Night Runner: Falling From The Light Part 10

"You know what, Kevin? Dust storms make me crazy hungry. What say we take a look at those monkey snacks?"

"s.h.i.t, that's hot."

"Okay, then."

Kevin's "lab" was a windowless, shotgun-style room with industrial-blue laminate tiles, dying blush-pink countertops and stark white walls. Swatches of fabric hung from a plastic stand that stretched across the counter like the world's longest, weakest coatrack. The fabrics ranged from leather to corduroy and were all...dirty. I balked a couple of steps into the room while Kevin ambled on, dropping his wallet onto a scuffed metal desk and his soda onto a counter. A large clock with a red second hand ticked audibly on the wall.

"What is it you're testing?" I asked, pointing.

"We're considering adding blue pigment to one of the psoriasis creams. There's a concern that it'll stain."

"Does the blue pigment make it work better?" Slightly less skeeved out by the stains, I wandered through the lines of fabrics, all different textures and colors. It was hard to believe that a place this concerned with whether a customer's velour pajama pants would discolor from a necessary medicine could create something that could kill.

A door at the back of the room opened and a pale, lanky man in a hairnet strode in.

"Hey, Bill. This is Andrea."

"Hi, Bill," I said.

Bill muttered something that sounded nothing like a greeting, pulled a box of non-latex gloves from a cabinet, and stomped back through the door. He paused at the last second to glare at me over his shoulder. Wow. If the company didn't have a policy against hostile psychos, maybe they were capable of manufacturing deadly drugs.

"Market research said blue makes things appear more refreshing. It's all about making the cash." Kevin opened a mini fridge crammed up against the far wall and pulled out a bag. "Cookie?"

"I don't know. Are they as refreshing as clear skies and pristine oceans and..." I stopped, hand raised, senses expanding. There was a vampire in the room, or there had been not too long ago.

Mistaking my hesitation, Kevin peered at the label. "Are you allergic to nuts or something?"

"No, nuts are fine."

The room had no windows, so a vampire could have been here during the day. But if so, where was it now? The only other door in the room, other than the one Bill had come through, looked like a closet. The sensation was a little off. There was no emotional resonance, no familiar niggling that "showed" me what it was feeling. Maybe it wasn't a vampire but something that belonged to one, an object containing a piece of its power the way Chev's territory belonged to her without being her.

That thought didn't stop my stomach from tightening with anxiety. I took the cookie with a forced smile and angled myself so that I could keep each door and small shadow within my line of sight. "So what else do you do here, Kevin? I imagine it's far more interesting than the warehouse."

"What do you do there?"

"Look at boxes. Point to boxes. Lift boxes."

"Oh." He sounded surprised, like he'd thought warehouses were supposed to be fun. "Up here it's product development, mostly. The fine-tuning after the R and D phase. It's a compet.i.tive business, so we're always pushed to innovate. Of the products I've developed, three are on their way to posting profits." His pride was unmistakable. Maybe that was a rare accomplishment.

"Are they that effective?"

Kevin shrugged and bit into his own cookie. "No idea. They sell well."

"And that's all that matters?"

"n.o.body cares about efficacy if they've never heard of the product."

"I guess. Will Dr. Stone be mad that I'm up here, or are the labs open to all employees?"

"He's at a conference this week," Kevin said with a smirk before glancing at the door Bill had come through. "You aren't technically supposed to be up here, but it's fine so long as you don't touch anything. You aren't going to touch anything, are you?"

"I'm just here for the snacks, man."

"Ooh!" Kevin power-walked to the other end of the lab. "Do you want some samples?"

I followed him to where he bent over a deep drawer. He pulled out small tubes, yellow with black caps, and I took them as he shoved them into my hands.

"That's sunscreen and sunscreen with tint. This is acne. Wrinkles. More acne." He tossed a few sample jars onto the counter, then came up with a couple of white ones. "This is an under-eye thing that actually works. More effective than hemorrhoid cream if you drink too much or eat a bunch of salt. This one's for psoriasis." He raised his eyebrows in question.

