Outbreak: A Nightshades Novel

by Melissa F. Olson

  Ruiz glanced where she was looking. “Yeah.” He sounded a little unnerved. The first mark on the timeline was labeled “turned into a shade,” and the year listed was 721.

  Lindy was more than thirteen hundred years old.

  “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” Ruiz admitted.

  “Seems reasonable.”

  They surveyed the paper for another minute, and then Ruiz shook his head, looking a little disgusted. “She’s been keeping a hell of a lot from us, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But you still trust her?”

  Hadley took a moment to consider it. Only a couple of days before, the answer would have been no. But she was vigilant about making sure Lindy didn’t touch her, didn’t go near anything Hadley ate or drank. She didn’t think the shade had ever mesmerized her—and Lindy had put her life on the line more than once for the BPI pod. If she was playing them, Hadley couldn’t see how.

  So why keep all this Hector background from them? “She was protecting us,” Hadley concluded. “And maybe protecting our image of her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Hadley pointed at the notations again. “Look, there’s a lot of detail right at the beginning of this, and starting about halfway across, all the entries are a few years apart. Like she was keeping tabs on him, but from a distance.”

  Ruiz stared at the first half of the timeline and nodded. “You think they were together at first?”

  “Yeah.” Hadley touched an entry that read, “killed the mayor of Warsaw.” The date listed was 1849. “And Lindy might not have been helping him, but she didn’t stop him, either.”

  “Maybe that’s how we got here,” Ruiz grumbled. “I agree that Lindy is with us—now—but a hell of a lot of pain could have been avoided if she’d just killed her brother a couple hundred years ago.”

  Hadley looked at him. “You got any siblings?”

  “A brother. Four years younger.”

  “Is he smart? Successful?”

  Ruiz snorted. “Nah. He works part-time as a groundskeeper at Wrigley.”

  “And if you found out that he killed someone, would you turn him in?”

  Ruiz’s head snapped toward her, his eyes narrowing. Then he shrugged and looked away. “Point taken.”

  There was an awkward pause, and then the older BPI agent crossed the room to the other end of the timeline. “Anyway. Thirteen hundred years of history is too much to sift through.”

  “Overwhelming,” Hadley agreed.

  “But if Hector were just any other guy, we’d be looking for known associates and previous residences. So we should start over here.”

  Hadley followed him. The last entry on the timeline was from just the night before: “Called to brag about corrupting Reagan.”

  “Okay, so let’s work backward,” she said. Before the phone call, there were notes from Hector’s experiments on transmuting teenagers over the summer. Before that, the most recent entry was for 2002. Before that, the entries were pretty evenly spaced, every two or three years apart.

  So why the long gap between 2002 and the summer?

  “Lindy told us once that she and Hector can feel each other’s location, right?” Hadley said, thinking out loud. “But Lindy gets a total blood transfusion to keep him out of her head.”

  “Right . . .”

  “That can’t be as simple as hooking up a couple of needles,” Hadley reasoned. “She’d need equipment, a lot of blood, and most of all, someone she really trusts. She’ll be vulnerable as hell when she’s basically drained of blood.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Well, we can confirm it with Lindy, but let’s say 2002 is when she gets the first transfusion. Before that, they were in each others’ business every couple of years. Probably couldn’t help it.”

  “Or one of them was chasing the other,” he pointed out.

  “True,” she acknowledged. Hadley studied the timeline a moment longer, tapping an index finger on her lower lip. Then she dug the burner phone out of her pocket.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Lindy.” Hadley found the number for Alex’s new burner and hit the number. As she waited for it to connect, she explained, “If she has to keep having these transfusions, that means they wear off, right?”

  “Right . . .”

  “Hector can’t know when Lindy’s transfusion will wear off, and right now, he doesn’t want her to be able to find him. So what if whoever she uses to do the transfusion is someone Hector knows too?”

  Chapter 10

  FBI labs

  Saturday afternoon

  ALEX COULDN’T TELL HOW Gil was reacting to Lindy’s explanation—the FBI agent had a pretty good poker face. He did look a little skeptical, though.

  “You think Hector’s setting you up on purpose?” Gil said. “He put all these moving parts in play so you’d be, what, ostracized by the Bureau?”

  “I think that me signing on with the BPI surprised him, and he did everything he could do to undo it,” she replied. “But he’s going to have a bigger plan in play, and the best way to oppose him is to keep surprising him.”

  “But how did he know about Camp Vamp?” Gil insisted. “There’s no way he could have broken in and freed the prisoners without insider knowledge.”

  Lindy looked at Alex, and he heard her voice in his head again. Up to you.

  Alex took a deep breath. “One of my team members revealed the information under duress,” he told Gil. “Hector mesmerized this individual. It was not his or her fault.”

  Gil rolled his eyes. “It’s Chase Eddy, isn’t it?”

  Alex was ready for the question, and made sure his face didn’t so much as twitch. “I’m not going to say which of my team members was involved. But if you happen to still have Agent Eddy in custody, I would remind you that you have no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part.”

