Chapter Eleven
Over the centuries Ricard had seen hundreds of vampires find their mates. He marveled at the transformation. Partly jealous, partly drawn from a scientific perspective, but entirely intrigued, Ricard had always wanted an opportunity to study the concept of vampire mating.
Be careful what you wish for was a proverb he understood far too well.
The desire to have Jessica was so strong, so intense he was amazed he was able to think of anything else.
He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her. He wanted to bite her, to make her, his, and to drink from her. The thought of tasting her was almost enough to push every other thought from his mind.
The force that held him at bay came from within him. It was almost tangible and quite possibly, if he were holding Jessica, it could be described as entirely tangible.
Protection. The drive to protect what was his, even if that meant protecting her from him. That was the force. He could no sooner hurt her in any way than he could pull the sun from the sky.
He had long ago forgotten what being mated felt like. He’d forgotten how out of control, yet controlled, a mated vampire was. The throes of passion, love, possession were far more powerful than anything other than the bloodlust that consumed a newly turned vampire. Though, even that might not be as powerful.
An innate function of his entire being was to protect his mate. He now remembered why vampires went insane without these women. The mere thought of anything happening to Jessica, made him sick to his stomach. It also made him want to kill.
Hundreds of years had passed since he’d grown numb to this feeling, a fact he was more thankful for than he’d remembered. Now, having it rekindled, having the woman who balanced his soul sitting so close to him, caused every thought he had to turn toward protecting her.
Finding an open area of the white board where late in the evening he had worked on the calculations from Joshua’s blood samples, he listed each member of Jessica’s family, beginning with her parents. “I heard what you said this evening.”
She hopped off the stool. “What was that?”
“That you wanted Rollins to pay.”
“I do. He and Tyrone killed my brother. They drove my father insane. God knows what they really did to Mom.” She came to the board and grabbed a marker, adding the dates of birth and death under each name.
He stopped writing and turned. “Please make one promise to me.”
With a purple marker poised below her mother’s name, Jessica looked up at him. “Yes. I promise to let you help.”
He squinted, hoping she’d take that promise one step further.
“Oh, damn it.” Her hand dropped from the board and she turned to face him.
He may have been trying with all his might to remain focused on the current problem, but having the one woman he’d gladly kill himself to save standing only inches away and batting her brown eyes while she tried not to make a promise they both knew she was going to make, made it nearly impossible.
“Don’t make me do it,” she said.
He let a smile crack his lips, though didn’t let it go too far. His fangs had descended, and he didn’t want to scare her into never flirting with him again.
She wore a pink long sleeve t-shirt that left not one bit of question as to where any of the curves on her body were. Faded jeans clung nicely to her hips and ass. Black sneakers rounded out the ensemble.
Crazy curly tubes of brown and red with hints of gold shot out in every direction, and each time she moved her head even a quarter inch several bounced.
He ached to touch one but thought better of it. The last thing he needed to do was give into to his desires and take advantage of her when she needed him.
“Promise you won’t go after Rollins or near Panthera without a good plan that we work on together and both agree is safe.” He tried to word the promise so she’d be backed into a corner and unable to go after the madman on her own.
“If that’s what it will take to make you stop worrying, I’ll do it, but you have to promise you’re going to help me avenge my family. I’m not going to slink away and hide. I want Rollins and all of Panthera to pay.”
Heated desire burned around Jessica. Her need for vengeance practically glowed and took on a life of its own. It impressed and worried him. The last thing in the world either of them needed was to be fueled by rage. Not only was it bad to make decisions in the heat of the moment, but it was a terrible idea to be possessed by such wicked hate.
“I understand what you want and why, and I promise. We will avenge your family. But, hatred must never consume you.”
Ricard worried of the impact of something so fierce and negative on her, on him, and on their bond. Together a mated couple was far stronger than any individual. Mated and filled with hate could take them down a very dark path.
“It’s hard not to be consumed with hatred. My whole family is gone.” She looked back at the board, brought her marker up and wrote a third date under each name.
“What is that one for?”
“It’s the date each one first fell sick as I remember it.”
Above the names Ricard wrote the date of the fire that destroyed Panthera and by extension all of Central City. “There’s something in the chronology of this situation.”
“Yes. Mom’s illness began exactly one year before the fire. Her death occurred four years later.” Jessica drew a line, titling the column “symptoms.”
