Six, p.24
Six, page 24
Paige looked away from the painting. Instead, she focused on a row of statues along the back wall—two men, one woman, all carved out of brilliantly white marble.
“I must have touched a nerve,” Mordred sighed as he paced beside her. “So, I see you’ve found my classical collection. I suppose now is as good a time as any to show you the final set of players in the sordid tale of my life. You know of the Jaegers who want me dead. You know of my wife, who possibly wants me dead—”
“I’m not an expert on Ancient Greece or Rome, but why does that woman look . . . Asian?” Paige asked as she approached the central statue.
“The experts misidentified these as Ares, Apollo, and Artemis,” Mordred said as he paced around the trio. “My son found them when he was visiting a rather eccentric family in the modern-day Czech Republic. He recognized Apollo instantly, but he had to bring them all back to me for a laugh.”
Paige eyed the slimmer male form that had a bow on his back and a scar cutting across his face.
Mordred pointed to the gash. “They thought that the cut must have been old damage, but it’s really just an accurate likeness. That is Brynjulf, the founder of the Jaeger clan.”
“And Artemis?” she asked.
“The Jaegers’ half-sister, Su Min Lung, founder of the only family of vampires that has ever defied the Caesar’s Council and survived.”
“And she wants you dead?”
“Oh, she’s been dead a very long time, but her descendants want me dead—that’s for certain. They are also the family that weaponized werewolves in the Far East before Nadia’s mother and I destroyed their operations.”
Paige buried her face in her hands and shook her head. “Is there anyone who doesn’t want you dead, Mordred?”
“Did I mention that if you told the truth about my name to the other Pendragons that they would want me dead as well?” her hallucination asked. “So I suppose the only person who doesn’t want me dead right now is you.”
“Give it time,” Paige muttered. She started wandering back to the door and a convenient panel marked “intercom.” Before she buzzed to be let out, she gave a fleeting glance to the powerful, nearly naked form of Ares sitting in a deep-in-thought pose but with a sword and shield surrounding his muscled body.
“So who is that?” she asked, pointing to the final statue.
Mordred rolled his eyes before vanishing in the blink of an eye. “Typical,” Paige heard softly behind her ear. Paige’s eyes closed for just a second and only snapped open to the sound of a buzz. She blinked as she found herself somehow right at the top of the stairs.
She growled as she had to hurry out of the museum. Somehow an hour had passed in the blink of an eye. She ran back just in time to grab her bags before an irritated-looking watchman escorted her to the door. By the time she made it back to the apartment, Kyle was pacing, and she had over a dozen texts pending on her phone.
“What the hell happened?” he snapped as she dropped her bags the second she stepped in the door.
“I think Lorcan is an asshole,” she said as she grabbed her pounding head. Kyle rushed over and examined her as a thick stream of blood started dribbling from her right nostril. He scooped her up and carried her to the lab, where Paige promptly passed out on the table.
Paige woke up to the smell of General Tso’s chicken and beer. Kyle had left the door propped open with a plunger so that a dazed Paige could wander into the kitchen. The redhead had redecorated with a couple of large corkboards, a dry-erase easel, and a printer hooked up to a laptop with some of the plastic wrap still stuck to it. A pile of grainy photos and printed-out clippings littered the counter, along with a stack of white and red containers.
Paige gingerly picked up the WWII image of her great-grandfather. “Do I want to know?” she asked.
“It seems to work on TV,” Kyle said defensively. “I figured what better use of a vampire trust fund then a genuine insane crime bulletin board? Also, a new MacBook. I caved.”
Paige picked up a Sharpie and scribbled “Suspect number one—Great-Grandpa Steve” before tacking the picture to the far left of the board. She then scribbled “Suspect number two—Lady Pendragon,” with a terrible stick figure of a lady with long hair.
“Seriously?” Kyle asked.
“Not eliminating anyone yet. Nine times out of ten, the spouse did it in these things, right?”
