Jonathan’s body temperature had been dropping before, but now he had spiked a fever. Still, his skin was more gray than pink, his dark hair looking even darker against his pale brow. Mark suspected Ferrel’s men had given him a second dose of whatever drug they’d received in the airport, and it was shutting down his organs one by one. Some of the effects were textbook, others made about as much sense as vampires, werewolves and fairies. Medicine never quite kept up with the paranormal.
And Mark was sure now that’s what he was dealing with. Jonathan’s verbal abilities were coming back online, but they had manifested first via telepathy. Mark had heard that cry for help by the sheep pen, he was sure of it. And there were those fantastic reflexes when Jonathan caught his milk at the ferry, and his hand-eye coordination when he was coloring in the restaurant... Something was happening to the boy that wasn’t covered in standard diagnostic texts.
Suddenly, Jonathan choked, his raspy breathing going into a long, painful rattle. His limbs began to shake violently.
“He’s seizing!” said Mark.
“What should we give him?” the junior doctor asked, this time smart enough not to guess.
It was a febrile seizure, simple enough to treat but Jonathan was weak. There were medicines the fey used that worked better on children than those designed for human adults. “Start a drip with Tincture of Rosebeam.”
Mark ordered a low dosage to start and willed the fever to drop, wishing that even the smallest part of his vampire strength could flow into the child. He wanted, needed Jonathan to fight.
The drug didn’t help. Mark increased the dose. That didn’t help, either.
Come on, come on. He wasn’t sure who he was urging anymore—it might have been himself. He had to solve this.
“What else can we try?” he asked.
Another doctor had come to assist. The team began making suggestions. The X-ray technician showed up just to add to the commotion.
Mark didn’t hear any advice he liked. Meanwhile, he could feel Jonathan’s breathing slow. With a sense of mounting horror, he realized he was losing.
He’d tried the sensible. Now he’d go with his gut. He bit his wrist, and then let the blood wet Jonathan’s lips.
“That’s against protocol!” the junior doctor exclaimed.
Jonathan took a deep breath like a swimmer emerging from the depths. Pink flushed into his cheeks like a tide, and the machines above his head resumed a steady rhythm.
The steel band around Mark’s chest let go, but he wasn’t happy.
“Protocol says—”
“I can suggest a thousand anatomically inventive uses for your protocol,” Mark snarled. “Where’s Schiller? I want a report.”
“Right away, doctor,” said one of the nurses, who ran from the room.
Mark swore long and viciously. He was not letting Jonathan slip away. Nevertheless, the junior doctor was right, which only made things worse.
Schiller marched into the room, white coat flying behind him like a sail. He was a short, stocky werewolf in his early sixties, bald with a fringe of grizzled hair and thick black-rimmed glasses. He was the best blood specialist Mark knew.
“I want to start a drip of OV-negative,” Mark announced. “Point-five solution.”
“Vampire blood?” Schiller said with surprise.
“Small amounts worked before, when we were on the road. It’s palliative at best, but—”
“You gave it orally?” Schiller interrupted.
“Yes.”
“Be careful of the concentration!” the werewolf admonished. “He’s only a child.”
Frustration made Mark’s fingers curl into fists. “I know that.” And he knew the terrible consequences of Turning a child. Spending eternity in a child’s body was a cruelty few could endure with their sanity intact. “That’s why I’m giving him a low dose. Have you made any progress with the blood samples?”
“It’s as you suspected,” Schiller said sadly. “There is genetic damage.”
“Can we fix it?” Can we save him? Can I at least give that much to Bree?
Schiller frowned. “I’ll have to examine the mother, but I have more work to do first. Bring her to me in the morning.”
“But can we fix it?”
Schiller folded his arms. “You should know the answer to that, Doctor. You’re a vampire. Everything depends on the blood.”
Chapter 24
Hours later, Bree was still pacing the room, looking for a way out. Pushing aside the curtains had revealed a blank wall where the window should have been. Opening the door required a keypad. There weren’t any hidden panels, bookcases that disguised secret passages or trapdoors under the carpets. An employee had shown up to take Custard for a walk. On his return, he had dropped off her backpack, but a search of the contents revealed that the book was gone. Only Jessica’s sketches of the wedding clothes remained.
He’d also brought pasta with scallops in herbed cream sauce, a light California white wine, crusty bread, French roast coffee and crème brûlée for her, and a full kit of puppy necessities for Custard. Until she smelled the food, Bree hadn’t realized how hungry she was. Anxious though she was, she forced herself to eat for strength. The food was excellent. She doubted the vampires had done the cooking.
Stuffed to capacity, Custard had abandoned her to curl up on the bed. Bree, on the other hand, started her search of the rooms all over again. There were no windows and she was getting claustrophobic. Nothing in the place let in light or air, and she was suffocating.
Waiting for news of her son was slowly turning her to ice. When the door finally opened, it was Mark. After one look at his grim expression, Bree’s heart all but stopped in her chest.
