The Turn: The Hollows Begins With Death Page 6

  “You should just let the humans kill themselves,” Orchid said as she flew to her stash of nectar behind the TV. “The world would be a better place without them. It would be cleaner, for sure.”

  Kal sat up, buoyed by his predictions but still feeling the sting of having to leave Orchid. “No. A world without humans, or even with too few of them, would be a disaster.”

  “For you, maybe.” The small pixy flew back with a cup she’d made from the carapace of a large ant. “But not me. They need too much room, too many resources. We’re pushed into smaller and smaller spaces to avoid them. There’s nowhere left to be pushed. If there were no humans, we could come out of the closet,” she said in satisfaction. “We all could. Witches would let us in their yards, I bet.” She looked wistfully to her garden, thriving but limited because of the salt and heat. “They might even keep the birds out.”

  “Inderland needs humans,” Kal said, his thoughts on what to bring and what to leave. Setting his beer aside, he stood.

  “I don’t,” Orchid grumbled.

  “Yes, you do,” Kal said, voice loud as he went into his room. “We all do. That’s why the enclave is treating this so seriously. Fewer humans means vamps would be tempted to prey on witches and Weres. They wouldn’t tolerate that, and we’d have another underground war.”

  Kal stood in his room and frowned at the double bed. He’d been sleeping alone in it for the last few months, but it hadn’t always been so. Orchid insisted she didn’t mind the occasional visitor, but they all left with blisters caused by pixy dust. I’m not sterile, am I? Grimacing, he flung his closet open. If he could not engender children, even ones who never survived to term, his voice would never hold weight, especially if his family’s millionaire status was in danger.

  Orchid followed him, sitting on the lampshade to sift a blue dust that pooled on the table. “My people thrived in the Middle Ages,” she said, oblivious to his dark thoughts. Their higher populations and rare sightings were probably how pixies and fairies had made their way into fairy tales. Fortunately, there hadn’t been a way to preserve images back then.

  “Mine didn’t.” Kal looked at his suits, taking only one to hang on the back of the door. It would be easier to buy new. The ties, though, he gathered down to the last and draped on the bed. “We need the resources that a large population brings: advancements in technology, medicine, a higher standard of living. You like your sprinkler system, don’t you? The electric wire that helps keep the cats out?”

  She nodded, and the light brightened as her dust hit the bulb. “I’d like a family more.”

  “I’d like that, too,” he said softly as he cleaned out his sock and underwear drawer. “If I could, I’d give you an entire field surrounded by a forest.” Orchid didn’t need him, but only now, faced with leaving her, did he realize how much he needed her. Even his colleagues did little more than tolerate him. Some of that was probably his fault. Hell, it was probably all his fault. He held too tightly to his pride, but it was all he had left. He’d known his parents had been strapped lately despite the show of wealth, but until today, he hadn’t known why.

  The light dimmed as Orchid grew depressed. “Six months is a long time to be gone,” she said softly, and Kal pulled his golf bag from the back, silently weighing the trouble of bringing it with the hassle of buying new clubs. Finally he took out his three favorite clubs and a putter, setting them on the bed before putting the bag back.

  “Can I come with you?” Orchid said suddenly, and Kal jerked, shocked. Emotion washed through him, honor, perhaps, that she valued his friendship as well.

  “Are you serious?” he asked, and she flushed. “You’d leave your garden?”

  She beamed, the light under her going almost painfully bright from her dust. “For the winter?” she said, giggling. “Why not?” Her mood dulled. “For everything I’ve done to it, my garden won’t come alive.”

  Kal’s smile faded as he glanced out the patio window, thinking the yard was beautiful. Beautiful, but empty.

  Wings clattering, she flew a blue-dusted path to him, hovering between him and the view. “If we go out there slow, stop at rest stops and stuff, maybe I could find a husband.”

  Kal nodded, a hint of melancholy brushing through him at her need to search for another of her own kind. “That’s a great idea,” he said, though if she found a pixy buck to settle down with, she’d likely abandon him rather than return to the garden she’d made.

