Book of the Dead: AESLI-00: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 1)
Page 19
“It was just some kissing and a bit of finger action our first day,” Sev winced, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
“I got a blowjob,” Ryan said, trying to play it off by shrugging but he looked— he looked so uncomfortable, maybe even ashamed. “She said she was 18.”
“Oh, no!” Kane exclaimed, holding up a hand. “No, please don’t think— this is not a criticism, not by any stretch. No, it’s good. Your willingness— it will help!”
I think Sev was going to puke if she kept talking, so I joked, “Sounds like age of consent isn’t really a factor, Ry. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I gotta know who,” Spider said, and I knew was killing him to sound that eager.
“Bella Zubeck,” Ryan bragged, his tone a little forced but Kane bought it, beaming at him.
“Alexa something,” Sev muttered. “I don’t know her last name.”
Kane looked perplexed then brightened. “You mean Alessa Jackson? She’s quite beautiful,” she said approvingly. He smiled tightly, and I hope she thought his embarrassment was from the name mixup. Everything about this was so clinical and manipulative— to even consider using Azzie like this…
I think every one of us felt unclean at that moment.
“But from here on out,” she continued, oblivious, clicking to advance the slides to one containing a picture of Azzie that was throwing me off, and I couldn’t figure out why, “I think you’ll agree with me that all other girls will have to be off limits for the time being. At least I hope you will.”
The picture appeared to be a candid shot taken as she was walking through the hospital, her headphones on, a small smile crooking up the side of her mouth as she approached her safe space, Mouse’s lab. I stared at it, trying to place what was off, then everything clicked.
Her name… God help us all, her name!
“Aesli Azrael Vokaty, who you know as Azzie, is a very important girl,” Kane paused, giving us a moment. I couldn’t look away from her picture, from that smile, hearing strangled gasps and muffled curses as everyone processed what Kane just announced like it wasn’t the most goddamn earth-shattering thing she could have said.
“Aesli?!” Jason choked out, and she beamed at him. “As in— as in AESLI? As in the vaccine?!”
She fucking giggled.
“I see you’re starting to understand,” she grinned, so fucking pleased with her big reveal. “When we started producing the vaccine, it seemed like a reasonable naming convention given the circumstances. But I’m jumping ahead. Yes, Aesli Azrael Vokaty, born in Detroit, Michigan, almost eighteen years ago. Her family moved to Salem when she was five to live closer to her mother’s family, and her younger brothers were born here at the hospital. At age eleven, she began exhibiting symptoms of a rare blood disorder, often classified as a type of cancer, called polycythemia vera. Aesli’s bone marrow produces red and white blood cells at an accelerated rate, but her platelet count is almost dangerously low. It’s one of many features of her disease that set her apart, but that’s probably a little too scientific for this room.”
Condescending-fucking-bitch.
She continued, oblivious. “It’s generally accepted that JANUS-23’s patient zero was an oil executive visiting Alaska to evaluate the newly opened drilling grounds, and everyone knows about the unfortunate coincidence with the cruise ship, but some of the fallout was kept out of the media as it might have sparked a dangerous panic in the general public. One of the passengers was a teacher from right here in Salem, on his honeymoon. He and his wife flew home from their vacation, asymptomatic during the two week incubation period it took for the viral load to build, and during that period they managed to infect everyone they came into contact with on the airplane, in the airport, and at home, including an entire junior high school and the assisted living center where she worked. The outbreak here in Salem was… it was extensive. With smaller outbreaks developing across the country, by the time the CDC realized what was happening here, half the town was dead and the other half was well on its way. The town was placed under complete quarantine, the Army and National Guard setting up a perimeter in an attempt to contain it, but at that time we hardly knew anything about the virus and it was already too late. Not to mention that the other passengers on the cruise had spread out around the globe… but that’s all common knowledge.”
Common knowledge, maybe, but every person in the room had been living through the horror of the pandemic, no one coming through unscathed, and her cavalier attitude was so… off-putting. It was all just anecdotal to her, she had no empathy whatsoever.
“What isn’t common knowledge is that Salem had a survivor, a young girl with a rare blood disorder who somehow managed to survive despite the almost 100% fatality rate at that point in the disease vector. I won’t get into specifics—”
She had no idea what those specifics were. Azzie— she keeps things in, I’d seen it already. She’s capable and independent; she’s self-contained to the point of shutting out everyone around her. Whatever this woman believed about Azzie and her survival, I knew with absolute certainty that she had no real understanding of what it was really like.
Azzie may have survived the virus, but she still experienced all the same agony, fear, and suffering as anyone else who didn’t manage to outlast the infection. Not only that, but she lost everyone she loved, everyone she knew. Everyone… everyone except Mouse. That— there was something there, I knew it. Mouse was somehow involved, but I would bet anything including my life that Kane wouldn’t acknowledge her part in it.