“It’s Jonathan, isn’t it?” she said. “Tell me.”
Mark gave a slow nod. “He’s stable. I thought you’d want to know right away.”
Her vision blurred and she ground the heels of her hands into her eyes, as if she could physically push back the tears. She sank down into one of the chairs, suddenly too tired to stand. “Thanks.”
He knelt in front of her, taking her hands. “Bree.”
Her breath was coming in short, jagged gasps. I don’t want to cry. She felt vulnerable enough.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I know you’ve had a lot to take in.”
Ya think? But the voice in her head was more plaintive than snarky. “I’m a prisoner!”
His voice was gentle. “We have to go through a clearance procedure before we can let people walk around the facility. Kenyon’s doing that right now.”
It sounded reasonable, but she didn’t know what to believe. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She could see it lurking right beneath his reasonable, compassionate, professional mask—the one that was as much a part of him as the stethoscope and white coat. And where do the fangs fit in? If only those were the product of a massive hallucination!
He was wearing that long white doctor’s coat right now, but she could still see the edge of that bloody shirt above the collar. He’d been so focused on helping her son, he hadn’t taken time to change. She remembered the knife going into his side.
“Take off your coat,” she said.
“What?” His brow contracted.
“Take it off.”
He stood and did as he was told, tossing the lab coat onto the sofa. Bree’s gaze wanted to be anywhere but on the ruin of the shirt, but she forced herself to take in every detail. This is reality. Take a good long look so you know it’s the truth. “Now the shirt.”
Clearly puzzled, he complied. This time, though, it wasn’t a quick job. The shirt was plastered to his skin in places where it had dried wet. He made a faint sound as though it hurt to peel it off.
The sight of his lithe, muscular chest rekindle
d memories of their lovemaking. Bree swallowed, a confused mix of emotions colliding inside her. He was every bit as amazing to look at as he had been last night, but now she knew what that perfect body hid.
Mark dropped the shirt into the garbage. When he turned back to her, she could see the angry red scar where the knife had been. It wept tiny beads of blood where the shirt had pulled away.
An ache throbbed in her throat. It wasn’t pity for his wound, though she felt that, as well. Everything she understood about the world had just crumbled. She rose from the chair, taking a step toward him.
“So it’s true. The whole vampire thing is real.” Her fingers touched the white flesh next to the scar. “You should have died from this.”
According to legend, he should have been cold as a corpse. He wasn’t. He was cool, but not out of the range of what she’d consider normal. Of course not, we made love. I would have felt it. Then again, she’d wanted him so badly nothing short of bat wings would have slowed her down.
When he spoke, his voice was flat, revealing nothing. “I won’t die. Not for a long, long time.”
“Aren’t you dead already?” Surely I’m not having this conversation.
“Not medically speaking.”
Her fingers slid over his ribs. No, nothing this vital could be dead. She forced her gaze upward from his admittedly fascinating chest. She thought again of the cougar, also beautiful, wild and deadly. No wonder Mark hadn’t seemed afraid of it back there in the forest. They were peers. Her mouth went dry, but was it fear or desire?
Her fingers still lingered on his skin, feeling the play of muscles as he shifted. “Not medically, but...”
“I died to the world of humans long ago.” He said the words as if he had spoken them a thousand times before, perhaps to the bathroom mirror. “I’m not one of you anymore.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“I’m also a killer.”
“You must be very confused.” She placed her palm flat against him, letting herself stroke his skin.
He blinked. “Yes.”
The single word held just a touch of sarcasm. That was the Mark she recognized. “Explain this to me,” she whispered. “How is this possible?”
He caught her hand, folding it in his own. “That’s what I need to talk to you about right now.”
“Okay.”
He picked up the coat, shrugged it on, and the moment of intimacy was gone. His features settled into the lines she recognized as his doctor face. Like one of her father’s pet actors, Mark wore a series of masks. They weren’t necessarily lies, but those clever faces made digging down to the person underneath all that much harder.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the sofa.
They sat, a few inches short of a polite distance between them.
“This all has to do with Jonathan’s illness, and Jessica and the book,” he began, almost crisply. “It all fits together like a puzzle. I’ll try to make it as clear as possible.”
The words alone made her heart pound with anticipation. A flicker of interest crossed his face, as if he sensed it. The predator. That was part of him, too—another mask, or maybe the absence of one.
“You’ve figured it out?” she asked, thinking as much about him as this ridiculous, terrible situation.
“Maybe a piece of it.” His lips twitched, but the smile died before it reached his eyes. “There was no way you could have solved it without knowing about us.”
“You mean vampires?”
“Yes. One thing you have to realize is that not all vampires work for the Company. I didn’t until relatively recently. There are others out there, good and bad.”
“What made you join the Company?” she asked, interrupting his flow.
Mark seemed to consider the answer. “There were a lot of reasons. Perhaps the main one is that I needed to belong to something. After a while, vampires retreat from the world. Eventually, the isolation catches up. I needed to reach out.”
