Blood Debts (The Blood Book 3) Page 4

  Gabriel glared at the feathers still hanging off the tear. “That’s fine,” he called. “I’m used to sleeping on the hard, bloodstained ground. Being a gladiator and all.”

  No answer.

  “Amelia?”

  Nothing.

  Damn.

  *

  Amelia clutched the baseball bat, poised next to the door in case he decided to come in. He didn’t. After a while, she heard him move away from the door. She propped a chair under the door handle just in case.

  Blood stained ground … right.

  She stayed by the door for a good long while, but then her hands started to cramp and ache. Finally, she surrendered her vigil and went to bed.

  Amelia wished she had her garden here. Nothing worked better to soothe troubled thoughts than lush greenery. She’d had a green house on Torrey, but she hadn’t had time to finish one here. The few potted plants she had in the sun room above the lab weren’t near enough to soothe her now.

  At what point had her life taken this turn for the bizarre? There were so many little things, so many insignificant choices over the years, all leading to this inevitable conclusion. Things like choosing to go to a different coffee house, rather than wait in line in the one she usually went to. She’d met her mentor there.

  Taking an interest in biochemistry. The only schools specializing in it were government-run.

  Accepting the first job offer that had come her way. Who cared if it was for the government? If the pay was good and the work was interesting, what else could she ask?

  It turned out, she could have asked for a lot more. But by the time she’d figured it out, it had been too late.

  One door closed, another opened. And if it didn’t, she crawled through a window.

  And now a suicidal squatter was in her apartment, insisting the shortest instance of freedom was worth more than a lifetime in slavery. Amelia understood. She’d fought with everything at her disposal to get her freedom.

  That was precisely the problem.

  There’d been nothing to do about Tristan, her first successful experiment in DNA alteration, except cover her tracks. Hailey had almost died, and in the process nearly exposed herself as a shape shifter. Both now had the rest of their lives to look forward to, but it came with a high price. Anonymity. If they exposed their abilities, the authorities would stop at nothing to put them under a magnifying glass. And she’d be the one forced to look through it.

  And now here came Connors, wanting to become a shifter for the express purpose of outing himself. One life among many, he’d said. Another fallacy in his argument. It was never about one person. In this case, it wasn’t even about his friends.

  If he exposed himself, he’d be putting everyone at risk. That included Amelia, and every patient and subject she’d ever come into contact with. Tristan would be first on the list. Hailey not far behind.

  Amelia was an expert at calculating probabilities. She played causality like a pro. A always led to B, regardless of C or D. It was a matter of predicting all possible outcomes and compensating to avoid the bad ones.

  There was no avoiding anything now. If what Connors said was true, and they came looking for him, Amelia was in trouble one way or another. The bastard had dropped her into the middle of a maelstrom without a life vest. He had no idea what he was getting into—what he was getting her into. It pissed her off that he was such a damn hypocrite.

  A hero and savior, sure. About to martyr himself for the good of the Romans. Right. He would only have to ruin a few other lives to do it. But who cared about them? They were no one. People he’d never met and would never come into contact with. Faceless strangers who didn’t register and didn’t matter.

  Was this what he considered triage?

  Were a few lives acceptable as collateral damage when it came to saving thousands?

  Amelia shook her head at herself.

  Connors didn’t think like that. He had tunnel vision so bad, he didn’t realize there were people about to be trampled beneath his charge.

  A always leads to B.

  It wasn’t unreasonable to assume Connors had come straight here. Like it or not, there was already a target painted on Amelia’s back. No matter what she did from now on, it would always be there. But maybe she could somehow minimize the risk to the others.

  Maybe if she played her cards right—assuming she had any—she could keep them safe.

  Amelia got up and went to the window. She pressed her hand to the windowsill. The entire bottom portion acted as a scanner. It matched her hand print to a very small database of allowable combinations and a compartment opened in the floor below the window.

  She took out the paper files and sat down with her back to the wall, using the light filtering in from the street to examine their contents. There were three files, and each one was there for a different reason. All of them were paper, one of only two surviving copies. Nearly impossible to trace, so easy to destroy.

  Some of the contents made her want to close the files and never look at them again. Amelia made herself look. In the end, they only mirrored what was already permanently stored in her memories. There was no escaping any of her past sins. She would take them to her grave.

  Amelia closed the top file and set it aside. The rest of them she placed back into their hiding place in the floor. The compartment was set on a timer, and closed automatically after sixty seconds, unless something disturbed the location, in which case it slammed shut and locked.

  The moon was full tonight. Amelia could make out its bright glow from behind a cover of thick clouds. There was rain on the night air. Probably another storm on the rise. This region was known for them.

  Rain makes the flowers grow.

  Not here. Everything within a mile radius was pavement and warehouse. People here didn’t care much for plants of any kind.

  A shame. At the darkest times of her life, flowers have always had a way of brightening her outlook on the future. Her first apartment had turned into a hot house, one plant at a time. She missed that place. And with its vast natural beauty, she even missed Torrey.

