the results, like none of it mattered.
Amelia was far more of a monster than he could ever be.
She and Honoria should get along quite well.
There was one thing monsters and scientists had in common. They did not feel while working.
Emotion clouded judgment. Made a scientist clumsy. Made her make lethal mistakes. Sympathy, compassion, remorse, and fear had no place in a lab.
Amelia closed her eyes and made herself not feel. She analyzed her body’s responses, focusing on the facts, not the emotional triggers. Elevated heart rate. Constricted airways. Lack of oxygen in the blood, and thus in the brain and major organs, causing lightheadedness and weakness in the body.
The next breath came easier. The one after even more so.
Amelia released her death grip on the soil and braced herself to stand. She had to hold on to the wall while her legs steadied and the room stopped spinning. One of these days there would be a chaise set up there, by the palm trees. And over there, by the window, there would be an artificial pond, maybe a little waterfall with lotus flowers floating on top.
One of these days, this place would be a miniature Eden she could escape to and pretend she deserved to be there.
For now, the plants still needed to grow and mature. And Amelia still had a lot to make up for.
Light, cool mist caressed her overheated skin. The irrigation system turning on. Amelia picked up the control unit to check the settings.
Gabriel had actually done an amazing job. Not only practically, but aesthetically. He’d programmed the system to water each type of plant as needed, in a sequence that had a rhythm to it. Stunned, Amelia looked around, watching and listening to the sprays of water sound out the Blue Danube waltz.
She could almost hear the melody.
Wait, she did hear it! The control unit in her hand had a volume option. She’d thought that meant water volume. Amelia turned it up and smiled. Johann Strauss at his best. And the water did follow the beat! Not only that, as she watched the sprays around her, it was like seeing an orchestrated performance.
Gabriel had done this.
She’d given him a task to get rid of him for a while, something that ought to have been menial and boring to someone of his talent, and he’d done this.
It was so beautiful it shamed her.
Amelia set down the controls, rinsed off her hands and left the Eden she didn’t deserve. There was dinner to order and a stack of movies waiting to be watched. She had a year of new releases to catch up on. Perhaps some mindless entertainment was what she needed.
The kitchen had an uplink to a hundred neighborhood restaurants. Thankfully, Gabriel hadn’t disabled it. Amelia ordered food from three different places, gathered light snacks for the wait, and set up the movies to play in sequence, skipping the end credits.
Gabriel returned from the lab as she was about to settle in to watch. She could hardly bring herself to look at him, but when she did, the strange look on his face made her frown. “Something wrong?”
He shook himself. “No,” he said.
The way he was looking at her, as if she was a mystery he was resolving, made her uncomfortable. “Look, about before…”
“I was being an idiot,” he said. “Just wanted to get a rise out of you.”
Her mouth quirked wryly. “It worked,” she said. Then she sobered. “About the other person—”
“You don’t have to tell me. I get it.”
“Oh?”
He winced and shrugged. “You, uh, left the link to your files open.”
“I see.” Amelia put the snacks down before she threw them at him. Stay calm, stay rational. “So you snooped.”
“Yes,” he said and, to his credit, he looked duly guilty. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you shut it down afterward?”
“Of course I did.”
She nodded. The backs of her legs were to the couch, but she wasn’t sitting down. Neither was he, still standing in the living room doorway. “So what did you find out?”
Gabriel dropped his gaze to the floor and rocked back and forth on his feet, hands in his pocket. “I found a recording of your sister.”
Stay calm. Hailey can take care of herself. Far better than Amelia could now. Hailey had the advantage of her snow leopard.
“You realize I have to kill you now,” she said, needing the humor to calm herself and dispel the awkward situation.
His gaze came up and he smiled crookedly. “If you must,” he said, as though extremely put out. “I suppose I have no choice but to let you try.” And from the change in his tone, it was clear where that attempt would lead.
&n
bsp; Amelia’s relief was weak, but it was there. She made herself release the tense breath she held and settled on the couch. “Maybe later.”
Gabriel ventured a step or two into the room and raised an eyebrow at the TV. “Dr. Amelia Chase watching a movie? How … ordinary.”
“I sometimes find it useful to engage in activities average people enjoy. For research purposes, of course.”
“Of course,” he agreed.
Amelia smiled. “Would you care to join me?”
“Well, if you’re sure it won’t bias the results of your study.”
She shrugged. “Repetition tends to remove bias.”
“Then I accept your most gracious invitation.”
“Good,” she said. “Park your butt right here and shut up. The movie’s starting.”
Gabriel chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.” He sat close enough that they touched from knee to shoulder and stole a piece of candy out of the snack pile.
She glared, put his arm around her and drew her knees up so she leaned against him. Then she stole the candy back. “There, that’s better.”
“As usual, Dr. Chase,” he said, snagging a snack of his own, “I cannot find fault with your logic.”
Chapter 14
September 28th, 3032
For two days, Gabriel played House with Amelia. Something had changed the day Honoria made her presence known—and Gabriel was under no illusion she’d actually left. Gabriel was more determined than ever to finish the treatment and put an end to that farce.
But at the same time, he was reluctant to see this thing with Amelia end. However messed up their circumstances were, the days he’d spent here with her were among his most pleasant memories. Three mornings now he’d gotten to wake up to the sight of her in his arms. She snuggled close to him in her sleep each night almost compulsively.
He got the pleasure of watching her eyes open, all liquid warmth like he’d never known existed. He got her sleepy smile, and the kitten-like purr. He got to kiss her, and take her, or have her take him. He’d even coaxed her to share her shower, which was quickly becoming his favorite pastime. Watching water sluice over that soft, creamy skin, getting to caress every inch of it, making her come in his arms while she clutched the handle bar when her knees did that buckling thing that made him feel like a god—oh yes, sex in the shower, definitely among his favorites.
Blood Debts (The Blood Book 3) Page 12