henri dunn 01 - immortality cure (3 page)

Unlike in fairy tales, vampires can’t turn into smoke. Most vampires can’t use powers of suggestion, either. (I know exactly one who can, and she’s got scary good psychic abilities. But she’s also living in Madrid, last I heard.) So whoever had killed Ray needed to be let in, and while Ray may have been in awe of supernatural creatures, he wasn’t an idiot. He knew the vampires of Seattle were not thrilled with Neha’s little Cure. He’d be monumentally stupid to let one of them into the lab if they’d traced it back here.

“Well?” Neha asked, still staring at bits of broken glass littering the floor. It looked like someone had knocked over some beakers.

“You guys didn’t distribute your wares here, right?”

“Never,” she answered immediately. “Ray usually handed the street substances off to Alana at a bar or restaurant. She’s our dealer. And she doesn’t know where the lab is.”

“Who does?” I ask.

“It’s a short list of people. A couple of UPS guys. I pay someone off at the electric company to look the other way at how much wattage we use for an abandoned office.”

I considered. Ray was basically a high-end drug manufacturer, and he was working on his werewolf project. That made him a big target. I wasn’t surprised he’d been murdered. I was surprised he’d been murdered inside the lab, with its strong security measures.

“It was locked when you got here?”

Neha nodded and folded her arms over her chest. She glanced uneasily at Ray’s body. “The door locks automatically.”

I turned back to Ray’s bloated corpse. The blood smelled stale and sweet. I pressed my finger into the wound at his throat. The flesh was sticky and gave too easily. Gelatinous blood coated my finger, cold in the way blood should never be unless you’re a masochist vampire who stores it in the fridge. Without thinking, I popped the finger into my mouth.

Neha gasped. I ignored her, but frankly, I was surprised, too. It wasn’t until the coppery taste hit my tongue that I even realized what I was doing. It tasted old and dead.

And then I got a flash in my mind like a clip from a bad movie. Ray, struggling with someone, being pushed into the chair. The feeling of the blade hitting his neck from behind and the pain of the sharp metal slicing his throat. I gasped, hand going to my neck. An acrid, acid taste coated my tongue.

“Are you okay?” Neha asked. Her expression was full of concern, and while I was sure most of that was for herself and the fate of her lab, I got the impression that at least some of it was for me. I wondered if she regretted what she’d done to me or if she relished it. If I was her lab rat and her interest was purely clinical.

I pushed that thought aside. Anger at her wasn’t going to get rid of Ray’s body. But I didn’t want to tell her that the blood had given me a glimpse into Ray’s final moments. I had steadfastly refused to share any of the side effects of her serum with her, and that wasn’t going to change just because of a temporary truce. If she wanted that kind of information, she should have found a test subject who consented to the experiment.

“I was just thinking that the killer probably slit his throat from behind,” I said.

“So?” Neha asked. “I don’t care how they killed him. I care who did it and why.”

I shrugged nonchalantly, but inwardly I was shaken. The fact that tasting this man’s old, dead blood could give me a glimpse into his final moments was utterly shocking.

As a vampire, drinking a living person’s blood often came with snatches of their memories, images of their pasts, and, if you drained them completely, their final thoughts before their heart stopped. If eyes are the windows to the soul, blood is an HDMI cable.

But for that ability to linger in me now was both startling and wonderful. I’d thought all the vampirism was gone from my system, burned away by Neha’s Cure. And yet, if I could still connect to someone through their blood, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. A spark of hope ignited somewhere inside me that maybe the Cure hadn’t been as thorough or complete as I’d previously thought.

The acid on my tongue burned like expired orange juice or really shitty lemon-flavored vodka. I suspected this was something my residual vampire could sense: something was wrong about the blood. Then it clicked. “Ray was high. I think he’d taken your drug, Lemondrop.”

Neha’s frown deepened. “Ray liked pot, but he never did drugs in the lab. He definitely never took Lemondrop. We had a rule not to sample the product. Everyone in the drug business knows that never ends well.”

“Can you test his blood to check?”