Bree thought of Mark’s cabin in the woods. That was a retreat if she ever saw one. “Why withdraw like that?”
His face went perfectly blank. “The human mind wasn’t made to live so long. Eventually you lose too many people. Everyday things cease to mean much.”
“That sounds like depression,” she supplied.
He sighed, but it was half a laugh. “Perhaps. Or just madness.”
She wasn’t touching that one. “How old are you?”
He looked away. “Not relevant. And not what I need to talk about.”
“The puzzle,” she said, realizing that she’d been stalling. Part of her didn’t want to hear this. She wasn’t sure she could take bad news.
“This is the first piece. For centuries a vampire named Thoristand lived in the remote areas of Marcari. He was very old, born before the Crusades.”
Over a thousand years old. That life span was hard to grasp. Surely that was older than Mark? How old was Mark?
But then Bree’s attention was firmly fixed on his tale about Jessica’s book and three versions of a secret formula. She heard the pain in his voice when he spoke about Jonathan. It was the one time his professional mask slipped.
Without thinking, she took his hand. He flinched in surprise and his words trailed off. He was looking at her hand on his, clearly perplexed.
“Go on,” she urged. She hadn’t meant to reach out like that, but now that she had, she wasn’t pulling back. Her gut said it was the right thing.
He licked his lips, the first sign of nervousness he’d let slip. “The contents of that book are just the logical conclusion of Thoristand’s experiments.”
“I thought you said it was a biological weapon?”
He gave her hand a squeeze, as if thanking her for not screaming and running from the room. “It is, sort of. Thoristand was concerned that vampires were making too many of their own kind. If that kept happening, eventually there would be too few humans to support the vampire population. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and engineer a solution. He was already deep into live trials before anyone found out what he was up to.”
“What was he doing?” Bree asked, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“He was trying to create hybrids capable of beating vampires on the field of battle. Half vampires if you like. Human, but with the physical advantages of our kind.”
“It didn’t work. You beat them.”
He shook his head, watching her face carefully. “I’m a trained assassin. If I had been an ordinary vampire, that trio of them could have killed me. Vampires are still the top of the food chain, but not by much.”
A trained assassin? It made sense, but how could that not make her stomach flip over? A wave of queasiness passed through her. Now she pulled back her hand. He made no effort to stop her.
She folded her arms across her chest. “You said this had to do with Jonathan’s illness.”
Mark closed his eyes. “He tested positive for the virus.”
Shock brought her to her feet. “That’s impossible! They stuck me with a needle, too! Neither of us grew fangs!”
Mark smiled sadly, as if he’d anticipated her response. “The first formula was lethal to the people who took it. This formula is far more subtle—mild enough that an adult with a healthy immune system could throw off the virus. To you, it was no more than a case of flu. In a child, the effect was more profound.”
“But surely...” Bree panicked, words sticking in her throat.
He met her gaze squarely, fully the medical doctor now. “You must have noticed Jonathan’s eye-hand coordination is above normal. He has reflexes far beyond the norm. Probably better sight and hearing, as well.”
“He stopped talking.” Her voice faded to almost nothing.
“Probably his brai
n was busy adjusting to the other changes. There would have been new pathways to map, more information to process. Learning language could wait until all this other input was sorted out. By itself, the loss of speech wasn’t an indication of illness. It was a developmental hiccup.”
“But he is sick.”
His steady, almost ruthless gaze wavered. For a moment she saw only a man who cared. “Yes. Very. We’re calling in every specialist we know to work on it.”
Suddenly weak, she nearly fell back into the chair. A black hole opened inside her—a vast nothing, and at the bottom of it, implacable anger. The rage started to boil up. “Why do this? Why do it to a child? Why not use more of their soldiers?”
Mark put his hand on her shoulder. When she didn’t resist, he pulled her under his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Why did they do it? He’s only a little boy!”
Mark’s voice softened, deepened. An anger as deep as her own flared beneath his clipped words. “An adult and a child were the perfect pair of test subjects. No one would notice if you vanished, because you already had. When they injected the virus, you were already captive and they had every intention of killing you, so why waste their own people?”
“Dear God,” Bree breathed. She was stunned. “That’s what Ferrel meant. We were guinea pigs.”
“And then you messed everything up and escaped. Not only was the book with the third formula missing, but their experiment was on the run.”
“Good for us.”
“Best of all, you lived.” He gave her a bitter smile. “Chances are, they didn’t hold out much hope for formula number two, but the longer you two lived, the more important you became. There was every chance you might be viable specimens. They had to get you back and study the results. So they chased you from one side of the continent to the other.”
“But what about the police who lied to me back in New York? The paparazzi? The lies about Prince Kyle being Jonathan’s father?”
“Don’t ever underestimate the Knights or their resources. They want the final version of the formula in the book. Failing that, they wanted proof the second version worked. They stopped at nothing to achieve their ends, be it lies, corruption or murder.”
Possessed by An Immortal Page 20