Chapter Eighteen
With one eye on her screen and the other on the clock, Mila scrolled through the output of her latest test—or tried to. Dominic had his arms wrapped around her from behind, nuzzling her neck. “Dom, I really have to get this done.” She gave him a half-hearted nudge with her elbow. “When you said you had a fetish about watching me work, you weren’t kidding, were you?”
“Mmm hmm.” His answer vibrated against her skin.
She leaned into his touch for a moment, then shrugged her shoulder to dislodge him, gesturing to the framed print leaning against the wall. “Would you mind hanging up that picture while I finish up? Five more minutes, then I can take a short break.” A short one, because she was swamped, and his visits had become a near-daily habit. In hindsight, extending that open invitation for Dom to swing by whenever he was in the building had been a mistake. Being his dad was a patient, Dom was in the building a lot.
Sometimes he stayed for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour, just hanging out in her visitor’s chair, but admittedly, she’d come to anticipate the moment when he’d rise from the chair, walk behind her, lean down, and wrap his arms around her. “Don’t mind me,” he’d invariably murmur. “Just keep working.” It had become a game between them, an unspoken challenge: How long could she concentrate, keep her fingers flying over the keyboard, with him kissing her shoulder? Licking her earlobe? Nibbling his way up her neck? How long before she gasped or groaned, before she turned her back on her work and kissed the bejeezus out of him?
She cut a quick glance to her door. Necking in the office was so, so wrong. “Dom. The print?”
He reluctantly straightened. “Do you have a hammer? Some nails?”
“Right here.” She opened her lower desk drawer and retrieved the hammer and the box of small hooks and nails Hansen had given her last night.
Taking them, he eyed the wall. “Any place in particular?”
“Eye level, vaguely centered. Thanks.”
Leaving Dom to his task, she turned back to her screen, spot-checking the output from the extraction program she was testing. Unique identifiers, patient names, birthdates, contact information, medical records…it was a fast-flowing stream of green characters against a black background, of binary and hex, upper case and lower case, of data blocks and field demarcations…and at a quick glance, the output appeared to be correct. She double-checked the program’s runtime. The enhanced program was running ten percent faster than the current production version—no small thing when data files approached a terabyte in size.
She leaned back, satisfied. Next up? Creating the corrupted data files they’d use for the next phase of testing. She loved working with data in the raw, designing corrupted files that would trigger every known failure scenario, hopefully producing the appropriate error message at the expected time, but…she’d consider it a personal failure if she couldn’t plunge at least one unexpected stake into the program’s heart sometime during the test cycle. “Fail gracefully, my ass.” The smile turned evil at the edges. The developers didn’t call her The Wicked Witch of the West for nothing—
Something unexpected caught her eye. Bailey Brown, a patient at Memorial? No way. They didn’t treat human patients here; humans weren’t supposed to know this hospital even existed.
She leaned closer, peering at the data dump. Yes, there was Bailey’s name in all caps. Presented at the ER last winter…perforated ulcer…Drs. Melvin, Penn, and Wyland…laparoscopic surgery, and a three-day hospital stay.
“Hmm.” Apparently they did treat humans at Memorial—extremely well-connected humans, that is.
She skimmed the file—temperature, blood pressure, blood work, labs—a full genetic panel? Why would someone with a perforated ulcer need a… Her eyes widened.
Bailey Brown had succubus DNA?
“Who’s this?” Dom asked.
Blinking, she focused on Dom instead of the screen. He was standing in front of the chest-high bookshelf, holding the small, framed picture she’d set there just yesterday. Her, holding Katarina. The sight punched her in the gut.
“The little girl is obviously you—look at that dark hair—but who’s the baby?”
She released a shaky breath. “My sister.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
“She…died not long after that picture was taken.” It was the only picture of Katarina she’d ever found in her parents’ house, and she’d discovered it snooping through her mother’s desk drawers. Furtively photocopied and quickly returned, the picture was her most prized possession.
Dom skimmed a fingertip over Katarina’s face. “Was her death related to her Down’s Syndrome?”
A wild laugh almost escaped. You might say that. “SIDS. She was two months old.” Sudden Infant Death Syndrome was accurate enough, because Katarina had died suddenly, all right. One night, her parents put them both down for naps, but only Mila woke up—and in the horrible, chaotic aftermath, no one had thought to ask a little girl about the odd noises she’d heard coming from her parents’ room next door. About the violent, emotional battering that a vampire child who shared blood with both parents hadn’t been able to escape. Loud voices. Mommy and Daddy fighting. Daddy, terribly sad but terribly resolute. Mommy, wailing like a wounded animal.
