Eight
A stop at home provided me with a change of clothes, a quick breakfast, and a café mocha.
I called Gayle, but she wasn’t answering her phone, and I figured she must still be in quarantine with the rest of the pack. Worried as she was about Deric, she wouldn’t have left him to detox alone.
The trip to HQ was, as always, convoluted, but it had decided to be at the base closest to my apartment, for which I was thankful. I wanted to brief the team on what I knew, find out what they had learned, and then get to Abbott’s and reclaim Lisbeth before she slipped our collective memories again.
All the screens were lit, minus hers, when I entered HQ, and Bishop tossed me a chocolate donut with rainbow sprinkles from a box emblazoned with a familiar logo.
Ambrose swooped around the hand holding the pastry until I took pity on him and dropped it into the void while no one was looking.
Much to my amusement, my chocoholic tendencies were definitely rubbing off on him. I just hoped the reverse wasn’t true of his murderous ones.
“I have the preliminary report on Faete,” Reece said without preamble. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Hit me.” I stole another donut and ate it before Ambrose guilted me out of it too. “How bad is it?”
“The cleaners’ database pinged on a match for the primary component.”
The best thing about the cleaners had to be their expansive database. Thanks to their in with all factions, it collated historical data on every crime involving supernaturals within city limits. Bishop nicknamed her DORA, and it caught on, but I had no idea what it meant, and still no one would tell me.
Jerks.
“That’s good, right?” I took a delicious bite of a third donut Bishop forced on me when he noticed my hand was empty. “That means we’ve come across it before.”
“It’s Martian Roach saliva.”
The dough in my mouth soured, and I spat it into the trash can before treating Ambrose. Again. Much more reinforcement of his bad behavior and he might begin to think disobedience paid in sprinkles.
“All those people were getting high off roach drool?” A full-body shudder racked me. “That is so gross.”
Martian Roaches were a magically engineered cross between the common roach, Periplaneta americana, and the parasitic emerald wasp, Ampulex compressa.
The natural order was the parasitic emerald wasp stung the common roach, laid an egg on its abdomen, walled it up in its lair, and the larvae fed on the roach. The first sting, they aimed at the roach’s thorax. It contained gamma-aminobutyric acid, taurine, and beta-alanine.
Not that I knew what any of those were, but they sounded bad.
With the roach’s front legs paralyzed, it was helpless to escape before the wasp stung it again, right in the brain. The neurotoxic cocktail blocked key receptors responsible for complex movements such as walking. During the process, the host showed no signs of pain or discomfort as it was eaten alive.
The twist with Martian Roaches was they skipped entombment, overtook their incapacitated hosts, and wore their skins for a period of time before the corpse started decomposing. That was the main difference between them and the witchborn fae coven. The Martian Roaches had a shelf life, but a skin hung in the coven’s closet was an outfit they could wear again and again. Forever.
“What’s the endgame here?” Bishop leaned back in his chair, and it squeaked. “Why dose them with that?”
“Perhaps its release was more experimental,” Anca mused. “Invite a variety of species, give them carefully measured samples, ensure they’re ingested with supervision, so that everyone is dosed the same amount. Then cull the specimens. Keep a few indoors to monitor as a control group then set the rest loose to do what they will while the coven watches.”
“I could see that.” Milo shifted in his chair. “What did we learn about how it affects different factions?”
“I can vouch that it turns wargs, even alphas, into giggling children with short tempers.” I blocked out the traumatic memory of Mendelsohn tackling me in the buff. “There was also gratuitous nudity, but we were dealing with the Mendelsohns, so that’s probably not a symptom.”
A grimace passed over Bishop’s face at the mention of our wet warg wrestling session.
Talk about your tongue twisters. I wasn’t even going to try saying it out loud.
“Ford passed on word at dusk that inhaling the drug collapsed the lungs of several teens who were lured to Greenleaf by a coven member posing as one of their friends, a teenage girl named Krista.” I kept a level tone when I gave them a friendly reminder. “That first part was meant for Midas’s ears. It’s pack intel, and we do not share it outside this room.”
“Aww.” Milo heaped sugar into his voice. “Hear that? She’s going all momma bear on us for Midas.”
“She’s protecting our relationship with the OPA’s single most powerful ally,” Anca chided him, but she let too much amusement flavor her words. “Do we know how any other factions are affected?”
“There were others unconscious on the street and in various states of lucidity.” I leaned against Bishop’s chair. “We couldn’t exactly stop and check species without being trampled. Crescent was a madhouse.”
“Vampires got secondary highs,” Bishop informed us, shocking the heck out of me. “I saw it firsthand.”
Annoyance fizzled through me, but I let it splutter and die. He had called and texted. I was the one who ignored him. He might have told me all this sooner if I had been in any frame of mind to listen.
“Jemima? The bartender Gayle mentioned?” Bishop raised his brows. “I hunted her down, asked her a few questions. She clued me in then ditched the bar scene and went home early to, in her words, beat the dickheads home.”
That was an item checked off my to-do list. I was grateful, if still