I shook my head. "Do you have anything that's antiaging?"

He poked around, turning over vials and tubes with his finger. White with clear caps, red with gold. And one long, thin vial with an R in brush stroke font. I had to stop myself from shoving him out of the way.

The insignia for Radia was written in a sweeping teal font designed to look like feathers. Applied by humans, it would melt fine lines, create a youthful appearance, blah blah blah. Applied by the undead, it would result in the vampire stalking and tearing through anybody unlucky enough to cross their path. I shuddered at the memory of the altered suckers, bloated with blood and fiending for more.

"I don't think so. Is it for your mom or something? You know you can buy the non-prescription stuff at cost. Family discount."

"Nice. I'll give that a try." I watched the Radia sample roll toward the left side of the drawer as he slid it closed. "Does Bill have a drawer like this I can raid?"

"Bill's in testing." The corner of his mouth pulled down and he busied himself with pulling the bartered chips out of his bag. "He mostly works with component elements and failed batches."

"What happens when products fail? Are they dangerous?"

"You don't want the samples he's got. They'll turn you pink or give you a third eye or something."

"Ugh, no. I'd have to get up a half hour earlier if I had to cover up a third eye each day and I am not a morning person."

Kevin grinned and shoved another cookie into his mouth. We talked about Phoenix and the weather, and I did my best to sneak in probing questions, but by the time Kevin got around to showing me his new favorite YouTube video-undergrads at UCLA, his alma mater, dressing up as dinosaurs and scaring the c.r.a.p out of each other-he was past answering questions. All the while, a tiny, paranoid spot in my brain expected Bill to kick down the door with a platoon of raving vampires at his back. Irrational, but I'd been surprised by nasty things before and the guy didn't seem to like people.

By the time the dust storm cleared, we'd eaten so much junk food that I worried I'd actually need to use that eye cream. And I'd stolen the vial of Radia while Kevin was digging around in his backpack to find his phone. Derrick eased behind me after I pulled out of the parking lot, the combination of washer fluid and dust making a mud frame around his windshield.

My stomach tightened as I pa.s.sed the border into Tenth World territory, but calmed when I entered the hotel. Chev didn't only regulate where the humans went, she also regulated the vampires that were allowed on the upper floors. Those I pa.s.sed were mostly staff. They moved briskly, but not inhumanly fast, and kept their eyes averted. Not all humans were aggressive, and being turned into a vampire didn't make you that way unless you were pushed. Maybe Chev, despite being unG.o.dly powerful and a micromanager that rated her own reality show, was a good boss.

Mickey had gone to the movies with a couple of feeders, and Malcolm wasn't back yet so I showered and wrote out everything relevant that I'd learned at Goya. I described the little I'd learned of Dr. Stone and mentioned Bill in a way that I hoped would provoke interest but not result in him being dragged off the street. Likely he was only guilty of having a surly att.i.tude. I tracked down Petr on the other end of my floor. He answered on my first knock.

"Do you have an envelope?" I asked, holding out my letter. Petr returned to a desk attached to a credenza that ran the length of the wall. He had a suite, and it wasn't only a separation of bedroom from living s.p.a.ce. Tenth World apparently took business seriously. The desk was insulated, with a steel rolltop, and the sitting room was dominated by an eight-person conference table.

"Leave it on the table," he said. I frowned. Vampire-to-vampire correspondence was customarily sealed tight. Not that couriers weren't trustworthy-I'd certainly never risked a peek-but there was no telling who might.

"Are you including it in a larger package?" I asked.

"All these years of service and you know nothing."

"I did a job," I said evenly. "I never served anyone."

He snorted, then spun in his rolling chair as the door burst open. My hand flew to my bag and closed on the knife in the side pocket. Soraya marched in with a large duffel bag. She wore a fitted black shirt with a high neck, something silver glinting over the top of the collar, and what remained of loose pants. One leg had been torn off at the knee. She didn't acknowledge us, merely dropped the bag on the couch and walked straight back out.