Beside Patricia’s name she added weight loss, nausea, white skin, light sensitivity, loss of appetite, hair loss, abdominal pain, mood swings.
“Dad continued working, though I think he spent most of his time trying to find a cure for Mom versus any other cancer. Then, he died nearly a year after Mom.”
Beside Matt’s name Jessica wrote paranoia, fatigue, weight loss.
“The age difference between Joshua and me was almost ten years. He had only one or two fragmented memories of Mom and not many good ones of Dad.” She kept writing, but Ricard felt her sadness over this fact. “I always tried to tell him our dad was a good man, but…Josh rarely saw Dad have a good day. By the time Josh could retain memories of Dad, life had descended into a paranoid hell.”
“The end must have been awful for each of them.” Ricard had seen his own father die. The plague had taken his mother before he knew her, and his sister and a brother. Ricard and his older brother moved away with their father, but very few people in Barcelona escaped the plague. It was only a couple more years before his brother succumbed, and afterward his father.
No matter how long a man lived, he never forgot watching his father suffer and die.
“Terrible.” Jessica wrote weakness, loss of appetite, inability to walk, nerve pain, nausea, abdominal pain, skin ulcers, gastric ulcers and hair loss on the board near Joshua’s name. “Josh contracted TB first, almost a month after Dad died. Then he had polio, both of which Mr. Rollins attributed to the city being dirty and lack of immunizations of the small children, which at the time I didn’t know enough to question. Now, I realize there is no way on earth my parents did not vaccinate my brother.” She turned to look at Ricard. “Do you know how guilty I’ve felt about this? I always thought I hadn’t taken good enough care of him, and that’s why he became so sick.”
She squeezed the marker hard, then punched the white board. “Damn it! I swore to my dad I’d keep him safe. That’s the last lucid conversation we had. The very last thing he said to me that made any damn sense was, ‘Promise me you won’t let anything happen to Joshie,’ and I swore I’d protect my brother, swore on my life.” She screamed and punched the board again. “And look what happened.”
“You know it was never anything you did, right?” Ricard placed a hand on her shoulder. “You and Joshua were manipulated by very powerful men, devious monsters.”
“Yeah. Well, no. I kept taking him back there for more treatments. Then they diagnosed him with MS.” Her head dropped against the white board. “I served him right up to them.”
“You were a child, raising your brother and misled by two evil men who even your parents, brilliant scientists, trusted. You cannot blame yourself.”
“But I do.” She turned from the board and leaned into Ricard’s arms. “I do.”
For several minutes Ricard held Jessica as she cried. Her overwhelming guilt bore down on him and only made his anger at Tyrone and Rollins deepen. In their sick search for a way to create a manmade vampire they managed to destroy an entire city and terrorize the family of the woman he loved.
There was no way he’d let her wallow in self-hate or guilt. He’d teach her to use those emotions as fuel to get answers and put an end to Panthera and Tyrone’s experiment.
“Jessica, I’ve always suspected your mother did not truly have cancer,” Ricard said. He’d tried to broach the subject with Matt more than twenty years earlier, but his friend and colleague would not hear it.
Matt refused to listen to reason. He refused to consider his wife had become one of Tyrone’s earliest victims.
“Me, too.” Jessica looked up and swiped tears from her cheeks. “In the end my father was driven nearly mad with guilt that he hadn’t found a cure for her. He couldn’t make sense of her illness and what he’d found in the tests.”
“He refused to share the results or any samples. He didn’t want us to help him,” Ricard said, handing her a tissue and giving her some space.
“He believed Dr. Tyrone would do everything he could to save Mom. We all did, even Mom.” She shook her head. “In the end he rambled for hours about her symptoms and test results. He’d lose himself staring into a microscope at slides of her transformed cells.”
“I’d heard his last few years were very difficult.”
“Difficult is an understatement. He spent every waking moment questioning the possibilities and debating the hypothesis that Mom had been purposefully hurt by someone.” She sighed and her shoulders drooped as if the weight of the memories crushed her.
“My father lost his mind in the end. We struggled to keep him safe. The paranoia that Tyrone was after him made him terrified to leave the house. In fact, in the last few weeks he wouldn’t let Joshua or me leave the house. I had to sneak out when he slept to get food.”
“I’m sorry to hear that a man with your father’s brilliance was reduced to this.” Ricard wasn’t sure if it was entirely Jessica’s heartache he felt or if part of it was his own sadness for his friend’s suffering.
