A Perfect Blood With Bonus Material Read online

“Do you even hear yourself? See what you’re doing?”

  Chris ignored me, but Jennifer looked disgusted.

  “Making her into a demon doesn’t help you!” I tried again, and Chris laughed.

  “We’re trying to make demon blood, stupid, not a demon. What she looks like is just a side effect of the process,” she said as she donned her gloves. They were anticharm. I could tell by the maker embroidered on the cuff. “Just think. If this works, you’ve saved countless lives.”

  I could have screamed, it was all so stupid, and I fingered the band of charmed silver. If only I wasn’t wearing it, I could freeze her with a word and Winona and I could go home. “You’ve got my blood,” I said. “Let her go.”

  Gerald stood between Winona on the floor and the opening to the stairway. He looked at Jennifer, and then Chris, clearly willing to do just that, but Chris was lost in the throes of unimaginable power, and I felt something in me die as she shook her head.

  “I have been inching forward forever,” she said as she stood over Winona. “I’ve seen the effect of this curse change as the blood did, becoming closer to actually working. Maybe with real demon blood, we’ll get a real demon. Maybe she’ll look just like you.”

  Her smile was mocking, and I bowed my head. I knew that wouldn’t happen. So did Chris. She wanted the twisting of limbs and the pain. She liked it. What was wrong with her?

  “Chris . . .” Jennifer said uneasily, but it was too late. Chris had already stepped across the circle to join Winona, and a barrier of green and black had risen, preventing any interference.

  “Winona!” I said loudly, hoping she could hear me. “I’m so sorry. Winona, listen to me! It will be okay. I’ll get you back to normal. It will be okay!”

  Oh God, let it be okay.

  “You are such a liar,” Chris said, and laughing she finished the curse. “Ta na nevo doe tena!” she said triumphantly, and I swear the shadows grew, daring to come out farther than the light confined them. It wasn’t Latin. It sounded . . . elvish? Winona gasped, then screamed.

  “God, let me be the one to stop them,” I asked as Winona made a choking gurgle and clenched under a wash of green and black. I could do nothing as she writhed on the cold floor, Chris watching in delight as Winona’s legs turned to spindles with hooves, and her head became heavy with two horns. A curly red pelt blossomed over her, and her long brown hair fell out in sheets. A black tail lashed, as long as her legs. She coughed, her voice harsh and as gray as her skin became. Tears streamed down her face, now hard with a too-strong jawbone and forehead. She was unrecognizable.

  “I will undo this,” I whispered to her, finding her goat-slit eyes and holding them with my gaze. “Just hold on. I promise,” I said, weeping with her. “I promise.”

  I never made promises. But I did this time, and I meant to keep it.

  The circle fell, and Chris clapped her hands. “Look! It worked!” she crowed, dancing out of the circle. “It was easy! So damn easy!”

  Gerald looked down at the woman at his feet weeping on the floor. “She looks the same as the last woman did.”

  “But she’s not dying like the other one did!” Chris said triumphantly. “I told you it would work!” She peered at Winona, her lips curling. “You are an ugly son of a bitch.”

  I was going to be sick. I knew it. “I promise,” I mouthed to the woman, horrified as she touched her hair that had fallen out, and defiance sparked in her. Her lips pressed down until her new canines made them bleed. She tried to stand and make a run for the unseen stairway, but she was unbalanced, unable to stand on her new hooves, and she sprawled ungracefully, her thin black tail whipping about to send her lost hair flying.

  “Get her!” Chris demanded, flushed, making the scratches Jenks had given her stand out. “Put her in the cage with the other one!”

  Gerald gingerly grabbed Winona’s shoulder and leg, and threw her into the cage when Jennifer opened it. Winona hit me in a tangle of bone and tail, and I scrambled to escape. I was too slow, and the door was shut by the time I got to it. Jennifer backed away, fear in her eyes.

  I looked at Winona, huddled in the back of the cage again. I reached out and touched her shoulder, warm and fuzzy under my hand, and she shivered as a harsh croaking came from her while she tried to breathe through her sobs. “Give me her clothes,” I said flatly. “We aren’t dogs.”