"Hey, Soraya?" I released the knife and followed her. Was she so out of it that she didn't recognize that she was hurt? "Are you okay? Do you need... Oh, s.h.i.t."

Down the hall, she pulled a limp body off of Malcolm's shoulder. A female drooped around his other arm, shambling along, battered skin showing through her torn clothes. Behind them, two males hobbled together in a painful-looking jumble of limbs. They were all dressed similar to Soraya in thick, flexible fabrics. Tactical casual.

"Petr, you've got, uh...incoming. Incoming casualties." I glanced back into the room to see him unrolling a tube of heavy plastic on the table. That was some kind of prepared. I helped him shift it around until the surface was covered. He dropped the roll, pushing it so that it glided across the room toward the door.

"Open that bag," he said as he slammed the desk closed around his laptop, securing it against the vampire energy. I unzipped the bag, then recoiled at the sight of a slippery pile of blood bags. Oh, this wasn't going to be good.

"How was work?" Malcolm asked as he entered, a layer of cheer forced over tightly wound tension.

"Very safety-conscious." I backed up against a wall, trying to stay out of the way.

"Maybe I should have sent these guys with you. What do you say, Vesta? Think you could stand a little safety training?" He guided the soldier to the floor where she all but collapsed when he released her.

One of her arms was shredded to the bone, the fingers curled up tight. I raised two bags of blood and Malcolm pointed toward the males who'd slumped together on the plastic just inside the closed door.

"Start with them. They don't require needles. Then see if you can find a stand for Vesta. There should be one in the bottom of the bag. Metal, collapsible." He helped Soraya to lay her unconscious charge on the table, then turned to Petr when he came back into the room carrying a case in one hand and a box of large bandages in the other. "Donovan is the priority. We're going to slough the burned tissue. Have you done this before?"

"It's been a while." Petr's face was quickly turning green, but his jaw set as he leaned over the table.

Turning my back to whatever they were doing, I fished the metal stand out of the bag, then clumsily snapped the pieces together. Soraya took it from me, hanging a bag of blood and efficiently inserting the needle into Vesta's good arm.

"Can I do anything else?" I asked.

Malcolm took my hand and smiled grimly while I sucked air through my teeth. Beneath a layer of soot and dust his lips and eyes were red. Fresh pink scars ran vertically from his lower lip almost to his chin, torn by his fangs.

"One cleft isn't enough?" I asked hoa.r.s.ely.

"I get greedy. Get the water steaming hot and soak all of the smaller towels. We need to get everyone patched up, cleaned up, and downstairs before Chev finds out I've brought unauthorized vampires to her human floor."

I'd put good money on her already knowing.

"Right." I dodged into the bathroom and pulled all the hand towels and washcloths out of the cabinet. The bathtub didn't have one of those temperature guards that a human hotel would have installed, and the water heated quickly. A series of whimpers came from the other room, semiconscious and pained.

"What happened?" I asked, knowing he could hear me over the running water. Steam climbed my skin and made my hair curl. My pulse chugged steadily throughout my entire body.

"We were checking the older addresses. You were right about Abel setting up safe houses. He left a number of interesting things behind at them."

"Like what?" I wrung out a cloth and set it on the side of the tub. Malcolm murmured, too low for me to hear, and Petr's answering tone didn't sound good. The room pulsed with energy-pain and hunger from the soldiers, the slick, angry beat of Soraya, and a steady flood from Malcolm, warm and soothing despite his aggravated state.

"Traps," Soraya answered. "Two dead feeders."

"Where?" I asked.

"Near Yuma."

LA allowed regulated feeding but Arizona and most of California prohibited it, and Abel had spent a lot of time in both. My stomach turned, and my hands burned as I carried out the hot, dripping cloths.