Then, a brittle, frightening silence.
Hansen had finally found her, hiding in the closet. His arms had become the only safe place in her world.
Dom set the picture back on the bookshelf, then came over to her desk. This time, when he hugged her from behind, there was nothing but comfort in his touch. “I’m so sorry.”
She leaned against him, twining her arms with his. “Thanks,” she whispered. “It happened a long time ago.” But she still remembered Katarina’s big, gummy smile, and her sweet baby scent. To this day, catching an unexpected whiff of baby powder, or disposable diapers, made her throat clog with tears.
Dom’s phone chirped. “A reminder I set about Hannah’s soccer game,” he sighed against her hair. “I’ll leave her a message that I’ll be late.”
“No. I’m fine.” She squeezed his hand. “Really, go to your sister’s game.” Leave, so I can pull myself together and get some work done. “We’ll see each other again in a couple of days.”
“Your parents’ party.” He pressed a sweet kiss to her cheek, straightened, then twirled her desk chair so she faced him. “Are you getting excited?”
“Mother is excited enough for both of us.” Her mother was positively manic, consulting her checklists, and working the party planner’s very last nerve. In a familiar act of self-preservation, her father had left the planning entirely to his bondmate; his only responsibility would be to show up wearing appropriate clothing. “I am excited about my new dress.” The burgundy tea-length ball gown, long-sleeved with a portrait neckline and a nipped-in waist, was the most beautiful dress she’d ever seen, much less worn. At yesterday’s final fitting, she hadn’t been able to hide her delighted smile. The dress softened her angular lines, showcased her meager curves—subtle and classy enough to please her mother, but unmistakably sexy. Somehow, the designer had accomplished the impossible: pleasing them both.
Dom’s wolfish grin made pleasure curl around her spine. “I can’t wait to see it—or should I say, I can’t wait to see how you look wearing it.” His expression turned slightly uncomfortable. “Mom’s taking me shopping tomorrow.”
She grinned. “That should be fun.”
“Not,” he said, deadpan. “I hate shopping. But Mom insists I need a new suit, and going to the mall will get her away from the hospital for a while.” He paused. “You’re positive I don’t need a tux?”
She shook her head. “Some of the older guests will wear tuxedos, but a dark suit will do very nicely.”
His cell phone bleeped again. Plucking it out of his back pocket, he looked at the screen. “It’s Hannah, wondering where I am. I’d better get going. Traffic’s going to suck.”
She rose, nodding in commiseration as they walked to her office door. It was almost 6:00 p.m., still the thick of rush hour. “Thanks so much for hanging up my print.” Up on the south wall, the daytime shot of The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry spilled a rectangle of sunlight into the windowless room.
“You’re welcome.” But Dom wasn’t looking at the print anymore; he was looking at the shelf again, at the picture of her and Katarina.
“I’ll walk you out.” Curiosity about Katarina, about her short life and sudden death, was the last thing she needed. No, strike that—the actual last thing she needed was for him to find out about her illness. Sure, Dom was hot, fun, and he kissed like a dream, but he’d guzzled an entire pitcher of the GPL’s toxic, batshit Kool-Aid. His personality had some dark corners she wasn’t sure she had the energy to explore—but on the other hand, maybe she could expose him to other points of view.
Do I really want to take that on? The more time she and Dom spent together, the greater the risk that he’d discover she had some dark secrets of her own.
They left her office and walked down the long hallway, past empty cubicles and workspaces. “Where is everyone?” Dom asked.
“At happy hour.” She’d been invited to go, but declined. Her new position came with more administrative work than she’d anticipated, and she’d let too much of it pile up. When they reached the end of the hallway, she opened the heavy security door. “Have fun at Hannah’s game. Say hello to your family for me.”
“I will.”
Lifting onto her toes, she gave him a quick peck on each cheek. “And have a good time shopping.”
Dom’s eye roll was interrupted by his ringing phone. “Hannah.” Reaching for the phone, he dropped a kiss onto her upturned lips. “If I don’t take this, she’ll never stop calling.”
She made a shooing motion with her hands. “Go. Talk to your sister. I’ll see you Saturday.”
“’Bye.” After another quick peck—and another—he pivoted and started walking away, punching a button on his phone and lifting it to his ear. “Hey, Hannah.”
The affection in his voice positively melted her.
She watched him walk down the hall, waiting for him to give his usual jaunty wave as he turned the corner and disappeared from sight. When it came, she waved back, then trudged back to her office. Sitting at her desk once again, she looked at her screen. Nope, she hadn’t been hallucinating. There was Bailey Brown’s name, screaming at her in all caps, followed by her species: HUMAN-SUCCUBUS.