  “Don’t make such a face,” Orchid said, clearly able to read his moods. “I don’t think there are any bucks left to find.”

  He forced himself to smile. “Nonsense,” he said as he turned back to his closet. “Human’s haven’t killed them all. They’re in hiding. Not every pixy buck likes the challenge of living among humans as close as you do.” He could leave most of his clothes, but shoes he liked were hard to find, and he put four pairs on the bed, then a fifth. “We’ll go through the wild places if you like. Set out honey and leave a notice at every rest stop. I bet by the time we get to the Pacific, you’ll have a bevy of bucks trailing you, wanting to make your acquaintance.”

  She slipped a pale pink dust, her mood brightening. “You think?”

  “Absolutely.” There wasn’t much more he wanted other than his toiletries and the rack of genetically modified orchids currently taking sun on the screened patio. He wasn’t going to scrap eight years of tissue grafts and DNA splices. Leaving his work to arrange permanent funding for it was one thing, abandoning his plants to die of drought another.

  Suddenly it felt more like an adventure and less like an exile. “You finished stockpiling for winter, right? Bring it all, and you’ll have enough until you’re settled and growing more. Sacramento has a twelve-month growing season.”

  Hovering before him, Orchid looked to the garden, her face glowing. Her land was her life, but she’d been here for two years creating a place to raise a family and had yet to find even one prospective mate. Perhaps Florida had none. He’d found her in the back of a truck full of heat-dead plants someone had left on the interstate. Even now she was too embarrassed to tell him how she’d gotten there.

  “Unless you want to stay,” Kal said, wondering if she was having second thoughts. It was more than risky traveling with a pixy. It was damn stupid if they were seen. “I won’t sublet it out. It is yours.” But he knew she’d suffer if he left her. Pixies weren’t naturally loners. Neither were elves.

  “I want to go,” she said again, her flash of worry vanishing behind a quick smile. “When do we leave?”

  Anticipation filled him, unexpected and heady. He’d have to work at a human-run facility with a woman he could hardly stand, but with Orchid coming with him, he felt whole. He could do this with his head high, not down in shame for failure.

  “Is morning too soon?” he asked, willing to give her all the time she needed. “I’d like to get some miles behind us right away. The sooner we leave, the slower we can go.”

  She took to the air, her dust a bright, happy silver. “Morning is fine. It won’t take me but a few hours to move my winter stores. Can I stash them in one of your orchid pots? You’re taking them, right?”

  He nodded, sure he had a cardboard box in the carport. “Of course. I can move your entire flowerpot if you like.”

  She clapped her hands, spinning where she hovered to make her dress and hair fling out. “I’m going to find a husband!” she cried, then darted out and up the flue and into the garden.

  Kal couldn’t help his smile of prideful happiness that he could do this for her. He had long since seen his own people’s faltering mirrored in hers, and knowing she was happy, even if she found a mate and left him, would be a calm spot in his fractured moods.

  Unlike his species’ decline, the pixies’ was a direct result of human activity. There were simply not enough wild places left for a small Inderland species forced into hiding and unable to mimic humans. It was a shaky balance, but the more humans there were, the happier the vampire
s were and the easier it was for the population of witches and Weres to integrate seamlessly. They’d had enough practice, having walked hand in hand with humanity through the ages since before Jesus, and yes, rumor had it he’d been an Inderlander. Never before, though, had any species had the ability to end not just its own people, but all of them.

  Kal reached under his bed for his largest suitcase. It was dusty, and he brushed it clean before filling it to find he had room to spare. Pleased, he put in two more pairs of shoes and zipped it shut. No one would thank him for letting the humans die out from a virus of their own making. He’d go to Sacramento and make sure Trisk’s virus was everything she said it was. Fixing what she missed would put his name on her research. He’d make sure of it. Ulbrine had given him a chance to earn a career that would increase his opportunity to find a productive wife, or at the very least, the higher salary that would pay for fertility treatments or the gene therapies just now being developed.