  “No, you’re demons,” Chris said, and she turned her back on us, excited, as she went to her textbook.

  “Give me a blanket!” I shouted, but no one listened.

  A warning beep had started at the monitors, and Gerald turned. Jennifer froze, and Chris looked bothered. “It’s just him,” Gerald said as a dark shadow passed under the first of the cameras.

  My head came up, and I tried to see around Gerald. Someone had shot the two vampires when Chris was freeing Jennifer—Captain America, Eloy, who was apparently good with a sniper rifle. You are mine, moss wipe.

  “Good,” Chris said, standing tall and firm beside her new demon book, a hundred ugly possibilities at her fingertips. “I want to talk to him.”

  “Me too,” I said as a man with a rifle and scope walked in.

  Fourteen

  “I see you managed to get away,” the man said, casually dropping an army-green satchel on the makeshift lab bench, right on Chris’s notes. My eye twitched, and I shifted to stand in front of Winona as the woman shook in fear and shock. “Nice job fucking up a perfect exit plan, Chris. Where’s Kenny?”

  Interesting, I thought as I took in the spare, athletic, somewhat military-looking man as Chris ignored him. He was dressed in jeans and had an army surplus jacket with a pre-Turn logo, a black T-shirt underneath it. His boots were suspiciously clean, but I could see a hint of dried mud on them, telling me he’d wiped them down recently. His hair was brown and cut close to his head. Average build, average height, nothing to make him stand out except perhaps the hard determination in his eyes and his stance, which would make me believe he was an alpha Were if I didn’t know better. No, this guy was HAPA, from his pre-Turn army boots tied with HAPA knots to the necklace of amber nuggets looking odd and out of place around his neck.

  Gerald’s face went red, and he shot me a glance. “A clot in a suit choked him to death. They almost had Jennifer.”

  “I saw. You left evidence of yourselves everywhere getting her free. Thirty more seconds, and I would have shot you both instead of the clots.” He set his rifle atop the monitors and faced me. “That is a mistake,” he said, meaning me.

  Jennifer fidgeted, head down as she subserviently moved the man’s satchel to the pile of sleeping bags in the corner and began to set up the camping cots. Gerald returned to his instruments, avoiding the rising tension between Eloy and Chris with a tired familiarity.

  “I’m not going to take responsibility if you can’t follow a simple order,” Eloy said.

  Chris looked up, pissed and still riding the high of having done that curse. “I’m in charge in the field. Not you.”

  “Sure.” Turning his back on her, he came to stand before the cage. “Why are there two goats in the box?” he said as he crouched, looking at us. “I told you, one corr at a time. God, that is one ugly bitch.” He hesitated, turning to Chris even as he crouched before us. “She’s still alive?”

  “It’s Morgan. Her blood worked!” Jennifer said as she unrolled a bag on a cot, and Eloy’s eyes flicked to mine, holding. There was no fear—it was worry laced with knowledge, and my heart pounded. He looked away first.

  “She came after us, and well, why not take her?” Jennifer said cheerfully.

  “That’s Morgan?” he said, and I gave him a bunny-eared kiss-kiss. “Shit,” he mouthed, and I smiled bitterly at him. Yep, that was the reaction I liked. “Taking her was a mistake,” he said as he stood and strode to Chris. “I told you not to put that corr on display!” he exclaimed, his back st
iff as she continued to ignore him, her neck becoming red. “This is exactly what I was trying to prevent. I told you—”

  Chris looked up, slamming her pen down and cutting his tirade off in midstream. “Either you told me a deliberate lie or you’re less informed than usual. I’m tending to go with the first because you have too much intel to not know the coven destroyed her magic.”

  “It’s cut off, not destroyed,” Eloy said, glancing at me. “She’s dangerous, magic or not.”

  Chris shifted slightly, crossing her legs at her knees. “Morgan is helpless.” She sniffed. “Her blood is good, though.”

  Clearly unconvinced, Eloy bent over her, putting one hand on her paper to prevent her from continuing her notes. “You deliberately disobeyed a direct order.”

  “I don’t work for you.”