  Gil looked ready to call bullshit on that, but Lindy broke in before he could respond, “Look, Gil. Let’s say for a second that you and the rest of the BPI are right about me, and I’m totally in cahoots with my evil twin brother. Hector has already gotten his people out of Camp Vamp, and killed even more BPI officers, including”—her voice wobbled for just a moment, but pushed on—“Agent Bartell, who has been with the BPI since the beginning. Why exactly would I be hanging around now? Why wouldn’t I kill you and Alex and run off to join Hector for our next evil scheme?”

  That seemed to give Gil pause, although Alex wasn’t sure if it was because she made a good point or because she’d used the phrase “evil twin brother.”

  “Here’s the bottom line, man,” Alex said, drawing Gil’s attention again. “You saw Lindy fight with us that night at the clinic.” The memory seemed to make Gil twitch a little. “Hector is as old as she is, as strong as she is. Do you want to go up against him? Or can we send in our heavyweight?”

  Gil looked back and forth between them, then glanced at Noelle. She held her hands up. “I just make the toys,” she said. “But for what it’s worth, I believe them. And she’s right, if all she wanted to do was help Hector, there’s no reason for her to stick around now.”

  Gil sighed, dry-scrubbing his face with both hands. “All right,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do: I’ll give you two forty-eight hours to get this asshole. But Lindy puts the bracelet back on.” He reached into his pocket and held up the tracer bracelet that Noelle had designed. It was still in a plastic evidence bag.

  Lindy looked ready to agree, but Alex couldn’t help but say, “How do we know you won’t just use the bracelet to hunt us down when you’ve got your team behind you?”

  Gil gave him a look. “Call it a leap of faith.”

  He had to admit, this was fair. And it occurred to him that if he and Lindy did find Hector, it might not be a bad idea for Gil and the cavalry to be able to find them.

  After that, things moved quickly. Noelle entered a new code into the bracelet, and this time she
gave it to Gil, not Alex. Gil made a show of checking his watch. “Forty-eight hours, then I’m coming to get you, Hector or not,” he warned. “And I’m hanging around Noelle until then. Making sure you don’t try to get the code from her.”

  Noelle made a face. Alex asked her, “Can you still make the weapons?”

  Gil looked between them. “Wait, what weapons?”

  “Yeah,” Noelle answered, brightening a little. To Gil, she said, “You can be my lab assistant.”

  The older agent blanched, but before he could respond, Lindy stood up. “We should get going,” she said. Then she paused and gave Alex a rueful look. I don’t suppose the El goes all the way to Hadley’s cabin?

  Noelle looked back and forth between them for a second and said, “Wait.” She went over to the backpack on her desk and dug out a set of keys, removing a single key fob and tossing it to Alex. “It’s the red Prius in the back lot. I can ride my Harley until you get it back to me.”

  He nodded. “Thanks, Noelle.”

  They headed for the door, but Lindy paused. She turned and said over her shoulder, “Oh, and Gil? While we’re finding my brother, could you be a lamb and get us some methamphetamine?”

  * * *

  Noelle had actual CDs all over the Prius’s passenger seat, but Alex scooped them up and deposited them in the back seat, along with some takeout wrappers and several empty water bottles. While he cleared the seats, Lindy leaned against the car frame looking tired and wan. Before they’d left, Noelle had requested a blood sample so she could use it in developing dosages for the darts. Alex had worried that Lindy didn’t have the extra blood to lose, but he’d said nothing. It wasn’t his place, and besides, it was a show of faith in Noelle that Lindy trusted her with her blood. The last person who’d asked her for a sample was Hector.

  “So,” Alex said as they finally climbed into the car. “‘Be a lamb’? Were you trying to piss off Palmer?”

  Despite her obvious fatigue, Lindy grinned at him. “Come on, you don’t want to waste our time beating up drug dealers in redneck bars in Wisconsin. That’s a Palmer job.”

  “Beating up redneck drug dealers sounds a lot more fun than going after Hector,” he grumbled.

  The new burner phone had internet and GPS, so Lindy navigated and Alex drove them toward Hadley’s cousin’s cabin. After about twenty minutes, the phone rang in Lindy’s hand. “Probably Hadley and Ruiz,” Alex guessed.

  “Hello?” she said cautiously, then Alex could see her relax. “Oh, hey, Hadley.” She listened for a second, and her face clouded over with worry. “Shit,” she whispered. “Okay. No, it’s a good point. I’ll make a call.”

  “What’s up?” Alex asked as soon as she hung up.

  “Can you stop for a minute?” He pulled the car over, and she entered another number into the phone, and waited while it rang. And rang. Lindy tried two more times, and then turned to Alex. “We need to make a detour,” she said shortly.

  “To where?”

  “Aurora. I need to check on a friend.”

  Chapter 11

  Interstate 57

  Saturday noon

  “SO HOW IS IT that this friend you’ve had for hundreds of years just happens to live forty miles west of us?” Alex said around a mouthful of sub sandwich. They’d made a quick stop so he could grab lunch.

  “I asked Roza to move closer to me,” Lindy explained. “She arrived from New York a couple of weeks ago.”

  “You must be close, if she came all the way to Chicago to be near you.”

  “Yes and no. Roza was the great-granddaughter of our nursemaid, Hilda,” Lindy told him.

