I didn’t know if this was the test subject Jackson had admitted to getting last night, but I had a feeling she was. If so, why did Natasha’s warning to run for the door sound so sincere? She should be dead—or asleep, or whatever euphemism anyone used—for seventy-two hours straight. If that was the case, though, why was all the monitoring equipment running, as if it were waiting to chart the moment she woke? I stood up and paced, thinking, sure to keep a close eye on her.
Raven shouldn’t have been able to make another daytimer so quickly after saving me—Lars’s jealousy had made that clear. Ingesting mere human blood wasn’t enough to even out the deficit of giving me so much of his. Just because you ate carrots didn’t mean that you’d bleed carrots—there was a strange, possibly metaphysical, metabolic pathway for vampire blood that had to be followed in between.
But Natasha was unlikely to work for any of the other vampires, and Raven wasn’t the type to allow any other of his flock to gain advantage on him. I faced the woman with crossed arms. Whose baby was she?
The only thing I knew for sure was that Natasha wasn’t following in Nathaniel’s footsteps anymore—human blood-substitute tests didn’t involve turning people into vampires. Despite her altruistic claims, if she’d managed to turn someone from human to vampire in under one day’s time, she was far worse for humanity than her dearly departed dad.
I circled to the computer again and sat down, elbows on the desk, holding my chin in my hands in thought while I stared at all her monitors’ straight lines.
* * *
After three minutes of watching her not-breathe, I risked looking down at the keyboard.
HAVE I MENTIONED HOW MUCH THIS BLOWS?
I typed out, hammering my frustration with each letter.
The monitor flickered to life, showing the login screen. It would have been awesome if that had somehow managed to be Natasha’s username and password combination. My estimation of her would have shot way, way up.
A word-processing program opened and a cursor started blinking at the top of the screen.
The keyboard is monitored. Do not touch it again.
I put my hands by my sides like a child who’d just been caught. The window shrank in half and then another window opened, and an absolutely frightening face took its place.
I’d never been so happy to see an eyeless, lipless man in my life—his exposed gums and teeth made it look like a jack-o’-lantern was grinning at me.
“Gideon?” I whispered. Gideon was one of Anna’s daytimers; he’d been working for her and been caught and tortured. They’d cut off portions of his fingers, and all of his ears and lips, then gouged out his eyes. He was helpless, and since everyone else Anna knew was nocturnal, he’d been dumped on me to babysit. At the same time Gideon was there, I’d been harboring a ghost in an old CD player. This ghost—who kind-of-sort-of claimed to be Wayland Smith, the legendary blacksmith from Nordic lore, but I called him Grandfather because he seemed old and generally disapproved of everything, up to and including the dragon he’d helped me kill—had talked Gideon into taking apart everything electronic I owned, down to my toaster oven, and inserting it into himself. So now he had a webcam on his shoulder, a CD player with the light still on in his chest, and some metal fingers. Grandfather and Gideon were one and the same.
Basically he was a cyborg who was really good with electronics. He still disapproved of a lot of things, though.
Hello again, Edie. There is no microphone on your side, or camera, so this is solely one-way. Hit the space bar now if now is unsafe to talk.
The words blinked on the screen all at once.
I wished there were a camera, so he could see me smiling back at him. I took the monitor between my hands as if I was going to kiss it.
Good. Hit the space bar if it becomes unsafe, and this transmission will instantly end. Until then, read.
I leaned into the screen.
We are coming for you, but we must choose our moment. We are deciding on the safest course.
It was hard not to take to the keyboard and type in
HURRY
!
Anna requests that you continue to play nice until we arrive, knowing how hard that is for you. Your man requested instead that you should play nice-enough.
I grinned even more helplessly at the monitor, thinking of Asher.
Curse again on the keyboard the next time we can safely talk. I hope to have more information for you soon, but know that we have not abandoned you. We are glad that you are currently safe. From your keystrokes, I can tell you still have all your fingers. Good-bye.
Keystroke metrics. I had no idea how many computers in Los Angeles Gideon was monitoring right now to find me on this one, or how long he’d been looking, but I was so glad he was. Maybe House Grey and Jackson were right to be paranoid about Anna, if she was monitoring all the communications by other Thrones that she could.