  What could go wrong?

  5

  Trisk rose from the fertilizer-stained cement walk, wiping the growth substrate from her fingers onto a rag tucked into her lab coat. A stiff, artificial wind blew dry air over the sturdy tomato plants as she stretched her back in satisfaction. The leafy, tart-smelling greenery spread nearly a quarter acre under artificial light, healthy and strong. It would be cheaper to have her largest testing field aboveground, but after the Cuban bioweapon crisis, legislation forced all true-breeding GMO research into facilities that could withstand a 747 hitting them.

  This would be the last year her Angel tomato would reside in Global Genetics’ largest quarantine field, and in actuality, what was here was the seed holding the final tweaks that Saladan had demanded. Her project was making money, and it felt more than good.

  It did, though, beg the question of what would fill the perfect rows between the dirt and the raised irrigation system next year. Perhaps after she had proved herself with Daniel’s virus, an elven lab would offer her a job.

  Trisk bent over one of the ripening fruits, examining it for any hint of cracking to find only a perfect red skin. The tiny little hairs that helped retain moisture were a soft fuzz on her fingers. Her feelings were decidedly mixed. It would be wonderful to leave the clunky, labor-intensive techniques that a human-run facility was saddled with to work directly on developing her donor virus, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave the comfort of where she was, fighting only the expectation that she should be cooking in a kitchen, not at a Bunsen burner. Her reputation was here, and to leave it, even to help her people, would be hard.

  “Dr. Cambri?” Angie’s voice came across the intercom, shouting to be heard over the massive fans. “Mr. Rales wants to talk to you.”

  Trisk turned to the observation window with a grimace. She’d skipped the man’s first staff meeting this morning, and he probably wanted to nip that in the bud. “Sure!” she exclaimed, hoping the mic could pick her up from here. “Can you take a message? I’m busy.”

  “Uh, he’s in your office?” Angie said apologetically, and Trisk winced.

  “I guess I’d better get my ass in there, then, eh?” she said softly, and then louder, “Got it! Thanks!” Making her way back, Trisk plucked a tomato to take home for supper. It wouldn’t hurt to remind Rick that her work paid some of the bills when he made whatever lame-ass request he had buzzing around in his vampire-infested brain.

  Wanting to make him wait, she carefully knocked the growth substrate off her field boots before slipping into her office shoes. She took the time to wash the tomato in the decontamination sink. The minimal procedures were nothing compared to Daniel’s elaborate precautions, but seeing as the Angel tomato was on the market, they were all she needed.

  Rick’s shadow loomed close to the observation window. He was smiling, but Trisk didn’t like the way he was looking at Angie, and she hustled to the door.

  “Dr. Cambri,” the man said as the air lock hissed open. His disapproving glance at her slacks rankled, and she held up a hand to shut him up for a moment and maintain control of the situation.

  “Angie, I want the field to go another three days without water. Could you adjust the irrigator for me?”

  “Certainly, Dr. Cambri.” The young woman gave Rick a lovelorn look. “Have a great weekend, Mr. Rales.”

  “You too,” the living vampire said with a closed-lipped smile. “See you Monday.”

  Never taking her eyes off him, Angie stumbled out the door Trisk had come in through and into the field. Eyebrows high, Trisk shifted to stand between the closing door and Rick. She didn’t like him watching her lab assistant. “What brings you down to the basement, Rick?”

  Rick’s attention went to her, Angie clearly forgotten. “You,” he said, and Trisk blanched as his smile widened to show his capped teeth. “You weren’t at my meeting this morning.”

  He looked better than good in the lab coat he’d begun to wear lately over his tailored slacks and crisp white shirts. He smelled good, too, sort of a dusty-book-and-wine scent. Knowing the man had made a game out of learning what turned on each of the female staff—not to mention that he’d pegged her correctly in two days flat—Trisk cocked her hip belligerently. “That’s right,” she said, offering no explanation. The monthly staff meeting had been a waste of time under Hartsford, and probably would be doubly so under Rick.

