Catnapped, p.21
Catnapped, page 21
“Considering I’ve basically promised to go on a date with you as it is through a bargain, I think you’re safe from the dark throes of disappointment. But I will remember all I need to do to flirt with you is talk about something technical or scientific. Damn. If I’d known men were this easy to flirt with, I would have done this a lot sooner.”
“A lot of men don’t like feeling like they’re inferior to women, so I’m pretty sure you’d have a bunch of offended, grouchy assholes with that approach. But then you’d get lucky with me, because your first scientific pickup line would have had me eating out of your hand. I’m blaming all three of my parents for this tendency.” Darian flopped back against the couch and shuffled through the papers I’d given him before setting them aside and reaching for the stack of tax documents. “Men like Kingston piss me off.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t care who he hurts in order to make his life better for him and only him. One of his previous attempts at curing the lycanthropy virus killed ten people through generalized human experimentation. If he’s not afraid of killing people, he’s definitely not afraid to kill a bunch of animals. This is something he would do. Or so I think. The references to his name in these papers definitely implies he’s involved.”
Interesting. “You hadn’t mentioned that earlier.”
“I try not to think about his lack of regard for life in general. It just makes me angrier than I like.” Darian waved one of the tax papers in my direction. “At least he’s, on paper, paying his accomplices fairly well. It doesn’t look like anybody made below a hundred thousand a year in this operation. That’s a damned good motivation to live in the woods in a trailer.”
As I didn’t make quite a hundred thousand a year before benefits and bonuses, I could easily see somebody deciding to live in a half-decent trailer doing sketchy things for a good paycheck. “Crime pays better than secretarial work, apparently.”
Darian shot me a look. “You’re paid less than these clowns?”
I shrugged. “I do get bonuses, but my base pay isn’t that high, no. The bonuses make it go higher, but they can be a bitch to earn.”
“You keep the higher-level bosses functional in the CDC for less than a hundred thousand a year?”
“Considering I don’t have a college degree and learned everything on the job, I think I’m doing pretty well for myself, thank you very much.” I shot a glare at him, huffed, and went to check on the meter, which churned through Darian’s blood sample and magical pulse with impressive speed. “Huh. I must have gotten one of the upgraded models. This is almost done. Maybe ten more minutes.”
“Upgraded model? I thought you knew the scanner?”
“There are different models of the same scanner. The only real difference is what is under the hood. I didn’t check the memory in it. I just assumed it was the base model. Apparently, I should not make assumptions when it comes to Lucifer.” I picked up the scanner and flipped it over to check the information on its back. Sure enough, he’d gotten me the top-of-the-line model. “Yeah. I made a mistake there. I made a stupid assumption. This is not the base model. This is the best model sold.”
“When you negotiate with Lucifer, it doesn’t matter you don’t have a degree, and you’re worth at least three times what the CDC is paying you. As you will have to deal with him most days of the week, go for a baseline of half a million a year plus bonuses and whatever other concessions you can think of. Take him for an apartment or condo in every major city he expects you to work at often, for example, unless you like hotel life. I mean, he might give you the ability to teleport, which would simplify things for you, but you might not want to live in his domain all of the time. Even Lucifer has properties on Earth to get away from work.”
I considered, and while pride demanded I stand up for myself a little better, I checked my knee-jerk reaction and forced myself to nod. “I’ve always thought I needed to be grateful I’ve done so well without a degree.”
“You’re skilled, you’re smart, and you do a good job. A degree can open doors, yes, but you’re the reason you’re being poached by the Devil. Lucifer doesn’t care about degrees. My mom? She cares about degrees, but my fathers? They couldn’t care less. They just paid for my education to keep my mother happy, and they suggested I continue educating myself so I don’t look stupid in front of women. I’m starting to think at least one of my fathers has been investigating my future in some fashion or another. Worse, I’ve already made myself look stupid in front of you several times.”
“I am of the opinion stupidity can be cured.”
“There is hope for me after all. I’ll try to keep from making you hate me by the time I can ask for a date.”
I grinned at that comment. “All right. I need to be less crabby, because right now, I should be cuddled in bed with my cat. It took months to get him to come join me in bed, and I resent some asshole has probably undone all the hard work I’ve put in convincing Mr. Flooferson to trust me.”
“Obviously, I should be sneaking out and trying to locate your cat, so when I bring him back to you, I can successfully inquire about a date after you have him settled.”
The scanner beeped in my hand, informing me it was done churning through Darian’s biologics and was ready for me to evaluate his DNA, his general health, and even his sperm count if I really wanted. “I’ll admit, that ploy would stand a good chance of working.”
“I might be an idiot at times, but you’ve made it clear you really love your cat. I’d end up feeling guilty if I tried that, so I’d try to slink away without asking. Just being honest. I’m pretty sure I’m the reason I haven’t had any luck with women.”
“Yet you’re being particularly bold and forthcoming with me?”
“Well, it helps my uncles are encouraging it. I mean, they can be complete assholes, but they generally don’t set us poor children up for complete failure without a good reason. I’m probably too trusting for my good on that one, though. So, am I dying of some undiagnosed disease?”