“Well, the spouse did it or the jealous other lover . . .” Kyle trailed off and added a picture of Vlad the Impaler to the board. He noted it “Dracula—Suspect number three.”
“Hold on—Dracula is real?” Paige asked.
“Oh yeah,” Kyle said. “Very real, and he has been having an affair with Grandpa’s wife for centuries.”
“Is he, you know, like the legendary Dracula?” Paige asked.
“Depends who you ask, I suppose. He used to be nicknamed ‘the Impaler’ during his lifetime, so I don’t think he’s going to be up for any humanitarian awards. Hey, why don’t you sit down and eat something? You still look like death warmed over.”
Paige nodded and took a seat on one of the stools by the counter. As she munched away on a pile of lo mein, Kyle started cutting lengths of red yarn to pin between Mina and Vlad, as well as tack up a few extra photos of places and articles.
“Don’t forget the Lung family,” Paige said. “Weren’t they the ones with the werewolf virus?”
Kyle grabbed the Chinese food menu and cut the dragon off the top of the front page. He scribbled “Lung” on it and tacked it over to the right of the illicit lovers. “Lung means dragon,” he explained. “At least that’s what they claim.”
“Now we just have to sort through a few centuries of bad blood, and it should be easy, right?” Paige sighed. “Jesus, my head is killing me.”
“Yeah, about that,” Kyle said, making a rather pained face. “I’ve done more blood work on you, and you’ve definitely got a pretty significant vampiric infection going on.”
“Infection?” Paige snapped. “I’m not going to turn into a vampire, am I?”
“No, it doesn’t quite work like that. I was afraid that Grandpa risked a hitchhike. He’s in your head, isn’t he?”
Paige nodded.
“The vampire strains are all different. The more primitive ones can copy chemicals and influence people. They sort of infect someone, give them suggestions, and then get sucked back with copies of the emotions of the human victim. That’s how the Jaegers, the Lung, most of the other clans work. All that vampire suggestion crap; it’s just a drug- and fever-induced haze. The Pendragon clan is a little more sophisticated. Um, how can I put this—?”
“Just assume I’m not stupid, and we can work backward from there,” Paige growled.
Kyle started drawing all sorts of blobs on the whiteboard. “Vampires are basically a big, really coordinated colony of unicellular organisms that work together and, in my opinion, hijack a more complicated organism like a human to make a pretty disturbing hybrid creature. They kill the consciousness of the human and take it over, like some meat-suit, because a vampiric colony can’t actually survive outside on its own. Vampires argue and argue if the human is really gone or if it’s just sort of infected and transformed.”
He started squishing several of his drawings together. “Now at least one of the strains has started to combine the single cells into more complicated structures within the more complicated human.”
“The Pendragon strain?”
“Bingo! What Grandpa can do is form a sort of membrane to isolate his cells from the human that’s hosting him and be more like a traditional parasite. In effect, he’s made packets of himself and implanted them in your sinus cavities and brain, probably so that he can spy through you, if I could hazard a guess. If that’s the case, ‘Hi, Grandpa!’”
Paige’s left hand waved. Kyle noted her stunned expression.
“He’s mostly on the right side of your skull. That makes sense,” Kyle muttered. “That must be really uncomfortable for you too.”
“He took over my body,” Paige growled. “Yeah, I’m uncomfortable with this.”
“Well, your immune system is probably trying its damnedest to kill him, and if any of the other vampires find out that you’re carrying part of Lord Pendragon around, they will probably try to either kill you or torture you to get the information out of him. Not to mention the social implications.”
“What do you mean?” she asked as she shoved her chopsticks into the few remaining noodles.
“Technically, giving a piece of yourself to another living being constitutes claiming them as your own. It’s not a big deal if you’re free and unattached, but there are those traditionalists who would consider this adultery, which is breaking a vow, which in turn would be breaking one of those big four rules vampires have.”
“He’s an infection, right? What would happen if I took a whole bunch of antibiotics right now?” Paige growled, her hands shaking.