  She put the file on her night stand and crawled back into bed. There was only one pillow left. Amelia curled up with it and closed her eyes, patiently waiting for sleep to pull her under.

  Bracing for the nightmares to come.

  Chapter 5

  “It wasn’t a dream.”

  Even if she wanted to convince herself otherwise, the evidence stared her right in the face. A chair propped against her door and a paper file on her night stand. One of the ones she hoped never to have to pull out again. Amelia took her time washing up and dressing. It was almost noon, but it wasn’t as if she had anywhere important to be.

  Her stomach growled for sustenance. After a cautious peek out the door and judging it safe to emerge, Amelia went to the kitchen. She poured thick mango-peach juice over a readied bowl of cereal in the meal nook and sat down to the table.

  The ferric diamond was still there, in the same place it had landed last night. Amelia stared at it while her cereal got soggy with the juice. She didn’t reach out for it … didn’t move. Why would he leave it there?

  “Connors?” she called.

  There was no answer.

  Dare she hope he’d changed his mind and just left?

  Doubtful. A gladiator used to fighting and conquering—a good one, as evidenced by the fact he was still alive—wouldn’t leave well enough alone. So where the hell was he now?

  Suspicion. He wouldn’t… “Connors!”

  Nothing.

  He would! The bastard!

  Amelia abandoned her cereal and left the apartment, heading for her lab.

  The light was on, machines whirring and computing. And in the middle of them, Connors was on the floor, doing pushups.

  “What the hell is this?” she demanded.

  He paused mid-pushup to look at her. “Good morning,” he said. “I’m gathering data, as you scientists like to say. It’s a str
ess test.” A computer beeped and he jumped up to his feet. He wasn’t winded or sweaty and the computers didn’t register any change in heart rate.

  Amelia tossed the file she held onto her desk and stopped the functions he’d initiated. “Pushups aren’t stress,” she told him. “Don’t pretend to know what you’re doing.” He had round, pale gray patches stuck to his temples, the side of his neck and on the inside of his wrists. One of her inventions, just recently patented and rolled out to every major healthcare facility. She cringed at the blatant misuse and took his hand to peel the wrist patch off. “These are not toys,” she told him.

  “Then you might want to take back the rest of them, too.”

  His tone … was he teasing her? Amelia took off the patches on his temples and on his neck. “As I was saying,” she said, tossing the used patches into the trash can behind her.

  “What about these?” he said while her back was turned.

  Amelia froze. How much worse could it be? She braced herself and turned around. “I’m going to kill you,” she growled. He’d stripped off his shirt, revealing his handiwork. The idiot had wallpapered himself in the damn things. It looked like he put a patch over each major organ.

  He must have wasted a full pack of them! “I’m going to beat you to within an inch of your life and toss you out behind one of the warehouses. And you know what?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m going to enjoy it.”

  Connors tossed his head back and laughed.

  Amelia blinked. Okay, so she wasn’t as big and tough as he was, and she wasn’t up on the popular threat-of-violence lingo these days, but surely she wasn’t that laughable.

  “You’re funny when you don’t try to be,” he said, still heartily amused. Bastard. He took off the patches one at a time and, following her example, tossed each in the trash. Amelia wanted to weep for each one. “I was waiting here for you,” he explained, “and got bored. You got a nice lab, doc.”

  As the patches came off—Oh, God, there were more on his back!—her tunnel vision slowly cleared past them to the scars that crisscrossed his torso. There were two long, parallel lines across his back, like whip lashes. His chest had a number of cuts, most of them fully healed and old, but one or two looked freshly healed.

  “I like computers,” he said in praise. “Or I used to, before all this shit—”

  “Battle scars?” she asked, cutting him off.

  His good humor faded a little when he peeled off the last patch over his right kidney. He was looking at the same thing she was—a long straight scar that ran from his left clavicle, across his chest to his right side. To just where the ribs ended over the liver. “Badges of honor,” he replied, but he didn’t sound very proud. “Hammer strikes that honed the blade.”

  When he met her gaze again, it was almost measuring. Was he self-conscious about them? “Come on, doc,” he said. “You must have seen worse than this.”

  What she’d seen didn’t compare to this on any level. She’d treated self-inflicted wounds, and ones caused by treatment. She’d seen men bleed to death in front of her eyes before she could identify the source of damage. All of them had been dirty wounds. That’s how she thought of them. She’d felt tainted treating them.

  Connors was the first man she’d seen whose scars were a fact of life. On him, they were a testament to his strength and will to survive. At least two of his scars would have been life threatening. He’d received them fighting for his life. As a scientist, Amelia should have been impassive, looking at them. As a woman, she wanted to know how he’d gotten each one. She wanted to ask if it had hurt.

  There was another scar on his forearm. It looked like it had come too close to severing part of his limb. Amelia’s hand reached for the arm, as if she weren’t in control of it.