  Eloy’s jaw clenched, and he straightened, clearly trying to keep from losing it. “This is a military operation, not your personal in vitro experiment! They’re going to double their efforts to find Morgan. That I can adjust for, but we are not equipped to move two people without losses. They shouldn’t even be incarcerated together.”

  “Relax, goat girl can’t even stand up,” Chris said as she continued to write her notes.

  Pissed, Eloy squinted at her as Gerald and Jennifer quietly went about their separate businesses. “You have seriously jeopardized the entire operation for the last time, Chris. You’re out. Both you and Jennifer. You have five minutes.”

  “Me!” Jennifer said, aghast, as she shook out another sleeping bag. “I told her not to!”

  Eloy had his hand on the butt of his pistol. “I’m calling it in, and you’re going to go back to the hospital where you belong. Using magic is a mistake!”

  Chris slammed her pen down, standing to stare at him, eye to eye. “Look at that goat in there with her,” she said, pointing. “Use your eyes. She’s not dying. The curse worked with Morgan’s blood, you cretin. As soon as we can synthesize it in quantity, we can wipe every last Inderlander from the face of the earth with one curse, and you tell me I’ve jeopardized the operation? That I’ve made a mistake?”

  One curse. That’s what the demons had twisted to try to kill the elves, and look what happened.

  “I am the science here,” she said confidently. “You are the muscle to keep the FIB and the I.S. off my back. If you can’t do that within the parameters I set, I’ll send you home and get another one just like you.” Her stance stiff, she dared him to say anything, confident she had the clout she needed. “We don’t need your kind anymore, Captain America,” she said, pushing him out of her way and sitting down. “And you know it. Military idiots who use machine guns to open a jar of pickles. We are fighting magic with magic, and for the first time we are winning.”

  Hands slowly unfisting, Eloy walked with a heel-toe sharpness on the dirty cement as he went to the cots and sat on one. He frowned, his feet spread wide as he rested his elbows on his knees and assessed me, thinking. His eyes were too bright, too clever for my liking as they traveled over me, lingering knowingly on the bit of tattoo that he could see.

  On the other side of the room, Chris confidently went back to work. She may have thought she had won and was in charge, but she wasn’t. Scientists never won over the military. When push came to shove, she’d do what he wanted or find herself dead in a hole. He knew it as well as I did, and he didn’t mind letting her think otherwise until the last moment.

  Winona was making a breathy hiccuping sound, and I took her hand, thinking it felt too thick and short. At least she had fingers. “You’re okay,” I said softly, not liking Eloy’s stare on me. “I’ll get you back to normal.”

  How am I going to do that? I thought, but she nodded, her head suddenly falling forward as she forgot her head was top heavy now.

  Jennifer finished with the last cot, her motions more sure as she started unpacking a small box of journals rescued from the last site.

  “What were her Rosewood levels?” Eloy asked suddenly, and Jennifer jumped.

  “Look for yourself, you lazy ass,” Chris muttered, head bent over her notes, and Eloy’s eyes narrowed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, all you have to do is ask,” Chris said sarcastically, pulling the data book closer and tossing the black-and-white journal across the space.

  Eloy deftly caught it, propping the book on one knee as he leafed through it. “Peaked the chart,” he said as he thumbed to the last entry. “She shouldn’t be alive.”

  “Neither should any of you,” I said. “Tell you what. Let me out, and I can fix that.”

  Chris slammed her pen down and half turned to me. “My God, doesn’t she ever shut up?” Getting to her feet, she went to stir the soup, which made me all the hungrier. Her mood was shifting now that Eloy wasn’t barking at her.

  “And the other woman’s levels?” Eloy asked, giving me a glance as he stood, book splayed open on his palm as he came to sit in Chris’s chair—still playing the dominance game.

  Expression mocking, Chris leaned over to flip back a page. “Here are her initial levels,” she said, pointing. “We haven’t gotten the new levels since her adjustment.”

  Her eyes flicked to Winona, and it was all I could do to stay quiet. Adjustment? She called that an adjustment? How about I adjust her right out of existence?

  Eloy closed the book fast enough to make Chris’s short hair shift. “Why not?”

