Ten, p.24
Ten, page 24
“Well this is familiar,” Paige muttered as she walked past the weathered statue of a lion. She shivered as an icy wind blew across Lake Michigan and swirled more December snow around her flushed cheeks.
“I’m pretty sure the ninth circle of hell was fashioned after Chicago in the winter,” Kyle grumbled. He flipped his scarf another time around his neck.
“Really, Kyle,” Lorcan sighed, “Everyone knows that January is far worse.”
The trio made their way into the Chicago Art Institute mere moments before closing time. A guard tried to give the standard “we
are closing speech” but was silenced as a skinny bespectacled man ran from behind the reception desk.
“Mr. Darcy!” he exclaimed. “I just got your message. Of course, you can come in.”
“Why thank you, Dr. Merriweather,” the vampire said in his most proper British accent. “You’ve met my associate, Miss DeMarco, of course—”
“Of course! I could never forget such a lovely young lady,” the obsequious little man said. “And this very large gentleman—?”
“My dreadfully American relative,” Lorcan sighed. “Now, I am sorry to keep you late. I would have come on Thursday night, but there was simply no time in the schedule.”
Dr. Merriweather waved his hands all in a flutter. “Oh, Mr. Darcy, you are at the level of donation that if you wanted to be here at two AM on a Sunday we would be happy to oblige,” he said quickly. “Just ring the buzzer when you are ready to return.”
Kyle raised a brow and stared at both Lorcan and Paige as the trio was led to a rather unassuming door marked “Janitor.” Paige giggled as they all crammed inside.
“Is this your next level of practical jokes, Grandpa?” the redhead asked.
Lorcan waved his hand, game show hostess style, towards a lovely tapestry of dogs playing poker tucked behind piles of paper products. “If you would do the honor, Miss Paige.”
She reached past the paper towels to click the little button behind the border collie. This time as the door slid open a synthesizer melody echoed through the room. It was Paige’s turn to raise a brow.
“Is that—?” she asked.
Lorcan flipped out his phone to show The Legend of Zelda ring tone test. “Sorry, couldn’t resist,” he said before limping his way down the stairs.
Kyle and Paige exchanged a look. “He has his moments,” Kyle sighed.
Paige grudgingly admitted, “Yes, he does.”
“Is this a kinky torture dungeon?” Kyle asked as they made it to the lower doorway. “Grandpa, are you stockpiling virgins again?”
The vampire rolled his eyes. “It’s about time I showed you one of the Pendragon family vaults, Kyle. After all, it was your family that paid for it.”
“I can’t wait to see this—” Paige muttered just as Kyle stepped into the room and his jaw hit the floor.
“There is a fucking sword in a stone!” he exclaimed. “Holy sh—”
“Language please, Kyle,” Lorcan snorted. “After all, you are in the gallery of our esteemed ancestors.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” Paige whispered as she once more stood in awe in front of an etched silvery sword rammed completely into a big old rock.
“Is that?” Kyle asked.
“Excalibur,” both Paige and Lorcan said.
“It’s an actual sword. . . in a stone!” he exclaimed. He practically pranced around it. “Grandpa, I thought that whole sword in the stone thing was just some of Lady Pendragon’s Arthur BS, but it’s… it’s real? Can I touch it?”
“Might be a bit of a shocking experience, child,” Lorcan warned.
The vampire strode confidently up to it and wrapped his left hand around the hilt. “Everyone always assumes that you pull and yank like some brute. Sometimes you just need a little technique—”
He carefully pushed the blade down until they all heard a click.
He then slid the magnificently carved sword out like a hot knife through butter. The moment the sword left its sheath, a new door slid open on the far wall. This time Kyle imitated the video game tune.
“Please tell me you don’t have traps or monsters down here, Grandpa,” Kyle begged.
“Actually, there are monsters,” Lorcan warned before motioning towards the new exit. “You go first.”