Too damn bad.
* * *
I had the better part of another hour alone in the room. While I thought, I was mesmerized by the woman’s monitors, with their continual proud declaration of her un-life.
Natasha came back in two hours to supervise my blood draw. I think she was scared there wouldn’t be any blood left in the heart, and I’d botch getting it out from the femoral artery—nurses never went there for IV starts or blood draws.
“Okay, yes. Just about that deep. Then withdraw it slowly, there’s a chance you’ll run dry, but you don’t want to chase it down with your needle and hit muscle wall—” she said, watching me perform.
I levered up the syringe’s plunger slowly, and the barrel filled as I watched. It looked just like any other ten ccs of dark red human blood I’d seen.
“Okay—she’s clearly not dead all the way. Since I don’t think you’re Jesus, I’m pretty sure she’s a vampire,” I said as I handed it over. “Where’s the other test subject? What’s happening to him?” There was a chance that Natasha was splitting her time between here and another similar lab, machines hovering over another corpse.
“I’m holding him in reserve.”
“What happens to her if she wakes up?”
“It’s not if, it’s when.”
I frowned at her. “Three days, right?”
Her lips pursed in smugness. “I’ve figured out a way to speed the process up.” Her voice was full of pride.
“How? And when?” How long did Anna have before Raven had another fighting member of his house?
“I’m still making my projections,” she said, suddenly coy.
“The others stood for this?” If Lars was pissed at me for sharing Raven’s blood and becoming a daytimer, how much worse would being skipped over to be changed anger him?
“The others don’t get a vote.” Natasha shrugged casually. “Only Raven’s opinion matters.”
Without the context of this room, she’d seem so … normal. More normal than someone related to Nathaniel, or held hostage, or even in love with a vampire had any right to be. “What’s a nice girl like you doing with him?” I asked before I could help myself.
She blinked in surprise, and then laughed. “I’m not so nice. But he saved my life.”
“From what?” I tried to imagine him swooping in and lifting buses, and I couldn’t.
“From leukemia.”
It was my turn to be surprised. “I got it when I was young. My dad tried everything to save me, but—” She shrugged, indicating how hopeless modern medicine sometimes was. “When science couldn’t help, he tried other things, and that’s when he found Raven.” Her lips parted slightly at the mention of his name. “He saved me, just like he saved you. Only I was fourteen.”
“Whoa.”
She nodded. “My father worked for Raven after that. I hadn’t gone to school in a while because I was always sick, so he had me help him in his lab, and taught me everything I needed to know. And I used to stay up every night, making western blots, hoping Raven would return.”
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be turned into a daytimer as a teen. If she’d been forced to feel the same strange connection to Raven that I’d felt—it seemed like the sort of thing that ought to be prohibited, but by whom?
“Eventually he came back. He visited the lab, and my dad didn’t shoo me away in time. After that, I caught him watching me sleep. He knew that I knew he was there—and I knew that I mattered to him. I just knew.” Her face lit up at the memory. It was taking all my strength not to cringe.
“Around that time, my dad started moving us around. But Raven always found me. And then my mom died in a car accident, and my dad decided it was Raven’s fault.” She shook her head to indicate how wrong he was, according to her. “Things got worse, until Raven took me away.”
I bit my lip and nodded sympathetically, while being fearful that her mother’s death was somehow the Consortium’s fault, a punishment doled out for consorting too much with vampires.
She shrugged again, a slightly girlish gesture, designed to deflect attention, as if to say,
Nothing bothers me, not the past, or the present, or you.
“I don’t get to talk about it much. The others aren’t very good listeners.”
“And your dad? What does he think?”
“He’s mad at me. I write him letters, but he doesn’t ever write me back.” That shrug again. “He loves me, but Raven and I are in love. It’s a totally different thing.”
I strongly doubted any of her letters made it into the mail. And I could hardly encourage her to write him again now, when I knew he was in the Leviathan’s belly at the bottom of the sea. She hadn’t gotten to have a normal life, between her illness and her dad—and I realized that I didn’t need my freakish daytimer strength to hurt her. All I had to do was tell her what had happened to her father, and why, and I would break her heart.