  Connors caught it in a flash, squeezing her wrist enough to let her know he could crush it if he chose to. It startled her into looking up into his eyes again. Don’t, they warned. Holding his gaze, Amelia reached with her other hand and pried the last patch out of his grip. He released her when he realized what she was after.

  Amelia held the crumpled patch up to him. “This is not a pulse patch.” Those had been discontinued years ago. Similar in appearance, but limited to monitoring blood flow to specific areas of the body. They were second generation medical tools, compared to her version, generation ten. And if that’s what Connors thought these were, if that’s how long he’d been out of the loop, she shuddered to think what else he might have messed up if she hadn’t come down when she had.

  “It is a multisystem monitoring patch. It has about a million microscopic connections that plug in to a person’s body and transmit vitals and system information to the computer over there. It costs about three thousand to make, six to buy. One can monitor every last detail about a person’s anatomy and bodily functions for a month.” Diagnostic applications alone were limitless. One small patch and a physician could monitor what ailed his patient for a full month. It was a breakthrough which made her a fortune.

  Connors had the good grace to look thoroughly chastised. His face flushed and he ducked his head. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Don’t touch my stuff again.”

  She tossed the last precious patch into the trash. Once they adhered to the skin, the microcomputer inside tuned into the wearer’s body. It would be useless for anything else now.

  “Have you made a decision yet?”

  “The decision’s not mine,” she said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  Obviously. “Whether I agree or not, I am already knee deep into this, thanks to your sudden and inexplicable arrival in my home. You already screwed up my life. Now the question is whether you are willing to screw up your own.” She handed him the file and took her seat at her desk.

  “What is this?” he said, opening the paper folder. “What am I looking at?”

  “A few possible outcomes to this scenario,” she said.

  The first few pages of the file were her hand written notes. Much like journal entries, except about others, not herself. She waited for him to skim through them and turn the page. After the notes came pictures. She expected some kind of reaction from him. Shock, disgust and fear were all possibilities.

  Those pictures depicted the worst of what could possibly happen to him. Fates Tristan and Hailey had avoided by sheer stroke of luck and a whole lot of pain killers. They were death portraits at their worst. People with their skulls split open and brain matter splattered everywhere; with broken, contorted limbs that no longer looked human. With fur to hide the bruising underneath, and massive fangs in dislocated jaws. People whose final act had been to reach out hopelessly for some kind of help that never came.

  People she’d killed in the name of science and progress.

  Amelia expected him to toss the file back in her face and walk out without a backward glance.

  Instead, his only outward reaction was that he turned the next page slower. He didn’t gasp, or make a sound, just frowned at what he was seeing and, without looking up, made his way to her desk and perched on the edge of it, still leafing through the file.

  When he got to the end, he closed it and placed it neatly in front of her. “When do we begin?”

  *

  Amelia was inherently a good person. It showed in every word she spoke and every action she took. Gabriel had never seen anything so gruesome as those pictures. The notes he’d come across in his search here hadn’t come close to scratching the surface of her studies. Amelia was meticulous about keeping her secrets.

  She’d shown him the file to educate him. Or possibly scare him. Odds were good that Caesar already knew where Gabriel was and would come looking for him. Amelia was right; she was already involved, no matter what happened. And despite all that, she was still trying to convince him doing this was not a good idea.

  All those people had died, as she’d warned, in terrible pain.

  But she left out the most pertinent fact i
n this situation.

  One man had survived.

  And if one had, another could. Gabriel hadn’t come this far to turn back now.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head a little, probably calling him all kinds of idiot in her head. “I’ll need to do some tests.” She glared at him. “The proper way.”

  He winced.

  “After that, I’ll need to procure several DNA samples and find the right match for your chemistry. Once I get the serum ready, it’s a matter of a few injections.”

  “How soon will the serum take effect?”

  “That depends,” she said. “I have some choices to make. The man you’re staking all your hopes on, the survivor, only began showing signs of metamorphosis after a year.”

  A fucking year?

  “However,” she continued, “some recent developments lead me to believe it is possible to expedite the process.”

  “By how much?”

  She glared. “It is dangerous, and the chances of failure go up exponentially the faster you try to achieve something.”

  “In for a nickel, in for a dime,” he said with a shrug. “What are these recent developments you mentioned?”

  “You should know that to stand a chance, there must be certain chemical markers present in your make up. It seems to be a prerequisite for any kind of success that the subject be chem-resistant.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means your body cannot have incorporated the mandatory chem-treatment administered to children in infancy.”

  “Why?”

  “The two work at cross purposes,” she explained. “The chem-treatments balance out protein production and seal DNA so it remains stable. What I need to do is open the DNA strand to introduce a new one. You can have one or the other, but not both.”

  “I see. So what do you need first?”

  “I’ll need a sample of your blood to test for this resistance.”

  Gabriel pulled a small blade out of his boot.

  “Jesus!” Amelia jumped to her feet so quick she sent her chair rolling back all the way out the door. “What is the matter with you?” she demanded.