I took the scanner to my new laptop, plugged it in, and went to work setting up the diagnostics software and importing Darian’s health and DNA record so I could make sense of the results. Within three minutes, the first red flag popped up, involving a positive lycanthropy result.
I clicked into the software to begin diagnostics on the virus strain to encounter the second red flag: no matching species listing.
Great. New species of lycanthropes popped up yearly, but the last thing I needed was having to explain to a triad their son was the latest person-of-interest to the research and development department of the CDC. After a few more minutes of checking, the virus count in his blood stream put him at the earliest stages of infection detectible. “Remember what we were discussing about lycanthropy? This states you are positive, earliest stage of detectible virus levels in the blood—or in the magic pulse. I haven’t confirmed which. In good or bad news for you, there’s no matching strain in the system.”
Darian’s brows shot up. “I mean, I work with lycanthropes often enough, but I take the base precautions. They’re all wolves, though.”
“You do not match any known wolf strains. It’s just a blank on species type.” I tapped on the species result, went into the diagnostics software, and tapped in the request for a classification of species rather than a specific species. Narrowing it down to mammal or avian would help, and if I got lucky, I’d be able to narrow it down to a family. “I’m trying to get a family classification out of the system, but we’ll see.”
A minute later, the system pinged, informing me it was unable to detect a base class of virus strain.
How odd. I frowned, pulled out the test samples, including the wolf strain of the lycanthropy virus, and set up a new test. Within thirty seconds, the scanner did its job, reporting everything I might ever want to know about the wolf virus. Puzzled over the complete lack of data on the strain, I went back into Darian’s DNA results and tapped in a request for the system to check for known shapeshifter DNA combinations.
It, too, returned back negative.
Interesting.
“According to your expression, you either hate or love me right now, and I’m not sure which. Should I be worried?”
“Normally, when these things register a lycanthropy infection, it’s able to judge the base classification of the virus, which is typically mammal or avian. It has no idea what kind of virus you’ve been infected with. You also are negative for any of the known shapeshifter DNA combinations, which can flag people as infected with lycanthropy without actually having lycanthropy. But this is reporting you are infected with the virus.”
Darian shrugged. “That would explain some of my uncle’s behavior.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
I nodded. “With how many cases of early onset lycanthropy have been cropping up lately, to the point doctors are pursuing it as viable treatments for terminal patients, it’s entirely possible you haven’t been infected long. You’ll want to monitor the virus levels for progression, but beyond that, you shouldn’t be contagious unless you go really wild.”
“Can you be a little more specific about that? How wild is wild here?”
“That depends. How’s your dad compared to an incubus?” With a wicked grin, I began tapping through Darian’s DNA to see if he might pose an infection risk should he unleash his inner beast—or his devilish side. “Is your daddy just a big, nasty devilish general, or is he secretly some sort of sex god on top of it?”
“This is not a question I have ever wanted to ask my mother, truth be told—or either of my fathers. Some things a son just doesn’t want to know. That’s one of them.”
“I regret to inform you that we’re about to find out.” Giggling over having turned the tables on him, I delved into the dark depths of his genetics, clicking through the DNA trees to the section dedicated to reproduction. “Congratulations! You’re eighty-nine percent male.”
“Pardon?”
“Humans don’t express gender as pure male or female. It’s a range. In this software, we use a range of zero to a hundred, one side of the chart leaning towards male, the other side of the chart leaning towards female. A zero sometimes presents as a hermaphrodite, although that’s not always the case. A better example of someone who is near zero on this chart would be someone with asexual tendencies, neither presenting as male or female. Eighty-nine percent male is pretty up there in terms of pure masculinity.”
“And what percentage are you?”
“I’m an example of extreme femininity; I have less than a percent of male traits in my genetics. This is pretty rare. Honestly, I’d consider you to be at a healthier percentage than I am—as evidenced by my development of cancer. Too much of a good thing can easily become a bad thing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if my high percentage on this specific chart led to the cancer problem.” After a moment, I shrugged. “It could also be the deodorant. I’ll switch to something with fewer harsh chemicals, but you know how something can be too little, too late.”
“This conversation may have just changed my relationship with my deodorant,” he admitted.
“And with your non-existent sex life. So, your manliness levels are pretty healthy, but you’re not registering on the incubus charts. However, your daddy is packing goods in some departments, as your sperm count is high, and you’re registering as highly fertile. That is not an angelic trait. That said, the pulse came back with a high percentage of female sperm, so if you’re wanting sons, you’re definitely going to be a source of frustration for your wife unless she wants a lot of kids hoping for a boy. Frankly, I recommend you hire an incubus if you want a son.”
“Alas, I am not a king of any country, so I am not terribly concerned with what gender my children are, should I have any. What else can you tell me, Dr. Diana?”
“If I’m your doctor, you’re probably going to die, but I’ll recommend you go ask a real doctor—or your smug uncles. I bet they were aware of your current situation.”