What he did know was giving Jessica the opportunity to connect the dots about her parents’ deaths with her brother’s was stoking her desire for vengeance into a full hatred for Tyrone, Rollins, and Panthera. There was only one difference between their hatreds—Ricard had learned patience in planning and execution.
“My parents did not deserve this.” She turned back to the board and uncapped the marker. “Neither did Josh.”
For the next few minutes she wrote in silence, listing every symptom, the dates of any major changes, and every note she could remember her father sharing about her mother’s illness.
Over the next couple hours together they worked out the details and timeline of each family member’s illness and subsequent death.
“Based on this information I’m convinced your mother was one of Tyrone’s earliest victims. It appears he began his experiments while his brother, Lawrence, was still alive—alive and unaware of this madness.” Ricard retrieved a bottle of water for Jessica.
“Thank you.” She studied the timeline as she drank.
Ricard had added events she was not aware of until today, including the transformation of Aurelia from human to vampire.
“So Tyrone accidentally figured out how to do it?” she asked, pointing to that event on the timeline.
“No. Actually, Aurelia nearly died from a Tyrone experiment. Her mate attempted the change with the hope of saving her. A supreme success is the best way to describe that event.”
Jessica gave a slight nod. “I wish we’d known you just a bit earlier. Maybe someone could have saved Josh.”
“It is unlikely.” Feeling the need to touch Jessica, Ricard stepped toward her. “Aurelia had one particular problem. A probe had been imbedded in her body and nearly pierced her heart. Otherwise, she was for the most part healthy.”
Ricard took Jessica’s hand in his. The feel of her hand, so small and warm in his made him relax. Quickly his mind ran through comments he’d heard others make about wanting to touch their mates, wanting to be near them because simply a passing touch made their worlds right.
“With all Rollins did to Joshua it is unlikely he could have survived the transformation. It’s brutal to say the least.” He placed a small kiss to her knuckles. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you think he really had? How could they possibly give him all those illnesses?”
“I’m certain he did not have any of them. On first review it appeared he did. Certainly the cells were affected, but I believe it was all a hoax, meant to confuse and probably scare you both into bringing him back for more treatments. By forcing him to believe he had three terrible illnesses he would continue to return to Panthera and trust only Rollins’ team.”
“But…” Jessica turned back to the board. “The things that happened to all those revenants, the strength, the reduction of mental capacity to a basic animal’s way of thinking, those things did not happen to Josh. He was certainly stronger for a very short time, but he was still bright and hopeful.”
“I do not believe he was treated the same as the others. After reviewing the samples of Joshua’s blood and comparing them to the revenants, I think the experiments he experienced were different.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. The clear look of confusion made it much harder for Ricard to tell her. Hurting her was agony to him.
“I believe Joshua was much stronger than we thought with a much higher tolerance for pain. In reviewing the samples we took from your home, I’ve concluded he may have been a human incubator for the tests rather than part of the sample group.”
“I don’t think I understand. How could he be an incubator? Wouldn’t his body have reacted the same as every other victim?”
For several months Ricard had been considering a theory that even Serge worried could be true. This new theory painted Tyrone as an even craftier and disturbing scientist than everyone knew.
“Had Joshua been treated like all the others, infected the same as those, yes. But I believe the base of the serums used on Joshua originated from Joshua. It’s conjecture at this point, but it’s possible Tyrone used the placenta from Joshua’s birth as a starting point.”
As he’d feared, Jessica was stunned. She shook her head. “How?”
“Both you and your brother were born at Panthera. It would have been no trouble at all for Tyrone or Rollins to obtain the placenta. In fact, I am willing to bet your mother donated them for research. Of course, I’m certain she did not have any idea what they would be used for.”
Jessica’s eyes flashed a look of rage. “If it’s the last thing I do, I am going to kill Rollins. I am going to close down that laboratory and stop this madness.” A fiery wave of hatred poured from her, making her seem nearly inhuman.
Without a thought of what he was doing, Ricard backed Jessica against the wall and kissed her with such desire and focus she lost her drive for vengeance.
Her arms came up around his neck and she kissed him back.
His instinctual need to keep her safe, to stop her from slipping into a state where she could lose herself took over, and his love called her back to him.
For the first time in hundreds of years Ricard felt what love truly meant.