Kyle started for the new door but paused as he saw a trio of Greek-looking statues. He cocked his head as he noticed that Artemis was clearly Asian looking. His jaw dropped as he stood next to the most brutish and violent looking of the three. He posed next to the chiseled marble and imitated Ares’s grimace perfectly.
“Wow, how did I miss that before?” Paige asked as she looked at the two of them side by side. “Lorcan—?”
“The resemblance is certainly more pronounced since Kyle’s recent changes, but, trust me, they are nothing alike,” Lorcan growled. “Shall we?”
“But who is he? Who is the statue of Ares supposed to be?”
Paige asked.
“Ooh, Ares! I like being the god of war,” Kyle said gleefully as he resumed his march to the new room.
“It was modeled after my father,” Lorcan said under his breath.
“What?” both Paige and Kyle said at once.
“Why does Kyle look like King Arthur?” Paige asked.
“I look like King Arthur?” Kyle asked as well. “Why wouldn’t you tell me something awesome like that?”
Kyle trailed off as both he and Paige stared, gobsmacked, at a pair of sealed glass cases. The first contained a neatly wrapped body with a red and black Pendragon standard laid over its torso. An ornately carved wood and stone mask covered the face. Malachite eyes stared serenely at the ceiling.
“Welcome to the true final resting place of Arthur Pendragon, King of the Britons.” Lorcan said. “Before you ask, the mummy in the Pendragon crypts is a fake. We’ve had problems with bodies being desecrated in the past so Uther, Arthur, and Nimue – the fallen founders – are all safely hidden in different vaults in our controlled lands. Naturally, it’s my responsibility to keep my father’s body safe
—”
Paige, however, walked right past the first case and stared into the tortured, torn eye sockets of the other mummy in the room. This poor creature lay in shambles, ripped into quarters and clearly gnawed upon by wild animals. She gasped as she saw tufts of fur and cracked talons jutting from its gnarled black hands.
“Holy sh—” Kyle gasped. “That’s a— that’s a—”
“Normally the body reverts to its human state within minutes of death, but his death was so violent and savage that the hands remained,” Lorcan said softly as he closed in on the stunned Paige.
“Of course, his unfortunate condition made transformation far slower and more difficult.”
Paige closed her eyes. For a moment the cold museum disappeared, and she once more saw clawed hands holding onto the same ornate sword that Lorcan now held in his hand. Paige shuddered as she snapped back to reality. “Mordred,” she choked out.
Kyle ran to the other side of the case and studied the torn edges of the monster inside. “Is this the Mordred?” he asked as he leaned in so close that his breath steamed the glass.
“That is indeed the body of the greatest traitor vampire-kind has ever caught in action. Paige, Kyle, meet Mordred Pendragon,”
Lorcan said. He kept his gaze locked completely on Paige, however.
“But he was torn apart and burned,” Kyle said. “Even the animals that gnawed on his flesh were burned just to make damn sure that no trace of him ever survived.”
“Well, that is the official story—”
“That you told me, Grandpa!” Kyle barked. His green irises began to spread across his corneas as he took in the traitor. It was only when his claws made a terrible screech against the glass that Paige finally stepped in.
“Kyle, snap out of it,” she barked. At her command, he recoiled from the case and took a few deep breaths. She whirled around to the vampire. “Lorcan, are you about to—?”
“Why do you have your dead brother’s body?” Kyle asked shaking his head. “I mean seriously, what the hell?”
“I need you to test a sample of Mordred. You said before that Miss Paige was infected by a very particular and ancient strain of the werewolf virus. I need you to make absolutely certain that it’s the same infection that plagued Mordred Pendragon—”
“But that would mean that Mordred was the same as you, Grandpa,” Kyle said still shaking his head.
Paige and Lorcan exchanged looks again. The vampire let out a deep sigh.
“What is the first rule of proving a scientific theory, Kyle?” Lorcan asked.
“You have to repeat the results,” he muttered.