  Whoa. That would make her almost as old as Lindy. “How does that work?”

  “Hector and I loved Hilda. After she died, we kept an eye on her descendants. Roza was the last one, and she contracted a fatal illness when she was about forty.”

  “So you transmuted her?”

  Lindy shook her head. “Hector and I were both in Prague, and worried that we wouldn’t make it back in time. But we sent an emissary to do it.”

  “So now you’re . . . friends?”

  Lindy smiled faintly. “Of a sort. Roza is like that cousin you don’t always get along with, but you’re still family. She’s also brilliant. She developed the technique that keeps Hector from finding me.”

  Alex rode along in silence for a few minutes, unsure of how much to question Lindy. She usually only talked about her past in a vague way, like she was just too used to keeping secrets to even consider opening up. But then again, he’d never invited her to.

  “How were you transmuted?” he asked tentatively.

  Lindy looked out the Prius’s window. “It’s a long story.”

  “It’ll be almost another hour to Aurora,” Alex offered. “And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t recognize any of Noelle’s music.”

  Lindy smiled again, and he reached over and squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said. “But it might help me understand.”

  She nodded. “All right.” Her eyes grew distant for a moment, as if looking for a starting place. “In 541, the first outbreak of the bubonic plague spread across the Roman Empire. Shades must have existed by then, but in very few numbers, which is partly why it was able to spread so quickly—there were no shades to boost the humans’ immunity.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t alive yet, but historians today believe that something like thirteen percent of the world’s population died, Alex. For a time it really did seem like the end of the world. So the shades, who were immune, of course, began to organize themselves.”

  “Organize how?”

  “They infected as many people as possible,” she said flatly. “They treated the shade strain almost as a vaccine against the plague.” She paused, considering. “No, more than that. It wasn’t just that every new shade was immune to the plague. They also fed off humans who desperately needed the increased immunity to fight off the infection. Emperor Justinian contracted the plague and survived, supposedly because he had his own personal shade feeding off him at the time.”

  “Jesus.” Alex tried to imagine what it must have been like: competing infections racing across Europe, each one destroying humanity as it was understood then. Becoming a shade must have seemed like the lesser evil.

  As soon as he thought that, he felt a little guilty. Lindy wasn’t an evil, lesser or otherwise.

  She must have read the thoughts on his face, because she just gave him a grim smile and continued the story. “I have no idea how many shades existed before the Plague of Justinian, as the history books now call it, but that was the first shade outbreak, the first controlled effort to balance the shade-human proportions more favorably.”

  “Did it work?” Alex asked. “Did it stop the plague?”

  “Slowed it down enough for it to stop, yes,” she said. “Although most humans weren’t told about us. At the time, I believe shades were worried that too many humans would beg to become like them, and there would be no humans left to feed from.” She rolled her eyes. “Ironic, right? They did learn something rather interesting about our kind, though: if you get enough brand-new shades together, there’s a sort of herd mentality that takes hold.”

  “Big whoop,” Alex scoffed. “Humans have that too.”

  She laughed. “I suppose they do. But I’m not talking about a psychological commonality. I mean more of a hive mind. Usually, shades have free will: an elder can talk to her fledglings, but she can’t force them to do something. In a herd, though, they just sort of stop thinking. They listen to their creator and no other.”

  “That’s what Hector was trying to do with the kids in Heavenly, wasn’t he?” Alex said with sudden insight. “He wanted to replicate that.”

  “I suspect so,” she replied. “He was hoping to connect a lot of shade minds at once, sort of like . . .” She frowned, thinking for a moment. “Like a power strip connected to many different strands of Christmas lights. Hector wanted to be the power stri
p.”

  Alex felt like there was probably a lap dance joke in there somewhere, but they’d strayed off topic. And he really wanted to know how Lindy had become a shade. “So there was this big vampire recruitment push . . .” he coaxed.

  She chuckled. “Not how I’d phrase it, but okay. Anyway, after that, for the first time shades required their own leadership.”

  “How did they choose the leader?”

  She pointed a finger at him. “Great question. During Late Antiquity, the western Roman Empire was divided into what are now called barbarian kingdoms, each with its own king,” she said. “Think of them like the predecessor to the feudal system you learned about in high school. Barbarian kings inherited their throne, but the people also needed to consent to their leadership.”

  “Wait, what? How does that work?”

  “Each king would have as many sons as possible, and his people would choose the one most worthy of ruling.” She gave a wan smile. “Sometimes there was even a tie, and two kings ruled together as brothers.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So when all those new shades cast about for the oldest among them, they found a man named Rainer who had been turned twenty years before the bubonic plague began. And, funny thing, he was a barbarian . . . prince, I suppose you would say. Rainer’s father was a Germanic king—of the Visigothic Kingdom, not that it matters much now—but the people had chosen his older brother to lead.

  “Anyway, Rainer had married and had his own children and grandchildren before becoming a shade at the age of about fifty. He had twenty years’ more experience as a shade than the generation around him, he was from a royal family, and it just made sense for him to become their king.”

  “So where do you come into the equation?” Alex asked, trying not to sound impatient.