Though the humans’ HIPAA law didn’t apply at Memorial, the mere existence of this intermediate file made her skin prickle. She clobbered the file and kicked off a new run of the program, one that would extract the records of patients whose names started later in the alphabet. Doing so put her even further behind schedule, but it had to be done—and while the program ran, she could go to the break room and get some blood.
She touched her tingling lips. Did she have the time, or the emotional energy, to deal with Dom’s complex life and mercurial moods? A burst of self-mocking laugher escaped. What made her think she could pull him into the light, when her own secrets were so deeply buried?
Dom walked to the parking ramp with Hannah still yammering in his ear. Any security guard watching from the ceiling-mounted cameras would think the phone conversation was responsible for his gob-smacked expression, but…nope.
Mila had a dead sister who’d had Down’s Syndrome? Bailey Brown was part succubus?
Holy shit.
“Dom, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah.” Bypassing the elevator, he entered the stairwell and started climbing, reining in his impatience as his sister told a convoluted story about a dude at the soccer field who could be Harry Styles’ twin, “if he had, like, a buzz cut, and only one tattoo.”
Ever since their father’s accident, Hannah called and texted him several times a day, just to touch base. He understood why she did it, but… “Hannah?” he interrupted, opening the fourth floor door. The Pathfinder was parked halfway down the nearest row. “I’m in the parking ramp. I’m going to lose signal soon.” Thank the universe, because damn. “I should be at the field in half an hour or so.”
“You and Mom are driving separately?”
“Yeah.” Dom had crossed paths with his mother about an hour ago, outside his dad’s hospital room. She’d been arriving for her daily visit, and he’d been leaving, on his way up to Mila’s office. “If Mom’s not on the road already, she will be soon.”
“And then we’re going to the Mall of America?”
“Yeah.”
“Awesome!”
At least one of them was excited.
“Gotta go,” she said. “Coach is starting warm-ups.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
As he hung up the phone and got in the car, a huge yawn escaped. Scrubbing his hands over his face, he glanced at his glove box, where he’d stashed the garage opener he’d swiped from Tia Quinn’s car. Which garage did it open? The one at her house in Stillwater? The storage facility up the road from Vamp Central? Hell, Vamp Central itself? He’d planned on driving to Marine on St. Croix later tonight, but maybe it would be smarter to test the garage door opener during the morning hours, when the vampires were more likely to be asleep.
No need to take stupid risks.
Yeah, a night at home sounded good. He’d chill for a while with Mom and Hannah, maybe make some popcorn and watch a movie. And after they were both asleep, he’d sneak into his father’s office, and explore the database some more.
On its face, the database was a collection of genealogy records—including species information, which helped him a lot—but digging a little deeper had yielded so much more. Family gossip, legal trouble, drug problems, secret affairs, kinks and exotic sexual habits…the database was a treasure trove of blackmail-caliber information.
But he’d save blackmail for later. Tonight’s research? The Stanton family. As Mila had spoken about her sister, her stale, clammy fear had filled the room. Something about the situation didn’t pass the sniff test. Surely the database would contain a record of Katarina Stanton’s death. He also had more letters to write.
Had Tia Quinn received hers?
He backed the Pathfinder out of the parking spot, then headed for the exit. Tia hadn’t posted anything new at In Like Quinn for days, and she’d completely dropped off social media. If she’d gotten seriously hurt during their altercation—hell, if she’d died—surely the news would be splattered all over the grapevine? He’d almost asked Mila to check whether Tia Quinn had been admitted to the hospital recently, but given he’d already seen admissions data he wasn’t supposed to see, he hadn’t pressed his luck.
Imagine, Bailey Brown, a human-succubus cross.
He navigated the parking ramp’s tight, downward exit spiral. Yes, he’d stay home tonight—do some research, and write more letters—and check the garage door opener early tomorrow morning. And in a couple of days, Bailey Brown would receive a letter of her own.
“Sigurd was a very erratic correspondent,” Tia said to Wyland. Tugging off the white cotton gloves, she jotted the date of the volume’s last entry in the wire-bound notebook sitting at her elbow, then stretched her arms overhead. “He’d write every day for three weeks in a row, then months would go by without a single word.”
Wyland glanced at her over the upper rims of those ridiculously sexy reading glasses. “He was rather busy.”
“I imagine.” She hadn’t actually read any of the journal entries yet. Instead, she’d offered to take a high-level view of the journals, noting dates and frequency of entries, leaving Wyland to focus on the contents of Sigurd’s last journal. Over the last two days, he’d made copious notes on a yellow legal pad, wearing the white cotton gloves she found so annoying like he’d been born to them—which, given his age and his profession, he…had. As a Regency gentleman, and as a modern doctor, wearing gloves had to be second nature.
