Darkyn - Private Demon Part 22

"It's plasma, two different sedatives, and what I think is a synthetic hormone. I don't know what the h.e.l.l to call it.

Personally I've never seen anything like it before."

Now Valentin looked completely dumbfounded. "What does this mean?"

"I don't know, but I can tell you this much," Alex said. "If Jema Shaw has been injecting herself with the same concoction every day, then she isn't being treated for diabetes. And since she'd be dead without insulin therapy, that would mean-"

The report slipped out of Jaus's hands. "She doesn't have diabetes."

"Good morning."

Jema blinked a few times to clear her eyes, and saw Daniel Bradford smiling at her. "Hi." She yawned and stretched.

"Lord, did I oversleep again? This is becoming a terrible habit."

"No, honey, you didn't oversleep. You had a bad night." He checked her pulse. "I heard you moaning from the hall and I came to check on you. You left the window open and the room was like a refrigerator. I couldn't wake you up, either, so I had to give you a shot." His pleasant face filled with sorrow. "I know I said you were taking too many shots, Jem, but I didn't mean for you to start skipping them."

"I didn't." Jema felt confused. The mugginess in her head wasn't helping clarify things, either. "At least, I don't think I did." Her memory was crowded with confusing images from the long dream she'd had.

"I'm not going to say anything to your mother," he told her. "She's been feeling very low the last couple of weeks. I know-how can I tell-but low for Meryl is devastated for the rest of us. Now, keep those peepers open for a second."

Bradford leaned forward to check her eyes with a penlight. "Do you want me to give you your morning?"

"No, I can do it." She didn't feel sick or weak, just tired and very thirsty. The fact that Daniel was talking to her as if she were a three-year-old made her feel irritable, too.

"I'll see you downstairs." Daniel rose and stared down at her. "You're sure there's nothing you want to tell me about last night?" "I... fell asleep." She worked up a pa.s.sably puzzled smile. "That's all I remember."

"If you say so." With one last, troubled look, Daniel left her.

"Except for the visit from the golden-eyed demon, who yelled at me and pushed me around the most disgusting place I've ever seen in my life." Jema pulled up her knees and rested her forehead against them. "Thierry."

Until last night, the dreams she remembered had been like a naughty little secret. What woman wouldn't want to go to sleep each night to be seduced by a demon who would shape himself to be whatever she desired in a man?

Until last night.

Jema clearly remembered every moment of the dream. It was not like any of the others. Everything had felt wrong.

The colors, the smells, the places-none of it was anything she could have imagined. It had felt too real. He had been too real.

Thierry was her demon, of course. Same golden eyes, same dark, brooding looks, that air of edgy sensuality. But he had been different. There wasn't any of that demon-lover facade as there had been in the other dreams. Last night he had been a person. Someone as sad and lonely as she was. Even as disgusting as most of the dream had been, Jema wanted to go out and search the world until she found him. A man who was fantasy, who didn't exist.

A man who was more important than anything she had in reality.

"I'm not in love with him." She flung herself out of bed. "You can't fall in love with a dream man. Especially one who works in a slaughterhouse and says he's a seven-hundred-year-old vampire."

It was the pink foam she spit out after brushing her teeth that tried to convince her otherwise. The blood tinting her toothpaste wasn't coming from her gums. It was oozing from the inside of her lower lip.

From two brand-new, fang-shaped punctures.

Chapter 16.

Thierry stayed away from Jema for the length of one day, unable to rest, unable to cease tormenting himself, until his own company became unbearable to him. As soon as the sun set, he drove to the museum and parked on the street across from the back lot where her little convertible sat. There was no guard tonight, and the lot gates were left open.

He would wait, and he would watch for her.

The hours pa.s.sed in silence as Thierry brooded, waiting for her to emerge so that he could follow her home. He had learned nothing from Jema to help him find the men who had attacked Luisa Lopez, and perhaps he had imagined her secret, hidden knowledge. He had certainly deluded himself about many things concerning Jema.

I should never have come here. What was he doing in Chicago? What redemption could be had from slaughtering more men, and using a frail, innocent human woman to get to them? Where is the honor in this?

It was very late when Jema finally left the museum. Thierry hunched down as he watched her walk to her car, her purse swinging, a stack of papers in her arms. Everything inside him cried out for her, for the sanity of her. Once he saw her safely home, he would return to the city and hunt. Perhaps he would return to the residences of the men thought to be responsible for the attack on Luisa Lopez and enter the dreams of their neighbors to glean information from their minds. The men had to be Brethren. Thierry knew there was no redemption for him now, but he could prevent them from harming another human. That much he owed to Alexandra.

Jema stopped a few feet from her car and turned around, as if startled. Gla.s.s shattered and the lamp providing light for the parking lot went dark. Three men ran out of the alley on the opposite side of the building directly for Jema. One grabbed her purse, another knocked the papers out of her arms, and the third flung his arm around her neck.

Thierry was out of the car and running for them before the first paper touched the ground.

The men were not men, but animals. Then he saw that they were men wearing masks made to look like animals.