I’d tuned Kane out, but my attention snapped back. “—and those brilliant scientists discovered that her blood could be used to produce a very effective vaccine as well as a treatment for those already infected. Given the nature of her disease and need for therapeutic phlebotomies, it was a perfect juxtaposition of supply and demand.”
Spider met my eyes and shook his head frantically, telling me that my reaction was not very well contained. I took some deep breaths, counting to ten, then again, trying to wrestle it back under control all while boiling with rage as the pieces fell into place.
I understood now why Azzie wasn’t being treated with medication.
Why she has a fistula and multiple buttonhole insertion points like a patient on dialysis for a decade, and willingly puts herself through almost daily phlebotomies.
Why she carefully monitors and controls every aspect of her life.
Why she keeps people at a distance, why she doesn’t talk about herself, why she doesn’t trust anyone, and why she’s so fucking alone.
“You’re using her,” I choked out, swallowing back the dark tar of my hate. “You don’t give her medication to control her disease so you can use her blood—”
“By her choice!” Kane barely raised her voice, radiating self-righteousness and outrage at my accusation. “She follows the treatment protocol willingly—”
“AND WHY IS THAT?” I exploded, springing to my feet, looming over her as I jabbed my finger in her face to punctuate my words, “You’ve manipulated her guilt, her feelings of responsibility, just like you manipulated—”
“ENOUGH!” Spider had rounded the table and was dragging me back away from her, muttering under his breath all the ways I was fucking everything up as the others began their own protests in a smokescreen, pretending horror at being injected with her blood, disgust at the process, throwing out everything they could to buy me time to get under control. “We need a break,” Spider called out to Kane’s assistant, “My brother has felt sorry for that girl since the first day in the lab, he needs a few minutes to process this— please!”
“I think that sounds like a good idea,” her assistant said, ushering a still arguing Kane from the room. He pulled the door shut, and Spider backed me into a corner out of the view of any of the windows, interior or exterior.
“Get your motherfucking shit together,” he hissed at me, but his hold was closer to a hug than a restraint. “Get it together or we can’t h
elp her.”
“You don’t understand,” I cried, my voice crackling, “you don’t know what this is doing to her. You don’t see her with Mouse, you don’t see the motherfucking hopelessness. She calls herself a cow… I finally get the joke… goddammit, we fucking milk her.”
“The day I met her,” Sasha said calmly from over my brother’s shoulder, “she slept through the class we shared while the teacher looked at her with sympathy and didn’t say a word. Jason touched her neck and she had a panic attack, clawing at her skin as though bugs had tunneled underneath it. When she passed out in my bed, I sat in the room with her working at my desk with loud music playing, reading, watching a movie at regular volume… making sure she was still breathing because sometimes I just wasn’t sure. Seventeen hours, that’s how long she slept in my bed, nothing waking her up. And to be really fucking honest right now, I still haven’t washed the sheets so that I can breathe her in every time I lay down.”
“Her joints hurt all the time, she can’t move very fast. I carry her bag for her, watch out for her in the halls,” Jason shifted in his seat, blushing. “As much as I can, as much as she’ll let me. Everything is difficult for her, and no one gives a shit.”
“Sometimes she gets disoriented, fuzzy-headed,” Sev added. “Teachers call on her and she doesn’t notice, and they just go on to the next person. No one ever asks if she’s okay or needs help.”
“She’s tired all the time, and lives off smoothies because she has problems digesting regular food,” Luka scowled.
“People fuck with her,” Ryan growled. “They talk shit about her… at least they used to.”
“We know what this is doing to her,” Spider said, looking me in the eye, soothing the agony inside my gut. “We see her every day too.”
“This has to stop.” I don’t know if I was telling him or begging him.
He nodded. “It’s going to stop,” Spider said with finality. “Now that we know.”
“Let’s get through the rest of this bullshit and get out of here. My skin is crawling.”
It went quickly after that.
Kane and her assistant returned, both of them agitated and rushed like something was going on.
She shuffled through the rest of the slides, explaining our objective: we had about a year for one of us to impregnate Azzie, ideally with twins or more. This round of the study had a two year limit, and if a pregnancy that could be carried to term wasn’t well-advanced within that timeframe — at least in the third trimester — we’d be released to return to our homes and a new round of recruitment would take place with a broader age range.
We asked a few questions, and her answers were terse and abrupt. As soon as they could, we were dismissed, cell phones returned, and we were escorted to the lobby of the hospital. Maybe it was just because our eyes were newly opened, but the whole place seemed slightly more sinister, every person we passed on edge, eyeing us suspiciously.