Leather riding gloves, cotton gloves, latex gloves…his gloved hands, stroking lazily over her skin…
Wyland cleared his throat. “Sigurd’s final journal spans a period of approximately five months. The first half of the volume is a priceless information about ordinary village life in the Middle Ages…neighborhood squabbles, a missing horse, plans for the spring planting. Here—” he tapped a gloved finger against a specific entry— “is the first mention of illness, and within a week, dozens of villagers had fevers and chills, headaches, muscle pains, and swollen lymph nodes in the armpits and groin. Sigurd started out recording the name and age of each villager who died, but—” Wyland flipped to an entry near the center of the journal “—starting here, the entries get shorter and shorter, until, near the end, all I see are hash marks indicating what must be the death count since the last entry.”
“And his last entries? Any information about why Sigurd committed suicide?” she asked gently.
A cheek muscle ticked as he turned to the last written page of the journal. “Unfortunately, no.”
She looked at the yellowed page and recoiled. Sigurd’s last journal entry consisted of a single, autobiographical hash mark, and a rusty spray of dried blood.
Wyland removed the gloves and then his glasses. Setting both on the legal pad, he rubbed his eyes.
“Let’s take a break,” she said, rising from her chair with a stretch. His cheekbones were too prominent for her liking. “I need some blood, and if I sit here any longer, my ass is going to sprout roots.”
He glanced at her backside, bemused. “We wouldn’t want that.” As he stood, he tipped his head from side to side, trying to loosen stiff muscles. Who knew that reading for hours on end could be so hard on the body? As they walked to the kitchen, she glanced at the wall clock. Maybe she could talk him into going home, taking a long, hot shower together, and crawling into bed for a while. Lyudmila and Stanton’s party started at midnight, and if she didn’t take a nap first, she’d fall asleep in the canapes. Earlier, Wyland had asked if she’d be ready to leave by 11:00 p.m., giving them an hour to drive to Lyudmila and Stanton’s Lake Minnetonka home.
Did he realize the conclusions the other guests would draw when they arrived at the party together? Did he care?
When they got to the kitchen, Wyland headed to the sink to wash his hands. That, too, was probably second nature. “Anna Mae called today,” he said over the sound of running water. “She’s finally done with Sigurd’s trunk.”
She joined him at the sink. “You’re the one who insisted we bring it to Sebastiani Labs in the first place.” After she’d discovered the skull, Wyland had quickly closed the trunk, and in what he’d described to Val and Thane as an abundance of caution, he’d asked Dr. Anna Mae Whitman to meet him at Sebastiani Labs’ bio-hazard facility. During the long drive to the Sebastiani Labs campus in Chanhassen, Wyland had glanced at her far too frequently, as if reassuring himself that she hadn’t dropped dead in the passenger seat.
Sebastiani Labs had been a revelation—what she’d seen of it, at any rate. Instead of using the main entrance, Wyland had driven around to the back of the building, pausing to speak at a machine that looked like one you’d find at a fast food drive-thru. After a short conversation, the loading dock door opened its giant maw. They’d pulled in, waited for the door to close behind them, and then driven down, down, finally stopping in a loading dock adjacent to a high-tech lab that reminded her of Iron Man’s subterranean lair. And there, Dr. Whitman, a tiny, terrifying woman with more than a hint of bayou in her voice, had matter-of-factly unpacked Sigurd’s trunk under a bio-hazard containment hood, a process Tia had recorded for posterity. In addition to Sigurd’s journals and skull, the young, grieving Valerian had also packed Sigurd’s robes, some linens, an ancient set of tools, and some writing implements. After declaring the items free of airborne toxins, Wyland and Dr. Whitman had debated about what should happen next. Wyland wanted to take the trunk and its contents back to Val, but Dr. Whitman had urged further tests.
Dr. Whitman had won. They’d left Sebastiani Labs with only the journals in their possession.
“She took a sample from the skull, and some blood off the knife,” Wyland said, stepping back from the sink to dry his hands. “She’ll sequence Sigurd’s DNA for the Archives, and assess the chemical composition of the blood.”
Chemical composition? Sigurd hadn’t been poisoned; he’d committed suicide. “Why do that?”
“Anna Mae is an expert on anthropocentric environmental impact.”
“Anthropo what?”
“Anthropocentric.” He walked over to the refrigerator. “The study of humans’ impact on the planet during the time they’ve been the dominant species. Some scientists theorize that modern humans’ impact on Earth’s natural systems is so visible, and so significant, that the planet has entered a sixth geological epoch called the Anthropocentric.”
