Death's Rival

A hint of amusement twinkled into Eli’s eyes in response to my sarcasm. He said, “My people? You mean the mongrels of society? I have ancestors who were slaves and ancestors who owned slaves.”

He was of mixed blood, mixed race, which I had suspected from his skin tone. Alex was much paler than Eli. Maybe they were half brothers? I brought my mind back to the conversation and tilted my head to show he had made his point.

“You’re good with Alex,” he said. “We were doing nothing but fighting about him showering.” The twinkle bled away. After a moment he said, “We were fighting about everything, actually.”

“Yeah. You treat him like a son or a soldier, instead of like a brother. He wants you to like him and admire him and love him. Maybe in that order.”

“Hmmph,” Eli said. “And you know this about families when you were raised in a children’s home?”

That could have been intended to be snide or even hurtful, but the look on his face was simply puzzled. I squelched the retort budding on my lips. I didn’t explain about my early years very often, mainly because it sometimes brought the memories back, like a tsunami, overwhelming, overpowering, visceral, and intense. With Alex’s ability to ferret out info on the Web, it wasn’t a surprise that the brothers knew about my history. “I came out of the woods at age twelve, give or take, with no language, no social skills, no nothing. I watched the body language and interactions between the kids and the adults in the home long before I could understand what they were saying. Tone and intent were clear enough even to the outsider. Your tone and body language say you don’t trust him. Your tone and body language say you are the boss and he better listen to you or else.”

“Yeah? So?”

“What do you mean So?” Men can be so obtuse sometimes. “He’s not a soldier under your command. This is family, not the army. And Alex doesn’t understand that you love him and want to protect him and that’s why you are all over him like white on rice. Tell him you like him. Tell him you admire what he can do. And back off and let him make mistakes. He’ll respect you more for it. Sheesh.” I went back to my research. Eli tucked his thumbs in his pockets and meandered up the stairs, I hoped to play nice-nice with his baby brother.

Before dark, Alex sent me an e-mail with an attachment, and stood over me with a half-proud, half-sheepish grin as I opened the document he’d sent. As I studied the file, he fidgeted, sitting down, standing up, roaming around and around the room. Without looking up, I said, “Stop. Light somewhere. Explain this to me.”

“It’s how Lucas Vazquez de Allyon is making some vamps sick when they to go Blood-Call for a date, without letting his Typhoid Mary out of his sight.”

I felt lighter, as if someone had just taken a lead overcoat off me. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Proof that Blood-Call has everything to do with the sick master vamps.”

I leaned back in my chair and said, “Okay. Shoot. Convince me.”

An hour later, I realized that the Kid had hacked into another government agency and found something in the CDC’s employee files that might help lead us to someone who could heal all the sick vamps in the nation—proof of what the plague really was, and how it had been developed—because it wasn’t something that had appeared naturally. Alex was grinning like a trained monkey, and I smiled back. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“So, do I rate a Big Mac?”

“Nope. The lady had to tell you to shower,” Eli said from the opening to the safe room. “But you did good, kid. Real good. I’m proud of you.” Eli turned back without waiting to see what effect his words had on Alex. The Kid glowed pink from his palms to his ear tips. I managed not to grin, which might have spoiled it for him, and nodded instead, my eyes on the screen. “What he said. Good work.”

“Okay. Okay, then.” Alex stood, bristling with energy, with purpose, with poorly concealed delight. “I’ll have a cup of coffee. You want one, Eli? Jane, you want tea?”

“Sure,” we both said at the same time. Eli tipped his head around the door just enough to see his brother go into the kitchen. When the Kid was gone, Eli tilted his head at me in thanks. And I realized that, maybe, we had just become a team. Turning away, I called a high-level parley at Katie’s.