“It would probably kill him, but that would also be killing the vampire that’s looked out for me my whole life, so I would not be cool with this,” Kyle growled back. “I’m guessing that Lorcan has plans to suck that part of him right back out so he can learn everything you’ve learned and leave you unharmed.”
Paige’s left thumb shot upward.
Kyle continued, “However, having a serious infection for a long period of time isn’t good for you, and I’m sure if you get weak or sick that he will summon us home so he can get out of you.”
She made a thumbs-up again.
“Also, I’d like it on the record that since you are also infected with a particularly virulent strain of the berserker virus, it would be very unwise to linger any longer than necessary,” Kyle said, staring into Paige’s left eye intensely.
Her left hand curled into an OK gesture, while the rest of Paige seethed. She then hopped off the stool and grabbed the largest of her bags. She fished out the card for the Shredded Zone and slapped it on the counter.
“Come on; we have werewolves to hunt.”
18
“This is the last place I expected to find a werewolf,” Paige muttered as she stepped out onto floor twenty-three of a Chicago high-rise. Row upon row of putty-colored cubicles stretched as far as the eye could see as a veritable army of office drones in white shirts and khaki pants swarmed between computers, snack machines, and copiers.
A young guy with slicked-back hair, a snazzy lavender button-down, and a horse-like overbite took one look at the sweet young thing in a skirt and Shirley Temple curls and had to approach the elevators.
“Why hello there,” he said, flashing a smile. “You wouldn’t happen to be one of our latest batch of interns, would you?”
Paige smiled right back and broke out her thickest, most enticing Southern accent. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she drawled as she flipped over her temporary badge on her chest. “Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to go.”
“I’m Mitch,” he said, still smiling like a Cheshire cat. “I like to think of myself as the welcome committee around here. What department are you interning with again?”
She quickly peeked at her badge. “I’m in Sales and Marketing,” she said sweetly. Mitch peeked at her badge and lingered for just a few seconds longer on her neckline.
“What a coincidence!” Mitch exclaimed. “I’m in sales too, and I would love to have a fresh new intern under me, Miss DeMarco.”
“Oh, I bet you would,” she said, staying all bubbly as she followed Captain Sexual Harassment right back into his lair.
“What does the P stand for?” he asked as he walked her to a row of cubicles full of prominently displayed awards, all sorts of convention badges, and oversize marketing slicks for various medical products.
“Paige,” she said as a few of the other fellows in this section took a peek at her.
Mitch pointed at another slick, pastel-wearing gentleman in the far back corner. “That’s David Feldman, our domestic sales manager. It looks like he’s on the phone right now, so would you like to get a cup of coffee while we wait for him to be free?”
“Oh, that sounds just lovely,” Paige said. As they walked to the centralized kitchen area, she kept her eyes peeled for any suspicious blonds. Her phone buzzed a few times in her purse. She smiled and nodded as Mitch made small talk for a while.
“So, where did you go to school?” she tuned in just in time to hear.
“University of Memphis.”
“So you are a true Southern belle—”
She tried to focus on the vast array of smells that filled one cafeteria, sniffing for a needle in a haystack, while the sales guy continued to prattle. She could pick up faint traces of sour milk and baby powder the longer she remained near this guy, and when he wrapped his hands around his paper coffee cup, she could clearly see an indentation around his naked ring finger.
“So, what brings you to MedCentric, other than a paycheck?” Mitch asked.
Paige nodded for a good long while, trying to keep a perfectly placid look on her face even as someone across the room had terrible flatulence. “Well, who wouldn’t want to work for the fastest up-and-coming medical supply company in America?” she finally said. She leaned in and gave her eyelashes a little flutter. “And I’ve heard that everyone here is so very nice,” she cooed.
“Well, I think you are gonna fit in here just ducky,” he said with a stupid grin.
Paige caught a quick reflection in a glass door. Even phantom Mordred was gagging at the cloud of crap floating from this guy’s mouth.