Neha hesitated and then nodded sharply. She put on gloves, pulled a syringe out of the drawer and bent the body forward. She pulled his t-shirt up and stuck the syringe somewhere in his behind, where the remaining blood in his body had pooled. She came up with a syringe full of dark liquid and took it back to her work space, clearing away the broken glass.

“What do we do with the body?” she asked.

Back when I was a vampire, I’d only killed about once every two weeks. Most vampires don’t need more blood that that. And if they do, a lot of them prefer to get it from various sources. Blood banks work, but it doesn’t taste great. Mortal companions are common. But so is drinking from drunks who will write the mark off as a hickey the next day, or finding some other way to get small tastes of blood while leaving the victims alive and unaware of what happened. Disposing of bodies is a pain in the ass, even if you’re immortal. Most vampires try to avoid dealing with the hassle as much as possible.

As a human being who couldn’t even carry the damn thing, the difficulty level went up a notch or two. I was going to have to MacGyver my way through body disposal.

“Do you have large plastic trash bags?” I asked.

Neha nodded and took off her gloves. She walked to the back of the lab and through the doorway to the “break room.” I followed. She pulled a box of black plastic bags from under the sink. There was a supply closet across from the break room’s fridge, next to a door to the server room, and after a moment of searching through bottles of cleaner and packages of sponges, I found a roll of duct tape.

I duct-taped bags together and laid the sheet on the floor. Then, wearing latex gloves, I rolled Ray off his chair onto the plastic and wrapped him up. I’m making it sound easy, but it wasn’t. Ray was stiff and heavy, although he’d been dead long enough that rigor had started to let up and he wasn’t as stiff as he might have been. I got him wrapped in trash bags and tape, so at least he was covered, but he was still the obvious shape of a human body.

Neha pulled out some industrial-strength cleaner that could get the blood out without leaving traces for black lights and other tools used to detect bodily fluids and then frowned at the scene. “There must be someone to call for this sort of cleanup,” she said.

“There are services,” I said. “But I can’t help you there.”

Some vampires disagree, but I’ve always believed that taking a life is a Big Deal, capital letters and all. I don’t regret more than one or two kills in my life, and after the first messy one, I never killed without purpose. I tried never to kill someone who hadn’t done things heinous enough that they should die for them. To me, part of taking it seriously and not making the decision to end a life lightly was being fully responsible for deposing of the corpses myself.

I stared at Ray’s wrapped body and considered my options. I was loath to admit it, but we needed help.

Neha and I could probably get this guy into my trunk without being seen—the back of the shopping center is an alley with dumpsters and a wall that separates it from a park. It’s secluded, making it a good place for illicit activities like moving a body.

The problem was what to do with the body once I got it out of there. I had my usual methods, but the best option was the incinerator. The problem was, in order to utilize the incinerator I used to use, I needed to deal with Cazimir. And I really, really didn’t want to.

I glanced over at the body.

I really didn’t have a choice. I pulled out my phone and stared at the name on my contact list, finger hovering over the call button.

I really, really didn’t want to ask Cazimir for help. I’d made that mistake before. It had ended with all of the vampires in his little crew casting me out for Blood Treason, a crime invented by vampires in the Middle Ages, most of whom had lurked in dirty cemeteries and crumbling castles, in an attempt to keep control over the younger, wilder vampires.

I had been turned mortal by science. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t agreed to the process; I’d let a scientist near me. That was bad enough. The existence of a “Cure” for immortality was downright terrifying to most vampires, and the result of scaring monsters was the monsters grabbing their pitchforks and chasing you out of town.

So suffice it to say, I hadn’t made it a habit to talk to him or any of his pals since they’d kicked me out and made it clear that I was very lucky they were tossing me out the door alive.

But Cazimir de Roi owned an old textile factory that he’d turned into his own personal palace, and it had an incinerator. My other corpse-disposal options weren’t great and came with a higher risk of getting caught. I hadn’t killed Ray, but that wasn’t going to matter much to human police if I was caught dumping the body. And I no longer had immortal strength or speed to fend them off and evade arrest.

I sucked it up and hit “call.”