“Hmm.”
He paused at the refrigerator door. “Within my own lifetime, we’ve gone from four-legged horsepower to nuclear energy, from mud huts to steel high-rises, from villages to megacities. There were fewer than a billion people on the planet when I was born, and now there are over seven billion.”
“We’re an industrious species, that’s for sure.”
“It leaves a mark.”
She blinked at his vehemence.
“New research indicates that today’s babies are born already carrying traces of hundreds of industrial chemicals and pollutants.” Opening the refrigerator, he retrieved two bags of blood. “Sorry about the soapbox, but humanity has the dubious distinction of being the first Earth species ‘evolved’ enough to engineer its own bloody extinction.”
“You, Val, and Thane—older vampires—definitely have a unique perspective on what’s short term versus long term.”
“And given we can’t reveal our existence to humanity, we can’t share our first-hand observations with anyone who isn’t part of our culture.” Wyland handed her one of the bags. “Sometimes I think we should reconsider. We live here, too. We have a vested interest in keeping the planet habitable…at least until we find a way to leave it again.” He tightened his lips. “But that’s a discussion for another day. I was willing to give Anna Mae time to get her samples, but I really want to get that skull back for Val.”
As far as she was concerned, Dr. Whitman could keep the creepy, yellowed skull that had stared up at her with its empty eye sockets, but Wyland was right—Val’s desire to see and touch Sigurd’s things was the thing that had started this whole extravaganza. “We could pick the trunk up on our way home from the party tonight.”
“We’ll be on the right side of town.” Wyland lifted the bag of blood to his mouth, then hesitated. “You’re right, you know. I’m am old.”
“What? I didn’t say—”
“You said ‘older vampires’, lumping me in with Val and Thane. I’m too old for you, Tia.”
A merry laugh escaped as she skimmed his frame. “Yeah, right.” The man was in his prime, sexually and otherwise. But…he wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t joking. “Are you serious? Sure, you’re a little tired right now, we both are, but—”
“You can’t deny the three hundred years between us.”
“I don’t deny them in the slightest, but I see them as a positive, not a negative. And for the record, Val’s pretty damn hot.”
He smiled, but then dropped his gaze to the bag of blood he held, studying the label as if it fascinated him. “Sometimes I feel…” His eyes were unfathomable, with an expression she’d seen only once before: on Valerian’s face as he mentally detached from the here and now, and traveled back into memory.
Alone.
She took the blood from his hand and set it on the countertop. “Tell me. How do you feel?”
“Like a man in a place out of time.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, tethering him. “All I know is that you’re the man I need, in the here and now.” She pressed a gentle kiss to his beard-roughened jawline. “Let’s go home.”
When he looked down at her, the immortal ennui in his eyes was gone. “Are you tired?”
“Yes. Despite your so-called advanced years, I’m the one who needs a nap.” But before falling asleep, she’d drag him into bed and let him rock her world. He’d never question her attraction, or his potency, again.
He looped an arm around her waist, examining her face in the harsh fluorescent light. “Your bruises are nearly healed.”
Frequent infusions of his blood had faded them to nearly nothing, but no amount of makeup on Earth would hide the scar at her temple. “I’ll have to figure out how to explain this at the party tonight.”
“The truth won’t suffice?” They left the kitchen, turning off lights as they went. “You tripped and fell getting out of your car. There’s no need to discuss the circumstances.”
She considered. “That’ll work.”
Wyland closed the journals so the weight of the pages wouldn’t pull at the ancient bindings. “I wish we could stay home tonight,” he muttered, pocketing his reading glasses. “I’d rather treat virulent pneumonic plague than go to this party.”
“Why?” Did he not want to be seen with her in public after all?
“Dealing with Lyudmila can be rather…labor-intensive.”
“That’s an understatement.” She flicked off the lights next to the door, then wound her arm through the crook of his elbow as he opened the door to the stairwell. “As our leader, you have to be diplomatic. But she has to be nice to me.”
“Why?”
She grinned. “Lyudmila wants a nice write-up about the party. ILQ’s gossip page is its most-read feature.”
“Aren’t you the political mover and shaker?”
“Of a sort.”
They entered the garage, got into Wyland’s sexy car, and opened the garage door. As they backed out into the morning sun, something caught her eye.
“What?”
She stared toward the woods. “I thought I saw something.”
“Nick mentioned a stray dog hanging around recently.”
Or maybe she was just being paranoid. She took a second look, but saw nothing but swaying grass. As she consigned irresponsible pet owners to the seventh circle of hell, they headed home.