They were shouting obscenities as they shoved Jema back and forth between them. Laughing, excited. Enjoying themselves.

Thierry jumped the fence and had his dagger in his hand as he saw the flash of a blade.

He hit the first from behind, pulling him back from Jema and slitting his throat in the same motion. The man ejected blood and his last breath at the same time before he toppled over.

One of the two left dragged Jema back toward the alley. "Get him!"

Thierry pivoted around to parry a small ax with his arm, squinting as the sharp head bit deep into his flesh. Behind the mask, flat eyes went wide with glee as the man hauled the ax backward and swung again.

Thierry caught his arm on the downswing and reversed it, shattering his elbow and driving the ax into the man's belly. Something came from the side and drove a thick bar of steel into his ribs. He wrenched the ax out of the sagging second man and drove the handle end between the legs of the third, who had come running back from the alley. He went down, squealing and clutching his crotch.

Thierry reached down with his b.l.o.o.d.y arm and pulled the last living man up by the collar. "Where is she?" He shook him, making his head jerk wildly. "What did you do to her?"

The man didn't answer, and his head drooped at an odd angle.

"Connard." Thierry dropped the body and ran for the alley where he had seen the man dragging Jema. He tracked her by her scent, and found her lying on the ground just around the corner, in the dark, unconscious.

He was on his knees, holding her in his arms. The smell of warm, ripe apples rose from her body and blocked out the exhaust-tinged city air. There was blood on her forehead, and she was so still he feared the worst. But no, there was her pulse, beating at the base of her throat. He kept his hand there, fearful that it would stop the moment he lifted his fingers. She wasn't moving, but she was breathing.

The gash across his left forearm was not closed, and more blood spattered the ground as he stood up with her. He carried her to her car and laid her carefully in the pa.s.senger seat before retrieving her keys from where she had dropped them. He paused only long enough to spit on one of the bodies before he got behind the wheel of Jema's car and started the engine.

Thierry didn't know how badly Jema was hurt. He could not take her to a hospital; there would be too many questions. He could not leave her in front of one, either. Bradford is a doctor. He will know what to do.

Keeping one hand on the wheel and one pressed against Jema's throat to monitor her pulse, Thierry drove. He didn't dare try to enter her unconscious mind while he was driving-and she could hardly be dreaming, not with that knot on her head-so he spoke to her.

"How could you be so careless to walk out there alone, so late at night, without an escort? Who allows you to do such things? Do these people at the museum wish you dead?"

He took a sharp turn and stepped on the accelerator to pa.s.s a slow-moving taxi.

"I think it is you who wish yourself an early death, that is what it is," he muttered. "You go out to crime scenes and pick over corpses, and then you lock yourself in that house or in that museum, surrounded by beauty that doesn't live, doesn't breathe, only grows more mold or disintegrates into dust. What sort of life is that?"

They were only a few minutes away now. He would park at the gate and move her to the driver's seat.

"Why did you do this to yourself? Why didn't you marry? If your sickness prevented children, you could have adopted them. In this country? You could have purchased them. You should have a keeper. One who wouldn't permit you to do foolish things that could get you raped and murdered in an alley. If I were your husband, you wouldn't leave our bedchamber. You'd be too tired to walk."

He was irrational, furious, ready to shake her back to consciousness. Then he looked down and saw her face, and he wanted to stop the car and gather her into his arms and cry against her hair.

"What do I do now, little cat?" All the hopeless love in the world, and here was his, and he was wasting these precious minutes shouting at her. "How can I leave you now, even when I know I must? Who will be there the next time someone tries to harm you?"

At the front gates of Shaw House, Thierry stopped the convertible and got out to lift Jema from the pa.s.senger seat.

She stirred a little when he eased her into the driver's seat. He used his fist to sound the car horn, watching Jema's face as he hit the horn over and over, until he saw Bradford hurrying out of the front doors.

Thierry moved back from the car and stood in the shadow of the wall. The gates opened and Bradford rushed out.

"Jema? Jema!"

He watched the physician check her, and then move her to the pa.s.senger side of the car. Bradford got behind the wheel, but before he drove off he stared hard at the deep pool of shadow where Thierry was standing.

It was his scent, of course. Strong emotions and spilling blood always brought it to its greatest intensity, and it was pouring off him.

Bradford shook his head slightly, put the convertible in gear, and drove through the gates.

Alex watched from the sidelines in the lists as Valentin Jaus defeated his fourth consecutive opponent. She glanced up at Cyprien. "How many more a.s.ses is he going to kick before he gets tired?"

Michael rested his chin on the top of her head and closed his arms around her. "He doesn't get tired."

Jaus had been like a caged tiger ever since Alex had confirmed her initial findings on the witch's brew that Daniel Bradford had been giving to Jema Shaw. Further a.n.a.lysis of the "insulin" revealed that Jema was being heavily sedated and subjected to a hormone that r.e.t.a.r.ded several natural functions, primarily menstruation.

"She's probably had very few periods, if any," Alex told Jaus and Cyprien as she explained the effects of the hormone. "This stuff was once manufactured in Eastern Bloc countries and given to certain athletes, like gymnasts."