Despite the fact that we were still in the room with a corpse she’d created, I found myself strangely unable to do so, so I looked away. “Being in love is nice.”
“Yeah. It is,” she agreed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Anyhow,” Natasha said, leading me back into the lab with her syringe of blood, “ask Jackson for a watch and then come back after Raven receives us tonight. It should be near the right time.”
“Awesome. Thanks.” I gave her a kindly smile and walked unmolested toward the door.
I was so confused. Nothing about my time here was as I’d expected, and I found myself actually feeling
sorry
for Natasha. I couldn’t believe I’d just been nice to someone who was a serial killer. Again.
I walked down the tunnel until I reached the first turn and then sat down on the stone.
Concentrate on the good things, Edie.
First off, I was away from the potentially hungry pre-vampire, yay. Asher. Anna. My engagement necklace. There was a prisoner hidden away somewhere who was willing to help me. I had all my fingers, as Gideon had so aptly pointed out.
And you’re still stuck with me, baby.
Things were bad, but they could definitely be worse.
I wished I could feel happier about that, though. Every time I closed my eyes I saw an image of that woman’s wired corpse.
I knew how economies of blood worked—that was why House Grey was scared of Anna. She was a living vampire, born one as the child of two daytimer servants, and she could produce infinite amounts of blood, due to some combination of genetics, magic, and, for all I fucking knew, alchemy. But I’d been led to believe that the metabolism of all the other vampires on the planet worked much more slowly, providing a natural cap on the population, because vampires could only share their blood irregularly with servants, and changing a human into a vampire required a lot of it.
So why was Raven letting this random woman—someone who’d just been cornered and caught last night at the bar—cut ahead of Lars? And how’d he managed to do it after giving so much of his blood to me?
No answer to those questions could possibly be good. Anna might be on her way here … but it might not be fast enough. I might still have to find the prisoner. I wondered if the fries I’d left in my bag with the Shadows would taste like sorrow, or cyanide, or if the Shadows might have taken the taken the fries with them, fashioning them into a crude raft to hold above their heads as they crawled back to hide underneath Celine’s bed.
Your mom is not crazy, baby. Just a little stressed out right now is all.
I heard footsteps and stood immediately—I didn’t want anyone else to see me and think I was weak. I was surprised when Jackson rounded the bend, as was he. “Is Natasha still alive, too?”
“Yep.”
“Things go okay?” Which was as close as he could come to asking what he really wanted to know.
“Hunky-fucking-dory.” I was really going to have to work on not cussing in the next eight months. “Natasha said you should get me a cell phone, flashlight, and watch.”
“No, no, and maybe. Why?”
“So I can be on time for science.”
“Where science is…,” he prompted.
A creepy speed-vampire-creation program?
I inhaled to tell him, and then we felt it together, the release of nightfall. I had to remind myself that it was winter outside; night was still the majority of each day.
Jackson broadly shook his head, and I nodded understanding. We’d talk later—and by then, I might know more.
* * *
We walked to Raven’s war room together, and were the first ones there.
Lars was next, in a crisp business suit again. He had to be the most fashionable bookkeeper/drug dealer in Los Angeles. Wolf rolled in, and Jackson moved to his side.
When Estrella entered, she was as glamorous as when she’d begun her shift last night. I had no idea how she managed to do her hair so fast after getting up—maybe she set it on rollers before she died in the morning? Her orange hair was pressed down in sleek waves, covering half her face, swooping down so that the lowest curl of it hung underneath her left breast, and the cream-colored satin beaded dress she wore draped down to the ground. She looked like an otherworldly Jessica Rabbit, until her eyes focused, hawk-like, on something behind me.
I turned to see Celine trotting in on impossible heels. She’d outdone herself. Her hair was down around her shoulders in chunky waves, her makeup was perfect, and her eyes were sparkling with life as her hips rolled when she walked by. She looked like she was out to have casual fun tonight, like someone on the far side of a welcome divorce. I knew everything about her appearance was preplanned and intentional, but so far she was the most lively-looking person here, and Estrella
noticed
.