  Making a small noise, Rick turned to a shelf of reference books stacked beside her terminal. “I’m sure you heard everything through the grapevine,” he said, and she stiffened as he ran a finger sensuously over the spine of the most worn.

  “No,” she said, feeling her pulse quicken. Daniel had been in a sour mood—the little she’d seen of him. “What can I do for you?” she said, wanting him to stop touching her things.

  “Me?” He turned, shoe squeaking. “Nothing. But I need you to clear out the office next to yours by Monday morning for an incoming researcher.”

  Trisk’s lips parted. “That office connects directly to mine, Mr. Rales, and I’m using it.” Damn it, why did new management always think there was a better way to do things?

  “Your assistant is using it, not you,” he said, going still.

  The barest widening of his eyes was a clear warning at her argumentative attitude. It wasn’t that he didn’t like it, but that he did. The sun must be down. It would be harder for him to keep a lid on his instincts. “Yes,” she said, eyes down to give him space to collect himself. “But it’s connected to mine. My work is proprietary, and the security risk alone—”

  “Your work has been on the shelves and in every third-world field for over a year,” Rick interrupted. “There’s no security risk. Perhaps next time you can make a product that doesn’t self-seed.”

  She’d taken a lot of flack for that from Hartsford as well. “Species that don’t reproduce on their own shouldn’t be taking up resources in the field,” she said, her face warming at the hypocrisy. Two-thirds of the elven population was alive due to genetic tampering.

  Rick turned away, clearly struggling to maintain an even temperament as she argued with him. “We can put in a lock between your offices if you like,” he said, voice low, “but he needs a terminal linked to the mainframe, and your assistant’s is the only one available.”

  “Mr. Rales,” she protested, and he spun, shocking her to silence with how fast it had been. His shoulders were hunched and his lips parted. His eyes held the need to dominate. Trisk’s mouth went dry. Quen said to never argue with a vampire . . .

  “This isn’t a request, Dr. Cambri,” he said, inches away, his aftershave coating her like a heavy blanket to make her pulse quicken. “Dr. Kalamack needs access to the mainframe to verify that the modifications you made to Daniel’s virus will hold through multiple generations.”

  “Kalamack!” she exclaimed, her fear vanishing at the thought of the prideful snot in her office. Eyes darting, Trisk glanced past Rick to make sure the intercom was closed. “Does the enclave know about this?” she all but whispere
d, and Rick made an ugly face.

  “Of course they do,” he said, as if she was being stupid. “He’s here to assist in the patent transfer of the T4 Angel tomato to Saladan Farms, but you will give him access to Dr. Plank’s tactical virus. Everyone wants to be sure it is safe before it goes into live trials, and that means a second opinion. Get that office cleared out by Monday. Stay late or come in this weekend if you need to, but get it done. And be at the welcome meeting at nine A.M. Monday morning, or I’ll bring the party down to your lab.”

  Trisk jerked as Rick strode to the hallway door, almost looking as if he was fleeing. She knew the tweaks she’d made to Daniel’s virus were perfect. She’d checked the original code herself, taken steps to be sure the organism wouldn’t easily mutate. It wasn’t her universal donor virus, but it was clean. And Kal was coming to check it? Bullshit.

  “Rales!” she shouted, but the door had already swung closed. Lips pressed, she yanked it open and strode out after him. He was halfway down the long hallway, moving fast. Quen had told her in his last letter to never follow a fleeing vampire, but he’d also told her the enclave was cutting off Kal’s funding. He was coming to steal credit for Daniel’s work. Either that, or hers. Or both. “Rales?” she called as she ran to catch up.

  Rick spun, a savage, almost pained expression on his face, and Trisk slid to a frightened halt. “Are you following me, Dr. Cambri?” he all but rasped.