"This cannot be right." Jaus shook his head. "Jema does not perform gymnastics. She never has."

"Well, if she had wanted to, she could have been Olympic material, because she likely heals just fine. In addition to suppressing the menstrual cycle, this hormone prevents a woman's body from developing normal b.r.e.a.s.t.s and hips and putting on fat. These are all things that keep older gymnasts small and light enough to compete with twelve-year-olds."

She rubbed her eyes, tired from staring at so many screens. "One more thing: This hormone has been banned for thirty years, ever since a little Asian girl died in the middle of a gold medal-winning performance. During the investigation, the Olympic Committee discovered that the long-term side effects include serious heart and liver damage."

After hearing that, Jaus excused himself and went to the lists to begin plowing through his men.

Alex wasn't sure why Bradford had been trying to keep Jema in a perpetual state of prep.u.b.erty, and, from her own observations, she felt he had been only partially successful. Jema's growth and development may have been stunted, but she showed too many signs of physical maturity. Now the big questions were, how long had Bradford been dosing Jema, and how much permanent damage had the mixture caused?

"We've got to tell her, Michael," Alex informed Cyprien as she watched Jaus take on a fifth opponent. "She'll need to be weaned off it-the sedatives are narcotic, so she's definitely addicted to them-and put in the hospital for tests to see what else is going on inside her." She winced as Jaus knocked his larger opponent onto his back and stood over him with his sword at his throat. "You'd better go over there and try to talk some sense into him. All the blood is starting to make the other guys slip."

Before Cyprien could speak to Jaus, the suzerain stalked out of the lists.

"I cannot fathom the reason for his anger," Cyprien said after he helped one of Jaus's men from the blood-spattered floor. "He cares about her, and with this new information we can help Jema. You said she could live a more normal life."

"If her insides aren't all f.u.c.ked-up from Bradford's drugs." Alex felt the weight of Jaus's confidences bearing down on her. "I think Val needs another sympathetic ear. Let me go talk to him."

Back at the main house, Sacher told her the suzerain had retired to his bedchamber to wash and dress. Alex went up to the room Sacher directed her to and knocked on his door. When there was no answer, she debated whether or not to intrude, and then used a little Kyn strength to force the lock.

Her first impression of the sitting room portion of Jaus's bedroom was that it was big and silent and very, very white. Like the camellia scent permeating the air.

"The Kyn don't hang out with the Klan, do they?" she asked, looking around at the walls, floor, and the single whopping-huge leather sofa, all of which were as pristine white as the new-arrivals rack at a bridal shop. "I don't want to know what your bills for bleach are."

The sounds of someone dressing came from the next room over. Alex followed the rustle and entered a bedroom done in dark midnight blue, where the scent of camellias grew stronger.

"I'd hate to have to pick one color and live with it like this. I like too many of them. Imagine, just pink." She shuddered as she turned to see the wall opposite the bed. Twenty-nine framed photos of Jema Shaw at various ages covered it. The images were all candid shots, evidently taken from a distance with a powerful lens. "Couldn't fit these on your desk with the other one?"

"Go away, Alexandra."

"I will, eventually." She picked up the sword he had left on the coverlet of his bed, only to find her hand covered with blood. "I hope you Scotchgarded the mattress."

Now she heard splashing sounds from the adjoining bathroom.

Alex looked in and saw Jaus standing in front of a sink and washing blood from his hands, arms, and chest. He might be a shrimp like her, but with all those muscles, who would notice? "Feel better, Conan?"

"No." Still wet, he strode past her and went into the white room, and came back a minute later carrying a full fifth of Stoli.

"That's going to make you very sick," she warned him. Straight liquor was one of the worst things a Darkyn could ingest.

Jaus glanced at her. "Do you wish to provide the mixer?"

She held up her hands. "Who am I to get between a vampire and his choice of emetic?"

"I don't drink it." He opened the bottle and poured the liquor onto a cloth, then used it to clean the blood from his sword.

"Does that work well?" Alex wondered if it was the same basic princ.i.p.al as soaking instruments in alcohol... "Unlike you, it evaporates quickly." He crumpled up the cloth and placed the sword in a case on the wall that held several other weapons. "Why did you break the lock on my door, Alexandra? Have I not sufficiently entertained you this day?"

"I have a soft spot for lost causes." She smiled brightly. "And men who can beat five other men into the floor without breaking a sweat."

Jaus propped one arm on the wall by the case and leaned against it. "I fight them so I won't go over to Shaw House and kill Bradford."

"Maybe I should go beat the c.r.a.p out of someone, then." She still couldn't quite believe what the doctor had been doing to Jema, or why.

Alex went into the bathroom to wash her hands. The bathroom was, like the front room, all white with antique- looking fixtures. The tub sat on bra.s.s claw feet, and the toilet flushed with a chain. The chunky bar of yellow-gray soap in the dish smelled of lye.

"Whew." She wrinkled her nose as she scrubbed. "Man, I have got to take you to Linens 'n Things."

"I will pay you to change her as you were."