The guy on the table was naked, but that wasn't the strangest thing about him. His body, from hips to shoulders, was full of holes. Not pinp.r.i.c.ks but actual, honest-to-G.o.d holes, some of them several inches in diameter. There was no blood. Maybe his gray skin, the color of low-tide clay, had something to do with that.

"Sydney," Soraya said, holding her hand out from where she knelt on the floor. "Here."

I crouched beside her and she s.n.a.t.c.hed up a hand towel and used it to scrub the female soldier's arm. Vesta was propped against the wooden coffee table, both legs straight out in front of her. Well, one leg was straight. The other had a kind of S-curve shape to it. I handed her the washcloth she was staring blearily at and she ran it over her face with none of the precise grace I'd come to expect of vampires. Maybe she was a lefty, and Soraya wasn't about to release the arm she was now punching a new IV into. I found some medical tape and tore off a piece to keep the needle in place.

Tape, I could concentrate on. Hot towels were also doable. The way that Malcolm and Petr were sawing at and tearing away pieces of the male on the table? Not acceptable. The male soldiers slumped with their backs to the door, alternately cursing and grunting rough laughter. A slick of blood crept away from them and down the plastic, turning black and grainy as it lost contact with their energy.

"So what happened?" I asked, my voice quavering with fear, with anger. "Was he there?"

"He'd rigged a house with incendiary devices." Soraya tossed a couple of wet cloths toward the males. Whatever they'd done, she wasn't happy with them.

"Did the bomb do that to him?" I gestured toward the male on the table. Empty blood bags surrounded him.

"Daylight burns," Soraya said. "The device was rigged to-"

"It wasn't that bad," Malcolm interrupted. "The explosion was small." He leaned on both hands, examining the soldier as Petr taped large bandages into place. He didn't look happy, but judging by the small patches of scabbed skin exposed through a tear in his shirt, he'd been lucky. This time. Malcolm had been partially caught in a blast once. I'd barely known him then, but it had hurt to see the burns on his back. The idea of his body shredded past the point that his power could restore it made my body flash hot then cold.

He held his hands away from his body as he walked into the bathroom. Water splashed in the basin as he washed his hands, and I followed him in, closing the door behind me. I walked around him to see his face since there was no reflection in the mirror.

"You're all right?" I asked quietly. He smiled through the tension his face still held.

"I'm ecstatic. Are you done at Goya?" He splashed water on his face and scrubbed it off with a towel.

"Soon. The labs are secured with key cards I don't have access to and the records are encrypted on computers I can't hack. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for." I pulled the vial of Radia from my pocket. Mal scowled at it, then removed the cap.

He raised it and, in a moment of blind panic, I slapped it out of his hand. He caught it before it hit the wall.

"What was that?" he asked.

"That stuff's poison. I don't want it anywhere near you."

"I'm only smelling it. I don't think that's going to result in immediate deterioration of mental faculties." He frowned and raised the vial higher, pa.s.sing it beneath his nose. "This isn't right."

"It might be old." Some of the samples had been a little crusty. Except that Radia was a fairly new product. Surely its shelf life was longer than a year and a half.

"I'll have it tested alongside the batch we confiscated in Chile." He capped the vial and leaned toward me, speaking softly. "When the adrenaline wears off, are you still going to be mad at me?"

I glanced at him peripherally. I didn't want to start up this conversation again, not here.

"Kelly?" Petr called from the other room. And not with life-and-death type interruptions.

"Let me check on Donovan, then we can leave." Malcolm squeezed my hand as we went back into the sitting room.

The males by the door were pulling on clean sweatshirts. Soraya had a leg up on the couch and was leaned over, inspecting it. Near my feet, Vesta stirred.

"Thirsty," she rasped.

The bag hanging from the IV stand was still half-full. I grabbed a bottle of water off the credenza and knelt beside her. She gripped my arm, fingers clamping down so quickly that I flinched.

She pulled and I shoved at her, belatedly realizing what she was doing. She was going to bite me. Holy s.h.i.t, she was going to bite me.

Malcolm said, forcefully, "No, Vesta."