Lorcan slowly walked over, clearly favoring his right leg again. He rested his free hand on his descendant’s shoulder. “Kyle, my grandfather may imitate a god from time to time, but the only religion he truly worships is science,” Lorcan said. “He chose me to see if lightning could strike twice. He originally experimented with six werewolves to see if any could become vampires. Five of them died and one was obviously mad. Even with Arthur dying on the field of battle, he chose to try to turn one of the dying werewolves rather than a mere human. I suppose he was lucky that I survived. I was from the same tribe as Mordred. Our human bodies were related, so I suppose that Northern Irish werewolves simply refuse to die.”
“You were a soldier on the battlefield for Arthur though, right?”
Kyle asked. His face remained as horrified as a little kid first discovering that Santa Claus was a lie.
“Dear boy, I was a soldier fighting against King Arthur. Merlin always has his reasons, and my bleeding-out corpse was close enough to the royal carnage to be of use. It was rather awkward at first, but now you can see why the origins of my turning have been glossed over for these past few centuries.”
Kyle nodded. “But, why do you need this tested? I’m not sure if it’s my wolf addled brain or what—”
“At first, I was certain that I must have somehow still had some of the weakened alpha strain in me, and that it somehow infected Paige. I took a sample of Irvine’s blood before we burned him—”
Lorcan stared.
Kyle’s hurt look grew even more pronounced. “You’ve been cheating on me with another scientist?” he asked.
“I do have a bondsman virologist here in Chicago, but I can only trust him so far. I’ve already had to pay to have his memories wiped once and while young Master DeMarco is currently working with us, he is still expensive. Kyle, I must find out how that strain got from this hermetically-sealed body and into a werewolf in the twenty-first century. I also need to know. . . if it’s mutated.”
“Grandpa?” Kyle asked.
“I should be immune. Hell, you should have been immune to a secondary infection, Kyle. We have to figure out what is happening
and soon,” the vampire said.
Paige finally stepped into the fray. “Why, Lorcan?”
The vampire let out a deep sigh. He handed her Excalibur and slipped off his coat. “Don’t drop that, please,” he muttered, as she couldn’t resist twirling the sword a few times. She stopped her moment of fun as Lorcan pulled his shirt up to reveal a hideous mix of matted black fur and crusty sores creeping along a growing ridge on his spine.
“Oh, god,” Paige gasped.
Lorcan punctuated the point by dropping his shirt and then yanking a dental bridge out of his mouth. Kyle and Paige both stared in horror at the two molded fangs on the metal band.
“Jesus!” Kyle exclaimed. “You’re—”
“I’m dying,” the vampire sighed. “Unless you can find a way to stop it.”
15
“SO, let me get this straight, you had no problem with my being Asian and an asshole, but being a vampire is where you arbitrarily draw the line? That seems a little cold considering your past relationship history,” Ren asked as he stared over his sashimi.
“You’re twisting my words,” she snapped before gulping down her sake. “I meant, don’t you have a problem with this? Isn’t this pretty much every nightmare you’ve had since you first started serving Minerva?”
“Of course, I was terrified!” he snapped right back. “But the choices were pretty limited.”
Georgia began to pull the seaweed off her remaining umeboshi roll. As she flicked little bits of nori and sesame seed on her plate, Ren started rummaging in his pockets. He then slammed an orange pill bottle between their plates.
“This is just a temporary situation, Georgia,” he explained. “The vampire that infected me is obviously too weak. It was just some commoner spawn mixed in a transfusion, but because of my condition it managed to get a foothold. You saved me, but it kept trying. I was stuck in limbo for months, and the only way out was to either kill it or let it win—”
Georgia stared at Ren’s hazy reflection in the glass. He took her hand and let her feel the warmth radiating into her hand. “The doctor just fed it enough that it could help me, Georgia,” Ren explained.
“There is a chance it may have even fixed enough of my bone
marrow that I can make B-Cells now. I mean it’s a long shot, but it’s a chance at a cure—”
“But—”
Ren pointed to the bottle. “They are called ‘zombie-killers’,” he sighed. “It’s the most powerful full-spectrum antibiotic ever devised.