She faked drinking another sip of coffee and nodded a lot until Mitch finally decided that she should do work. Paige plastered on her best smile and endured introduction after introduction, all the while entertaining herself by counting how many screens were actually on social media rather than doing real work. The Feldman guy seemed more intent on scoring Bears season tickets than anything to do with her, so Paige ended up being plopped in a cube in the back corner with a stack of fliers and a mail merge to manage. She kept her happiest face on as Mitch ended up being her ever-so-eager cube mate. Mercifully his phone rang, so she had time to make a call of her own.
“Are you sure this is the place?” she hissed to Kyle.
“Look, hacking into a mailing list for protein powder isn’t like breaking into the CIA, Paige. It was a lot more difficult sneaking you into the new hires. If Grandpa’s bondsman . . . err, associate wasn’t on the board of directors, then you wouldn’t have this cushy little job. The only Wolfe on the mailing list gets his fliers sent to floor twenty-three in the McKinley building.”
“Sales? Really though,” she whined in the phone. “I don’t know the first thing about marketing medical supplies—”
“Look, part of being what we are means big, powerful pheromones, Paige. Even though most people can’t smell them consciously, it makes you irresistible and attractive, or intimidating if you prefer. You’ll have no problems making friends.”
“Yeah, I got that,” she muttered as she flashed a smile over at Mitch.
She had made it almost entirely through her first day of fliers and fetching when a faint whiff of something decidedly feral drifted from the direction of one copier. She spied a paper jam error on the screen and instinctively started to follow the prompts, all while trying to casually sniff the faint aroma in the little side area. She had just flipped down a side panel and turned a little lever for the second time when a shadow loomed over her back.
“I thought I smelled something,” a gutteral voice growled behind her.
Paige whirled around to see a tall, red-faced man in a blond ponytail and spectacles. He cracked his knuckles and made certain to block Paige’s only exit with his puffy, plaid-clad body. At this distance, something frightfully familiar reflected in his bright blue eyes.
“That’s a little tamer than the last time we spoke,” Paige said. “Morgan, right?”
“What are you doing here?” he snarled.
“Unjamming a copier,” she said flatly.
“You know that’s not what I meant—”
He was cut off by a snide voice saying, “Hey, Morgan, you’re blocking the copier. Oh, hello there—”
For the first time all day, Mitch’s sleazy, whiny little voice was music to Paige’s ears. She slipped around Morgan and flashed a cute little smile. She looked expectantly at both of them.
“Morgan, babe, have you met our newest intern, Paige?” Mitch asked. “She’s working on the incontinence series fliers.”
“It’s such an honor really,” Paige interjected sweetly.
“Paige, this is Morgan Wolfe, our annoying internal auditor who always bothers us about receipts and sales figures. If you ever are having trouble sleeping, he can give you a whole presentation on budget reconciliations and cost analysis,” Mitch said as he punched Morgan in the arm. “You been working out, big guy?”
“Excuse me,” Morgan said as he shuffled off toward the other half of the floor.
“Yeah, they have some live ones over in Accounting. I heard at their last team event, they had a Scrabble tournament,” Mitch said.
“He’s a big guy for an accountant,” Paige noted.
“Yeah, he eats like five sandwiches for lunch. He’s a total wuss though. Anderson found him crying once in the bathroom.”
Paige giggled as expected and followed her guide dutifully back to her cube. At the end of the day, she snatched Kyle’s innocuous little flash drive out of her desktop, courteously ducked out of any after-work plans that involved Mitch, and took a quick detour to the accounting side of floor twenty-three.
The cubicles on this side seemed a bit more understated than the marketing slick-laden sales side. An occasional potted plant or family photo broke up the sea of beige and glass, but the predominant decoration in each cube was an in-box stuffed with ledgers, invoices, and all manner of familiar papers. Paige tried to saunter casually as she wandered the rows, but she still drew a few withering glances from the staff still clicking away long after the sales team had bolted for the door.