I left them to go to the lab, needing to talk to Mouse and hoping to intercept Azzie. We made arrangements to meet at our place — all of us, including the Callises — as soon as we found Azzie. I’d bring Mouse too, if she was willing. Maybe even if she wasn’t.
As I walked the endless corridors, I thought about the one bright spot in the whole meeting, the one part that amused the fuck out of me: Kane believed, with absolute certainty, that Azzie would never suspect or figure out what was going on.
Azzie was suspicious from the moment she laid eyes on me. She knew in a hot second that something was going on, she knew the moment she saw Spider that it was no coincidence we were all multiple births. And she knew it had to do with her, she just didn’t know how.
God help me, I didn’t want her to know either. Finding out we were brought here to seduce and impregnate her would crush her, she’d probably never trust a single one of us again. But how could we keep this from her? And even if we tried, how long before she figured it out on her own?
Beyond all that, there were a lot of things that Kane conveniently glossed over, such as why? Why get her pregnant? Why twins?
The only answers I could come up with on my own filled me with a sick horror, and I needed my brother to talk me down from this, to give me some other possibility. I needed someone to remove the images of a row of cribs with little babies stuck with needles, their blood draining into collection bags, of little girls being used to procreate another generation of donors the moment they reached puberty. Of little boys used like stud bulls.
As I fought my way back from the overwhelming need to carry Azzie away and let the world burn to the ground in our wake, Mouse’s text message nagged at me: JAK2.
What if they figured out how to trigger PV?
End Of Book One
Acknowledgments
Nothing is written in a vacuum, current events and the times we live in always have an impact, and obviously this is no different. I began developing the characters and plot when the coronavirus was still something strange going on in Wuhan Province, and at the time, writing about a pandemic and vaccines seemed pertinent. Serial killers, monsters under the bed, zombie apocalypses, or alien invasions are nothing compared to a virus, and we should all be arming ourselves with every weapon in science’s arsenal.
I tried to imagine a world post-post-pandemic: COVID-19 happened, then a few years later (in 2023), a much more serious and deadly virus (JANUS-23) emerged. Four years after the initial outbreak seemed like enough time for things to settle, for the new world order to emerge. I made notes on what I thought would happen over time, in documents named things like “My Neighborhood, One Year In” and “Course of Outbreak.”
Many of my predictions seemed absurd, dramatic, over-the-top, and unbelievable. At the time I started writing, we were worried about toilet paper shortages, and rolling our eyes at every commercial starting with “in these unprecedented times…”
Didn’t take long for things to change. And now? Holy. Fuck.
This is ultimately a Romance with an HEA, and reality is Horror. I’m trying really hard not to cross genres, but gotta say… it ain’t easy. It’s challenging to resist writing about all of the agonizing, heartbreaking, rage-inducing things that are happening every single day, but that’s not this story.
There are a couple people that need to be thanked for their help. For beta reads, feedback, support, encouragement, and generally just being awesome chicks: Tori Clark, Nicole Casterline, Kaitlyn Gainey, and Anne Vandermade.
For beta reading and mad skillz with her red pen, Michele Patten of Patten Proofing shined this until it sparkled.
Roxie Turner, my ride-or-die bish, keeper of all my plots and twists: none of this (including the cover) would be possible without you.
And finally, Dave: I can’t believe you still put up with me. Seriously. I’m a monster.
Book 2, Book of the Damned: A-E5L1-01-00, should be out soon.
Stalk me on Facebook: https://bit.ly/FB_VESPullen
Playlist
Act Nice an’ Gentle on Spotify: https://bit.ly/BotDPlaylist
Far From Any Road - The Handsome Family
Dodged a Bullet - Greg Laswell
Voodoo - Godsmack
Sex Type Thing (2017 Remaster) - Stone Temple Pilots
Very Nervous and Love - J Mascis
Somewhat Damaged - Nine Inch Nails
Act Nice and Gentle - The Black Keys
Could Have Been Me - The Struts
Judas - Lady Gaga
Dead Souls (from “The Crow” Soundtrack) - Nine Inch Nails
So Real - Jeff Buckley
Aneurysm (B-Side) - Nirvana
Video Games (Remastered) - Lana Del Rey
Control - Halsey
Do I Wanna Know? - Arctic Monkeys
The First Vietnamese War - The Black Angels
Kill the Medicine Man - Ron Gallo
Dirty Boots - Sonic Youth
In the Year of the Wolf - Motörhead
Circles - The Soft Moon
Love
My Way - The Psychedelic Furs
1969 - The Stooges
Devotion - Charisma, Peanut Butter Wolf
None Shall Pass - Aesop Rock
We Have Candy - Die Antwoord