“For the record, I really do not see this as at all a disadvantage. As I said earlier, I quite like living. Since I work with lycanthropes as part of my investigative work, I already know the rules for the newly infected. I just need to report to the CDC and register, which doesn’t bother me.”
I eyed his records. “I could probably figure out how to register you, although you’d be better off having your father go with you for the registration. The CDC doesn’t tend to give the children of triads who somehow contract lycanthropy much of a hard time about it. They will want to do a contact tracing to see where you got the infection.”
“Are you infected with lycanthropy? I mean, we’ve been sharing a room.”
“Sharing a room isn’t sufficient to pass on lycanthropy, and I’m tested every year. That said, I am not tested with the high sensitivity scanners. The scanners I’m tested with could have a ten year or longer incubation without the virus being picked up. It catches the virus a stage before becoming infectious, typically.” As I already had his data, I went to work preparing the scanner for a new reading. “I’d like to test the vials first, but then I can run mine through to see if I have picked it up. Like you, I do have a lot of contact with lycanthropes, so honesty? It’s viable.”
“The Devil is underhanded enough he’d help the virus along, too.”
Lucifer would. I frowned. “But who would he have taken the virus from?”
“You, because he knows full well I’d consent to contracting the lycanthropy virus. Can your machine tell us how long I’ve been infected?”
I shook my head. “The virus is pretty individualistic, and replication times have been changing a lot lately. Some people are still taking forty years or longer to incubate their viruses, but a lot of younger people are shifting far younger. Early onset is becoming rather common. It’s on the CDC’s radar, because with transmission and maturation rates, it’s actually possible for lycanthropes to outnumber humans, and it won’t take nearly as long as people think. It becomes even more complicated when the virus mutates, although it mutates at a fairly slow rate. Then there’s the issue of species. For a long time, people believed only mammals could be lycanthropes. The avians kept to themselves and either played wolf or just refused to admit their species. The percentage of avians is also really low, with some species only having one to three members. Because of the nature of the lycanthropy virus, the species usually ends up with two members, but some of the avians simply don’t pass their virus on to their children, and the virus itself is less likely to infect somebody else. The CDC expects most avian species will only last one or two generations.”
“And reptiles?”
“We haven’t seen any known reptile species, but I’ve come to the conclusion maybe we shouldn’t assume it’s an impossibility.” I checked the scanner, went through the settings, and adjusted the device so it would read through glass, plastics, and even clear metals. “Lucifer really spent too much money on this thing, and I refuse to give it back. I will fight him for it. I’ll bite his bloody kneecaps off if he tries to take it from me.”
Darian snickered and dug out one of the cases and began to check over the vials, making notations on a sheet of paper before tying a tag to the handle with a few notes. “In bad news, I can’t actually mark the vials, so once we hand this over to the CDC, we won’t have access to them again. Please tell me we don’t have to open these vials.”
“We don’t have to open the vials. Lucifer gave me a scanner that can penetrate through just about anything. We’ll have to rely on the magical pulse readings, but it’s sensitive enough we’ll be able to get a reading on common toxins, viruses, bacteria, and so on. The bacterium readings can get sketchy, although things like anthrax are typically easy enough to identify. It’s a matter of numbers, as there are a ridiculous number of bacteria in the world. Hell, our guts have a huge number of bacteria.”
“Surprisingly, I did know that. Will the scans take as long as my DNA?”
“No. It’ll take me probably half an hour to get through the whole lot of them. Just set out the cases, and I’ll hold the scanner’s probe to the vial. It’ll register the results, beep to let me know it’s done, and I’ll move onto the next one. If we get any bacteria, it’ll add twenty minutes to test the sample, but it’s not bad. I have it set up to save the data to be more efficient. If you get bored watching, feel free to crash out. I’ll wake you if I find anything interesting.”
“I’ll watch, if you don’t mind. If I can con Lucifer out of one of these, too, I want to see how this is done. I’m not above begging to be able to give using it a try.”
“Well, you’re easy to please. I might be going to hell, but it’s not because I don’t know how to share. Just don’t you break my scanner, because I really will cry if you do.”
“I’ll be careful,” he promised.
Thirteen
“All miracles come with a price.”
Sixty-four different vials, sixty-four different diseases, viruses, and bacteria, all of which were used in some fashion or another in biological warfare. Most importantly, one of the vials contained Darian’s strain of the lycanthropy virus.
I had questions, but the scanner provided me with zero answers. Darian, who’d realized I hadn’t been joking about it taking at least twenty minutes to check over each bacterium, hadn’t made it to bed before passing out. Initially, he’d been seated upright, but an accidental bump while reaching for one of the metal containers had startled him enough he’d fallen over directly onto my lap although he hadn’t woken.
Either that, or he did a damned fine job of playing possum, and I figured he’d earned using me as a pillow for tricking me.
Lucifer manifested in the room along with Gabriel, and the Devil opted for his inhuman form, his tail lashing side to side. Like his brother, a shroud engulfed him, shimmering whenever he moved. “You’re supposed to be sleeping. How can we commit nefarious acts when you’re awake when we’re supposed to be tending to you?”