It’s so strong that the Cesare Council ordered it banned and had all the researchers. . . removed from the project. Apparently, some CDC
researchers working out of Atlanta found a vampire dying of osoi-shi and actually thought it was a harbinger of a zombie apocalypse, so they made this, and it finished the job.”
“So, this is basically Buffy in a bottle?” Georgia asked. She picked up the container and rolled the horse pills around. “But it was banned—”
“Yeah, but that’s the sick beauty of the little shadow war going on between the Lung Clan and everyone else. Each side not-so-secretly keeps deterrents if you will. Since my father is one of the very few people who has dealings with both sides—”
“You have zombie-killers,” Georgia muttered. “Why aren’t you—?”
“That’s what the timer is for. It’s a calculated risk to let the emerging vampire fix me up as much as possible. Once the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, I take this, and I don’t have to worry ever again.”
At first, Georgia smiled and squeezed his hand, but her face fell the longer she held onto his still-warm fingers. She shook her head in horror. “No, Ren, you can’t do that, can you?”
“It will be fine—”
“Ren, if you take that pill, won’t you be killing a vampire? I’m pretty sure in the four laws scheme of things, breaking rule number one is pretty much the worst.”
“Bareta ka. Shimatta,” Ren muttered.
“What was that?” Georgia asked. “Ren—”
“This vampire isn’t really alive, remember. Vampires celebrate their death days. Until the human dies, the vampire is not yet alive, so think of this more like an abortion, if you will,” he said quickly.
“And are vampires pro-choice?” Georgia asked earnestly.
“Well it’s not exactly something that comes up often. There is a small risk that I could have a reaction—”
“How small a risk?” she pressed.
“A small risk, but—”
“Ren!”
“Georgia, I feel better than I have in years. I’m not a slave to Minerva. I’m not in pain, and I have a chance to be free of all this.
We should be celebrating, not fighting,” he begged. “Yes, there is a possibility that these are my last few days on earth, but I assure you, I’m more at risk to be killed by those crazy drivers out there than by these pills. This buys us time. What else can we ask for?”
“Then let’s get the check and get out of here,” she said before leaning across the table to kiss him.
“You do realize you have tuna on your tits,” Ren said flatly.
“Yeah, that’s my Ren,” she said before brushing herself off.
The two made their way back onto the snowy streets. They talked and laughed until they finally could snuggle into one of the green line trolleys. Only once inside did she dare ask their destination.
Ren gave a wink. “I’m taking you back to a hotel, of course,” he said. “After all, my master still isn’t back, and it would be a shame to leave a hot tub all alone on a cold winter’s night.”
“Not to mention that stash of champagne in the cellar and the really comfy king-sized bed in the blue room. Think Mr. Lambley would mind if we crashed there?” Georgia asked.
“Do you even care at this point?”
“Nope.”
The two got off downtown and walked the rest of the way to the magnificently abandoned Intercontinental. Once inside the cavernous lobby, Georgia dared ask, “So, do you want to drink my blood?”
Ren swept his arm around Georgia as he swept her into a dip. He grinned seductively and let his hair fall around her pulsing neck.
Unfortunately, his attempt to bare his fangs with a menacing hiss simply devolved into a self-conscious laugh.
“That was almost hot,” Georgia sighed as she stared deeply into his eyes.
“Oh, now you’re digging the vampire thing?” he asked with a raised brow.
“I’m digging the whole hope thing,” she said before craning her neck, so she could kiss him. She pulled away reluctantly. “I like hope.”
“Mada ikite iru,” he whispered in her ear.
“Mada ikite iru,” she said happily back. “Now let’s see what mischief we can get into. If it is going to be your last day on Earth, I think we should go all out.”
Ren wiggled his brows suggestively and took off running for the grand staircase. Much to Georgia’s delight, some thoughtful little house elf had left her a white bikini, a super fluffy towel, and a dozen roses on the landing.
“Oh, you want me to wear something in the hot tub?” she asked.
“Well, there is a certain fun in dragging things out,” Ren confessed.