“Hello?” an unfamiliar man’s voice answered. Of course Cazimir didn’t answer his own phone.

“I need to speak to Cazimir,” I said flatly, annoyed at having to go through an intermediary even though I’d expected it. He did his job and refused the request several times in polite but increasingly less cheerful tones.

“This is Henri Dunn,” I finally said forcefully, infusing my own name with as much importance as I could muster while standing over a corpse wrapped in garbage bags. “Put Cazimir on the phone now.”

The man faltered, clearly unsure if he should follow my orders. I didn’t even know if he recognized my name. At the speed Caz probably goes through groupies, who knew if I’d even come up in his tenure? But after some fumbling and a long silence, a familiar voice slithered onto the other end of the line.

“Henri.” Cazimir’s voice was syrupy and slick as a snake’s belly.

“Cazimir,” I said, not quite mimicking the derision in his tone. “I need to ask you a favor.” I held my breath, expecting the line to go dead.

Finally: “Do you,
ma chérie
?” Cazimir affected his usual over-the-top French accent, though I’d never seen any proof he was actually French.

“I need to borrow your incinerator.” I paused and glanced down at the plastic body-shaped blob. “There’s a body.”

“A body?” There was a pause, and then the sound of tapping, like fingernails on wood. “Fine. Bring it.”

The line did go dead then.

The good thing about Caz was that he was predictable. He liked to pretend he was in charge, a monarch of the vampires in the region. Real vampires don’t subscribe to any kind of hierarchy or government, with some outlying exceptions. No covens, no nests. No kingdoms. But if Caz had his way, he would be the King of the Undead, and in order to make this clear to those around him, he simply pretended it was so.

It was irritatingly arrogant, but it also meant he liked to know what was happening in his “kingdom.” Which meant if the Blood Traitor who’d been turned mortal by scientific “magic” had a dead body, he was going to want to know why, and curiosity would get me in the door. It just might not let me out again.

“Good news,” I told Neha, shoving my phone back into my pants pocket. “I solved the body problem, but I need you to help me move him into my trunk.”

CHAPTER 3

I
pulled my car around into the alley behind the lab, and somehow, Neha and I managed to get the corpse into the trunk.

“Should I come with you?” Neha asked.

I gave her a very dark look. Neha frowned. She was good at frowning. “Neha, they might murder me for the crime of being human again. They’ll definitely put your head on a pike for making me that way. They’ll hate you for fear that you could do the same to them. These are not vampires who miss the sunset.”

Neha swallowed, eyed the trunk like she was trying very hard not to think about her former associate’s body squished up inside it, and then went back inside.

I took the I-90 back across, rather than the 520 bridge, which would photograph my car for the purposes of the toll. It had already gotten a shot of me driving to the lab. Bad time to start getting paranoid, but at least I didn’t have to give anyone evidence of the return trip.

My car was registered to Harriet Allen, born in 1992. It was a fake identity I could burn, with the car and matching driver’s license, if needed. I just didn’t want the hassle, especially now that I was very human and my connections to people who could afford to get me a new ID and vehicle registered to match were tenuous at best. Not to mention that this name also leased my apartment and got my paychecks.

Cazimir’s old textile factory sat on the edge of Pioneer Square, on the inland side, near where the lumber mills used to stand back when Seattle was first becoming more than a supply port for the Klondike Gold Rush. I was pretty sure Cazimir had owned it since then. I was also pretty sure he’d come to Seattle when it was new territory to the white people who were quickly displacing the indigenous population, since it meant the odds were greater that vampirism had not yet spread to that corner of the world, leaving him free to crown himself king. Of course, as the city developed and other supernatural beings moved in or showed themselves (the native tribes were not strangers to paranormal creatures), Cazimir’s self-appointed title had lost most of its power when people refused to play ball.

Herding vampires is harder than herding cats. Getting them united behind a leader is rare and doesn’t usually last long. Oh, sure, it happens, especially when vampires are forced to band together or under the influence of a very charismatic personality, but it’s usually short-lived. On the whole, vampires don’t like rules or constraints, and they don’t like being told what to do.