  Chris picked up the hot beaker with a Kevlar mitt and poured some soup into a black mug. “She didn’t die, for one,” she said as she shook off the mitt and blew on her soup.

  “Thank God,” Gerald muttered, almost forgotten at the monitors.

  “We’ll get the sample somehow,” Chris finished, looking at me and sighing as if I was an errant child.

  “Way to think ahead, Einstein,” Eloy said, and she frowned.

  “You’re not touching Winona,” I muttered. I had the sudden urge to use the bathroom. This might be a problem if I kept threatening them, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  Jennifer slid the last book away and turned, smiling brightly. “Want me to dart them?” she asked, eyes going to a box on the counter.

  “No,” Eloy said, exhaling softly. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, like I was an animal he wanted to study—but one too dangerous to keep for long.

  “Yes,” Chris said, immediately countermanding him. “At least she would shut up. I thought the whining and crying was bad, but this is worse.”

  “Let me try,” Eloy said, and Chris leaned back on the narrow counter. The light from the single bulb in the center of the room made her expression hard to read. Eloy put his hand up as if asking for patience. “I’m sure I can reason with them,” he said, the expression on his face empty as he looked at me.

  “And I’m just as sure that Dorothy’s flying monkeys are going to come out of your ass,” I said, and Gerald rose with a stretch to get some soup, chuckling.

  Eye twitching, Eloy stood before me, his hip cocked as if his feet were sore. He was inches from the cage. I could throttle him if I could get my hands through the mesh. “Will you let us get a blood sample from Winona?” Eloy asked calmly, as if he was reasonable and I was an idiot.

  “No.” I lifted my chin, feeling powerful though I was on the wrong side of the cage. They wanted something. Bad enough to give a little, maybe?

  Gerald growled something, and Jennifer sniffed as Chris turned to watch, amused. “You really think asking her is going to work? Jenn, just dart them.”

  “Wait!” Eloy said, inching closer, his gaze becoming canny, as if he knew I’d been caged before and had escaped. I wasn’t cowering in the back, but snapping at the lock, and he respected that even as he thought I ought to be exterminated.

  “You stole Kalamack’s machines,” I said. Not a flicker of change marred Eloy’s expression, but behind him, Jenn
ifer’s mouth dropped open in a sweet little O of surprise. Honestly, how had she gotten mixed up with these people? My lips quirked as I got my answer from her, and Eloy dropped back a step, clearly peeved by her lack of finesse.

  “Will you ask her to stick out her arm so we can take a blood sample?” he asked again.

  I edged closer to the mesh, mocking him. “You’ve been stealing machines and living off the back of civilization like the scum you are. Moving around like this isn’t cheap, either. HAPA doesn’t have that deep a pocket. You’re a backwoods, ignorant fringe group that should have died out with the space program in the forties. Who’s funding you?”

  Eloy never dropped his gaze from my eyes, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. “HAPA is bigger than you think,” he said. “Our people are everywhere.” Behind him, Chris went back to her work and Jennifer took the second mug of soup, which Gerald had poured her. The hierarchy was being played out more clearly than if they had been lions on the savanna.

  “Who is funding you?”

  Eloy smirked. “If you don’t convince her to let me take some blood, they’ll put you to sleep.”

  Winona’s breath caught. Put us to sleep, and then take more blood from both of us. “Why are you talking to me?” I said, disgusted. “She is her own person. Ask her yourself.”

  Eloy turned to her, his lip curling when he saw her face, but I hadn’t won anything in our verbal pissing match. “Can we please have some blood?”

  Winona awkwardly flipped him off with her thick fingers, and I almost applauded.

  “Have it your way,” Eloy said, and my heart pounded as he turned away. Jennifer made a happy sound, setting her cloverleaf mug down and starting for a box.

  These people are nuts! I thought, then sighed when Winona scrambled in a crawl to the front and shoved a skinny, red-fuzzed arm through the wire mesh with frantic haste. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, but if I was honest with myself, I was relieved.

  Winona shrugged. “Ah don’ wan oo be spelled,” she slurred, her face going almost black in embarrassment as she tried to speak. “Oh, dhit,” she moaned, feeling her mouth. “Ah dink mih ’onge is ’orked.”