* * *

Alex, showing his nerves by the way one knee jerked spasmodically, stood in front of a specially picked small group of vamps and humans. I stood over to the side, where I had a good view of every person in the group. Leo, who I wanted to stake on sight or curl up at his feet, sat front and center in a padded chair that looked like a throne. Katie, his heir, Grégoire, his second heir should Katie predecease him, Troll, Grégoire’s B-twins, Brandon and Brian, all the clan heads still alive after the battle, and a smattering of humans and servants sat or stood around the walls. The room was crowded, even with the silver cages removed and the furniture back in place, and over it all rode the half-muted tingle of power and the scent of Leo Pellissier, peppery parchment, still tainted with the faint, fermented hint of too much blood. It made me grind my teeth, and I had to breathe slowly to keep my heart rate from speeding and betraying my emotional state. The MOC didn’t look my way, to see if I was okay, or still hurt from his attack.

The room fell silent for long, awkward seconds and finally Leo turned his head and met my eyes, his own guileless and superior. Even though my brain said to ram a silver stake through his black heart, I still wanted to fulfill his wishes, the result of the dregs of the binding that still trapped me. I wondered fleetingly how bad it would be if I had no way to resist, if the binding was permanent, and not something that Beast and I could destroy eventually. I didn’t want to think about what a person would do or become if she had no will at all. Rather than do what I wanted most, I broke the master’s gaze and nodded to Alex.

He cleared his throat. “Hi. I’m Alex.” He wiped his sweating palms on his pants. “Okay. Well. Yeah. Okay.” He took a breath and launched into his spiel. “The disease is from a mutated strain of the Filoviridae ebola virus, one that can be safely carried by humans,” Alex said, opening with a bang. It was clear from Leo’s reaction that even old vamps knew of the Ebola virus. The MOC sat back in his chair slowly, as if putting distance between himself and Alex. The other vamps took a collective half step back.

“The only human known to have contracted the virus,” Alex said, oblivious of the vamps’ reactions, “was one Tanya Petrov, a virologist who worked at Greyson Labs. Two weeks after she contracted the virus, the lab was purchased by de Allyon’s company, and the victim vanished from a level-four containment facility, while under lockdown, something that was not supposed to be able to happen. Subsequent electronic forensics showed the disappearance took place between four a.m. and four-ten a.m., when there was a disruption in the digital security system.

“A few years earlier, a boutique pharmaceutical company called DeAli, owned by our head evil dude, announced trials for a new drug that was supposed to help an existing cancer chemotherapy drug locate and penetrate cancer cells with the help of a deactivated virus. This drug was never released to the general market, though it went through all the trials with excellent results and has been in production for months in small batches. The drug never got a market name, and goes by the moniker VR1389. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call it VR.” Alex grinned when he looked up, seeing all the vamps concentrated on him. To me it looked like a pride of African lions fixated on prey, but the Kid seemed immune to that imagery.

“This part is guesswork, but what I think happened is that de Allyon—whose base is the same city as the CDC, by the way—wooed some top people from them. A virologist, a microbiologist, and a couple of people who specialize in genetic recombinant studies left within the last couple of years.” He looked at me quickly and back to the room before adding, “They all disappeared, like totally, literally.” He wiped his hands down his pants again. “I think that one of de Allyon’s pet virologists or microbiologists discovered that the new cancer drug, VR, worked like cocaine on vamps, making them all mellow and buzzed. I think that after he got all his medical team together, they discovered that it also would bond with the new strain of Ebola. De Allyon kidnapped Tanya Petrov, injected her with VR, and made a vamp . . . ire,” he added, “drink from her.

“The combo of the virus and the drug seem to work like a highly addictive narcotic on vampires. They are both sick and stoned. They need more of the drug, which is available only in a virus combo cocktail. And they eventually die. Meanwhile, it looks like de Allyon discovered that a very few of his humans, who had been dinner to vampires infected with the VR combo, were able to pass along the disease and the addiction for several days before falling really sick themselves and developing antibodies to the virus. If what I think is true, de Allyon now had a disease and a treatment. If the sick vampires drank from these humans, and no longer drank from a recently infected host, the vampire would survive.”

It was a lot to take in, and I had heard it already once. The small crowd in Katie’s sat in silence. A lot of what